Tropizm Family Website

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.  Faith’s sister, her boyfriend, and son came to visit AZ.

They stayed a week and we did the usual Thanksgiving things.  Eat and shop.  We did make a day trip to Sedona.  We are going to spend a week there next month, but David and Cindy wanted to go and see it.  It was a nice trip, though it was short.  We only spend a few hours up there.  Long enough to take some pictures, do some window shopping, and eat lunch.  It was real cold there too, for AZ at least.  It was 44F and windy.  Stop laughing, Jon.  It was cold.

We spent the whole weekend pretty much at Faiths parents house, as that was where they were staying.  The last night they were in town we went over for dinner, and Erin joined the after-dinner dice game some of them were playing.  She also put on a show of dancing, singing, and just hamming it up for all of us. 

You can check out some pictures in the Tropizm Photo Album if you like. 

Tropizm

The Yahoo photo album is officially gone.  I got an email from Yahoo stating so.  One surprise though, they transfered all of the albums and photos.  You won’t be able to view them yet, as they are set to private and I will have to set them to public.  I am not going to do this.

I selected Flickr after I was notified the Yahoo album was going away.  I did this because there were plugins I could use with wordpress (the management software I use for my site) that would make it easy for me to put pictures in posts and what not.  The plugin worked fine, and as you may have seen, I have several posts with pictures in them.  You could click a picture and it would take you to the Flickr page and blah, blah, blah.

 But the more I use Flickr, the more I don’t like it.  The Yahoo album was pretty straight forward.  You upload all of you pictures into an album.  You click on an album, and there are all of the pictures.  Click a picture and you get a big picture.  The only think I didn’t like about the Yahoo album was having to rename each picture.  But at least I could order them in such a way that you could start at the first one and scroll through them and you could get the “photo story” of whatever is going on.

With Flickr, I have several issues.  First, the “front page” shows the last few pictures I have uploaded, with the albums on the side.  I cannot change that.  After you click on an album, it is ordered by name.  I don’t like that.  There are a couple other things I don’t like about it, but mostly it is a real pain to manage.

I do like the fact that I could add comments and such, and it works well with my site.  So once again, I searched for an alternative.  The answer was a plugin that is for wordpress and doesnt use any outside albums.  Though it is limited and not nearly as powerful as Yahoo or Flickr, it is easier to use and I have control over most of it.  I could pretty much do anything I want with it if I code it in, so for now, I am leaving it as-is “right out of the box” if you will. 

As a “test” page, I uploaded the latest pictures of the progress of the house.  Click on the “Tropizm Photo Album” on the right to check em out.  At the bottom you will see the pictures I took yesterday.  I am leaving the Flickr link up, and I removed the Yahoo link all together, as it is no longer there.

Let me know what you think.  Yay, boo, or *shrug*.

 Tropizm