Turners Websites......

Here's John Jordan's tutorial on photographing woodturnings. Typical of John, it's excellent and straightforward.

Michael Latcha - at home in Redford, MI

What issues are you having with phpslideshow? The slideshow on your site seem to work well for me. What's not working? It's been around for 8 years and has been updated as late as Nov 2006. That's not really old yet. There are hundreds available, flash, dhtml, css, ajax, mash-ups (flikr,picasa,etc.), with resizing, transitions, exif info, and on and on.

Here are a few.

20PHP/ javascript/ for-freeflux.html Do you want flash or no flash? What software is the rest of the site? Most blog and theme-based PHP website toolkits include a slideshow. Do you want to try to restrict downloads of the pictures? Do you need watermarks? Do you want transitions, zooming, resizing? Do you want exif info displayed? Do you want to use external photo sources like flikr and picasa? Do you want rotation, like ad banners? Do you want feedback, blogs, polls, voting? How much PHP or javascript do you know? An PHP or ajax javascript toolkit can give you great features for the whole site but is code only, you write with/to it.

Best advice is find two or three sites that have features you want. Then you can get recommendations on whether the sites are implemented using opensource, or if another package has the same features desired. Which brings us back to the original question, what isn't working for you with phpslideshow? What don't you like about it? What features have you seen that are missing from phpslideshow that you want?

What do I use? I work with PHP websites (oscommerce,drupal,phpnuke,etc.) and normally use the slideshow included with the package unless some other special feature is required. Otherwise I write my own, less is more, and I want it fast, secure, and unbreakable.

One of AJAX's first primary use, before it was commonly called "AJAX", was slideshows, before people started writing frameworks for data/json transport, so most AJAX toolkits include slideshow code. A few of the current AJAX implementations still use javascript rollover image code (slideshow) to trigger the extended http request.

Using old fashioned coding you can extend a rollover to multiple triggers. Normally rolling over a menu item changes that menu items picture to highlight it. This is assigned by name and you can assign all menu items to change the same single picture. Now your menu is pictures, right? So the thumbnails are a menu that rolls over the single large picture display. It's the same code used in 90% of menu rollovers you see on the web. The slideshow is a simple timer loop. The frameworks or toolkits add transitions, pre-loading, random rotation, and feedback.

WOW! That is certainly alot of stuff to take in. I want to be able to display my work on my website. I want to be able to put all of my images in a folder and just have the slideshow display whatever is in there. I want the people who view the pictures to be able to navigate through them with little trouble. All the bells and whistles are cool, and I want it to fit within the framework of the site that I have built (ie. using my background and buttons and text and showing the slideshow as just a part of the page. I have gotten PHPSlideshow to work to a degree, but I can't seem to be able to get it to just be a part of the gallery page. The slideshow on the home page is just a simple javascript that I found that doesn't really have alot of flexibility. Its just another script I have been playing with. I appreciate all of the information and will go through each one to see if it fits.

Alex

Joe wrote:

you know, there are guys like me that block flash, most java scripts, etc - there is an advantage to basic HTML

Just the opinion of one person, but I used to design and support a bunch of web sites, and I can tell you that many (most?) people hate (or at least dislike) slide shows.

For anyone on a slow connection (still nearly half of the audience out there) a programmed slide show can be extremely time consuming and painful. For the rest of us, it's just more convenient to be able to look at a bunch of "thumbnail" sized images and click through to a full size version if we want to see the details. The thumbnails can be as small as 10 Kbytes each so they load fast, where a larger image could be

100K to a Megabyte without causing significant pain for the viewer.

Unless you are trying to show a very specific progression that requires the viewer to see things in a certain order, the slide show only gets in the way. No matter what slide speed you choose, you lose some viewers because it's too fast, and some because it's too slow. If you are interested at all in selling work via the internet, you really have to allow the viewer and potential customer to pick and choose without having to wait through a series of slides first. Slide shows and related programmed views like Flash also take a lot of yor time to implement.

In short, your audience has a very short attention span, and you need to set up your web site in a manner that allows the audience to rapidly choose the items they wish to view.

As an example, I once had a client that had a good, working site but he got the idea in his head that a slideshow or flash presentation was the way to go. As I didn't agree with his "needs", we parted ways. Once the flash show was in place, he boasted how he got a couple of thousand of hits a day, until I showed him how to look at his site statistics, where he found that his retention on the site was nearly zero. People came to the site due to his (higher and extensive) advertising, but only a half percent or so stuck around long enough to actually go to any of the sub-pages. Yep, though he had very high initial view, only 10 or 15 potential customers ever made it to the second page. Contrast that with the "old" site that routinely got three or four hundred hits on the home page a day (without the high profile advertising), with about half of the visitors exploring significant parts of the rest of the site. The flash which cost him significant time and money to implement actually drove most of his potential customers away... Within a year or so he became frustrated with "the whole internet experience" as he put it, and dropped his site completely.

Sometimes simple is better.

I have to agree on Slideshows. I used to have both options on my website, one Flash Gallery, which was nice and simple to move to the next image, and the other a simple thumbnail version which opened to the full image.

