As you have probably noticed, the site layout has changed somewhat. I’m still in the throws of sorting it out, so you’ll have to excuse any broken links etc until they’re sorted. Hopefully shouldn’t be too long!

Cheers!

This is an example of the sort of thing it can produce :-

Have a mess – you can click on the labels, and the route I put on it, as well as zooming and moving around in the normal way. Clever stuff eh?  By the way, that’s a view of the Brecon Beacons (Corn Ddu and Pen-Y-Fan).  

This is one little web app I’ll be making good use of

Meanwhile, I’ve still got to get the rest of the sidebar stuff working. And that’s something I can’t easily do with a 4″ screen…

UPDATE : Well.. the main engine is working now – just got to sort out the sidebar cos at the moment, it’s buggered! Waaaaah – no galleries etc until I can sort it out…lummy!

UPDATE 2 : Almost there!  Galleries are now working, but still a bit flakey.  Just got to remember what the heck I had I the sidebar now!  I know getting the musicplayer working is gonna be a bit of a pain, but here goes!

UPDATE 3 : If anyone can tell me where all the bloody ‘Â’ symbols have come from in my old posts, I’d be grateful.  Guessing its something to do with the upgrade of the database for V2.6 or something…

More later….

There are several flavours of SSP – all produce a similar output, but in different ways. The first (and currently most used) version, is SSP for Flash. This consists of flash plugins that enable you to construct a slideshow inside flash and export it to upload to a website. The second, and the version I use, is a plugin for Adobe Lightroom. This causes SSP to be aded as a ‘Slideshow Type’ in the ‘Web’ section of lightroom, so you can construct slideshows from any combination of your images in your Lightroom library.

These cost $29 for the Flash plugin, and $25 for the Lightroom plugin respectively. Both have extremely good docs, great support on the SSP forum, and are well worth the asking price.

Thirdly, there’s Slideshow Pro Director. This is not an alternative to the above plugins, as you still require those to create your initial layout. What SSP Director is, is a way of managing your slideshows, allowing you top upload images, create albums and galleries, and tweak many aspects of the way it all works, dierctly from a browser. It is MySQL and PHP based, so you’ll need a webhost that supports these, and be reasonably up on their basic use to install it. It honestly isn’t difficult, and the SSP people provide a free server compatibility check download for you to make sure it’ll work on your host’s server before you buy the full thing. If you’ve installed WordPress, Joomla, CMS Made simple or anything else that uses MySQL and PHP, you’ll know hat I mean. You just need to make sure that the table prefix doesn’t match anything you have at the moment (unlikely!).

Director costs $29 per domain. They used to charge just for director, and you could use it on as many domains as you wanted to. This changed to a domain lock-in system on the current release. It’s a part of the install process, and it registers the domain you are installing it onto with the company. This license IS transferrable to another domin however. For the price, it’s well worth it in my opinion, as director is the very nice and tast icing on the cake of SSP.

Director allows you to manage your slideshows and galleries once you have them online. What it doesn’t do is enable you to fiddle with the layout and design of your slideshows – this still has to be done in Flash or Lightroom. Director provides an easy link to an XML file for each album and/or gallery of albums you create. This link is then simply pasted into the Lightroom or Flash plugin during the design, which then takes the images from the web gallery for its content, rather than the local files. This means you can do all the layout with local files as examples, then sikply paste in the XML link to make SSP use the web gallery instead. Easy once you get your head around it!

You then export the gallery to a folder, which brings together all the SWF and site files (only abot 5 or six if I remember) for you to upload. You can either use the default index.html it provides, or take the code from that and add it into your own pages.

Once uploaded, the original SWF file does not ever have to be changed if you don’t want to. You can simply edit the galleries that you want to, and the SWFs that use them will use whatever images are provided. Another very good aspect of Director is it’s ‘on demand’ publishing system. Simply put, SSP Director automatically resizes (and caches on your webspace) images that are required for your SWF galleries. So… say you had a two galleries, both using the same images, but different sizes. You can point two differnt sized slideshows at the same XML file, and director will resize the files on the fly to fit the correct SWF. It will then cache the resized images so that the next visitor will not need to wait for them to be resized again. As the first visitor is almost always yourself when you’re testing the gallery, subsequent visitors get the gallery displayed with little or no delay.

I’ve not covered all the options available here. For example, you can actually make video slideshows too, as well as adding music etc to your SWFs. The full list of features can be found on the SSP site (www.slideshowpro.net). I love this piece of software, and all of my images will, from now on, be published using it. Take a look at the full gallery by clicking the link under the slideshow in the sidebar, clicking the slideshow itself, or by going here – http://www.axemansplace.co.uk/gallery/maingallery/.

Cheers!

It basically brings up nice full-size shots from thumbnails, but using javascript and pretty effects. With me being a sucker for non-pointless eyecandy, I’ve decided to it a try on here… Clicky clicky on the image to take a look

I was really rather impressed with the way it displays. It removes the need for popups, and also for complete new pages for full display of single images. I’m going to play with this over the next few weeks, as it gives me a great way to post single or small groups of images without the clunkyness of before. It also fades out the rest of the page, meaning you concentrate more on the image. This is similar to the ‘Lights Out’ feature of Lightroom, which is something I use all the time.

The lightbox plugin can be found at:-

http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/lightbox2-for-wordpress/

UPDATE: Just discovered that if you enter [groupname] (with ‘groupname’ being a test string of your choice- e.g. [group1]) in the rel=”lightbox” section of the <a> tag, then it groups that image with any others in the post and allows you to go ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ through the images in that group, without having to close each one and open the next.

To generate the below, I used the following code :-

rel="lightbox[group1]"

in each of the <a> tags, rather than just rel="lightbox".

If you click on the first image in this example, then hover over the full size view, then ‘Next’ appears, which skips you to the next image…

Finally, adding title="put your title here" to the tag gives you the nice little titles on each pic, as in the example.

I’d also recommend ‘ImageManager’ which is a great replacement for the image uploader in WordPress. If you use the insert as ‘Thumbnail with Link to Image’ to paste in the image, automatically links it to Lightbox. I’m not sure if you’d have to install Imagemanger before lightbox, but anyway, here’s the link…

http://www.soderlind.no/archives/2006/01/03/imagemanager-20/

Enjoy!