<3 Gallery

Okay, so it's not the speediest. But there's just something I like about Gallery, the php open source image organizer I run on my site. And now that I've spent some time over the past couple weeks cleaning up the UI and enabling all the modules I had neglected months ago (in the original install), I guess I've committed to using it until the end of time. Hey... Maybe they'll fix the lag in version 3.0.

So... what's been updated? Well... Comments are now enabled for all users, even guests, thanks to Captcha. I had disabled them previously due to a bot that had its way with my site a few months back. Now that I've enabled Captcha, comments require visual input in order to post -- take it, bots!

UI changes include a handy dropdown menu (instead of an overwhelming navigation list along the left, now you get all that and more in a dropdown!), and a tree view that expands to allow quick navigation of the albums. Because sometimes gallery can be slow. Did I mention that?

Also new are RSS feeds for any item or album. I subscribed to my own feed (because hey, who else will, really) on my igoogle homepage and was rewarded with a gadget that not only lists the image updates, but also includes the image thumbnails, which is super cool. BTW, igoogle is awesome, and I suggest getting yours set up if you haven't already.

Something else I enabled is the ability to upload videos -- they play completely embedded from the gallery page. This would be teh awesome if only I had videos to upload. Guess I better get to work on that. Taking suggestions! On second thought... never mind.

And the last nifty thing added to the gallery is a shopping cart that allows you to choose as many images as you want, and then download them all in one convenient zip file. Why a shopping cart? It's not like I'm charging anything for these images, so the shopping cart thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense... But just pretend you're like one of the kids on Double Dare that won the Toys R Us shopping spree. You're not payin' for anything and you're taking as much as you want. Woohoo!

Alright, if you want to see the results of all this work, checkity check it out. Now I'm off to take the physical challenge and then slide headfirst into a giant sundae. Am I the only one that always wanted to do that?