The important thing I did was to advise visitors that if they had a fast connection then they could look using Flash or Thumbnail. But if they had a slow connection it was recommended they only used the thumbnail version. Don't force it on them

Slideshows work depending on what the purpose of the content is. Usually a slideshow restricts all image sizes, to fit in its own framework, but with Thumbnails each image can be size independent

I find if I do encounter a slideshow that I prefer ones where I can manually advance to the next image when I have finished rather than be given five seconds then automatically moved

One very important thing I would say, if the slideshow route is chosen, don't auto start music. When I find a site like that I leave immediately

If only a few changing images are needed to show the range of products a simple Gif animation would suffice. But I am sure there are a lot more newsgroups out there where product specific information can be obtained

Even though I have 8Gb of server space with 400Gb of bandwidth a month, I still prefer to offer my user as simple a system as possible, balancing accessibility against speed. Maybe that explains the fact I get over 16000 unique visitors a month.

I am not an HTML guy, do you have an example or two of how to do something like that? Is there a program that will allow me to generate thumbnails of my pictures? Do I use frames or just load a bunch of small picks in a table and oopen a new window when some clicks on the smaller image? what I was trying to go for was keeping the main screen to a single with a minimum of scrolling and making it so that the viewer would only click on the images they wanted to see. If I keep just 6 - 8 images per page, I could potentially have a lot of pages (someday). Any ideas would be great!

thanks....Alex

In message , dragonhollow writes

You can make thumbnails quite simply by duplicating the images and resizing them to something suitable, and adding your own addition to the file name. Otherwise a quick Google will bring up all sorts of free programs to resize images, and others to do mass re-names Take a look at

and see what they have ( I am not affiliated with them).

One thing to consider in your web design is where do you expect to be in

5 years time? Will your design cope with it? Allow for expansion. Last year I spent 3 months re-designing my website of over 3000 pages because the existing 10 year old design had reached its limitation.

And one last point sit down for a few hours and define a mission statement for your website. What's its purpose and how you plan to achieve it. Then when you come up with a new idea test the idea against the statement and if it doesn't fit your mission, you shouldn't be doing it, or you should be re-defining your mission

w.freewarehome.comand see what they have  ( I am not affiliated with

You can always try Google's free Picasa.

Use menu options; Folder Export as web page

This will create HTML, CSS, thumbnails and resize photos for the web. Edit the HTML output if needed.

Export to each different style to view the source and see how each style is achieved. Produces fairly readable/editable code vs. Adobe SE and MS SE teaser products.

In message , dragonhollow writes

Well for someone without a mission , you just stated it :)

How you intend to achieve your mission

This will depend on how you intend to make your content available to the www. If you have your own domain you may even find that your host has software as part of your package specifically for site building. You may also be considering a site hosted at the likes of wordpress, or other blog site.

I have no idea what you folks are talking about, but regardless of how they are sent, we woodturners need the messages so let's be glad of all our messengers.

Any turner's website that I can access within a week, if at all is a victory for WebTv, but it beats my Vic20 & Heathkit. :)

Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter

Alex:

I've been following the comments and suggestions so far, and I'd like to make a couple of my own. You say that you are trying to put together a website to share your turnings with the rest of mankind, which is a good thing. However, you seem caught up in features you want on your site instead of simply concentrating on, as John put it, the mission of your site - why will it exist, what do you want people to know about your turnings when they visit?

You say that you're not an HTML guy, but you're jumping head first into features with PHP... which to me is a lot like trying to run before you know how to crawl. Like it or not, HTML (and CSS) are the meat and potatoes of displaying web content, and most everything you have stated in this thread that you want to do can be done with simple HTML. I've looked at your site, and to be perfectly frank, it's broken in MSIE 7. Pages don't scroll correctly (either horizontally or vertically), there are JavaScript errors on nearly every page, etc. Like it or not, these little things are what turns people off, and you have to know how to get them right before implementing cool features.

My advise? Dump the coffeecup software you are using to design your site and become an "HTML guy." And to that, from the beginning, add CSS. The site you are currently displaying is simple, straightforward and has great potential, and would take you only a couple of hours to re-develop in HTML/CSS.. and it would work. The learning curve is not steep, the design options are limitless and you will know a lot more about what's going on as you add bits and pieces and your site grows. There are plenty of references and examples (and people, even on this site) around to get you started, and to help when you get stuck.

Michael Latcha - at home in Redford, MI

Michael;

Thanks for the comments. Over all, there is very little javascript in any of the pages. I know the gallery page is broken, but everything else seems to be working just fine. I don't want alot of "features" on my site, I just want it to be easy to use and navigate through. The main reason I was looking at using slideshow type picture viewers is so that I wouldn't have to modify the html everytime I added a new picture or pictures to the site. I have given up on that after reading the comments of the group, and now I am attempting to use lightshow v2.0.3 to at least display the pictures with some dignity. This is a work in progress and that is why I decided to poll the group to see what would be best. If I knew more about the process, I would have plunged ahead without the need for feedback. I do appreciate everyones input and I will try to make it easy enough navigate so that it can even be used on WebTV (right Arch? ;-) )

Alex

Try using the program that is free online that is called Koolmoves that will do what you want it to. Look at my website and you will see

Keith Newton