With the last two albums (Cricklade Walk and Puppy Party) I used a different method to upload the pics and noticed that all thumbnails loaded immediately, as they jolly well should!  It would seem that there seems to be some sort of issue with the Publish to Web from XP option, which is what I used previously.  With the new method, they fly.

The upshot is that I’m afraid that old albums will still suffer, but new ones will be whizzy.

The bad news is that the plugin which displayed the random Gallery image at the top of the right hand side bar doesn’t work any more.     I’ll see what I can find out over the weekend.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get things back up and running at some point today…

Anyway, the pictures are here.

Note – the links (above and right) are currently set to open in a new window because there isn’t a “Return to homepage” link on the gallery yet. Just another item on my to-do list!

Not that anyone is likely to care, but this is Gallery v2 and it was v1 that I had on my old site. How does it compare? Well, it was far easier to install for a start! It was almost just a case of creating the database, uploading the zip file, extracting and stepping through the install wizard.

Right, enough waffle – it’s playtime!

It’s been a long time coming (forging a new career got in the way) but I’ve wanted to sack 1&1 for a long time now. It wasn’t so much that their server went bang and lost everything, it was the fact that they dragged out restoring the backup for months…only to then say “Oh, this has gone on too long, your backup is no more!” Turns out the useless tossers only keep backups for three days anyway! So quite how (and why!) they managed to drag it out for so long is beyond me.

Anyway, good things come to those who wait! I am now paying half the amount for a much better package and level of service. The new host is TSOHost and so fary, so goody. I completed the purchase shortly before 1700 yesterday (Friday, 28th Dec) and they had me up and running almost immediately. The support ticket I opened with a question about the domain transfer was answered very quickly too.

One of the reasons for moving was to be able to create a MYSQL database. This means I can create a new, super-whizzy photo gallery – probably using Gallery v2. This may take a little while for me to complete so please bear with me. Once it’s done I’ll upload all our photos (I hadn’t bothered after 1&1 lost the old website because I knew I was going to move it).

I think the front page will stay as the Blogger blog because I’ve got the moblogging working well.

Right, off for a Wii at the Outlaw’s!

Sorry, no captions as yet!

Anyway, back to the problem at hand, i.e. all the pictures with the incorrect file dates. I had read that one could edit the EXIF data, so I decided to try and find out if I could redate the file with the one from the EXIF. Time to JFGI. Initially I wasn’t having much luck because all the links related to changing the EXIF data, which isn’t what I needed. That’s when I thought of having a look through Digital Media Thoughts, a sister site to Pocket PC Thoughts, which I regularly read. Rather than goint to DMT, I decided to utilise Google’s inurl: search option.

Finally, I had the answer: Exifer. Among other things (read their site!) this gives you the option to redate the file using the last modified date from the EXIF. Splendid. Please note that there are some compatibility issues posted on their website regarding some software not recognising the EXIF data after an edit. Thankfully, despite PHP functions being in that list, I haven’t had any problems.

At this point in time I’m going to casually ignore the fact the ftp-ing the file up to the website changes the date…