So I published the Silverlight + Flickr photo gallery. It has replaced my old gallery until I completely remove the old one OR find another different way. My Reasons for going with this solution were simple. I wanted to be able to publish photos from my laptop or my desktop without issue, to a central location, without editing massive amounts of files for each one.

So now when you click on the Photos it will take you to the SilverLight Gallery.

In other news, I started studying for the next test to be an MCSA, The 70-291, Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Infrastructure. As I am going through this at the moment, I am looking around at some of the job postings that are available, and they all seem to list the MCP as a desktop only certification. This is amusing because I intentionally started on the server exams just to show I am serious about them. I will need to do either 70-260 for Windows Vista or 70-270 for Windows XP. I have no fear about taking the XP test, I have been using it since it was called Whistler, then again I have been using vista since it was Longhorn Beta 1, but not as fully. I have had a lot of issue with XP so that made me stronger in it and more self reliant, I have not reached that stage with Vista yet, mainly because I have not had any problems with it. Oh well I will shoot for the best.

Wow that was a longer post, and I should start doing the video posts again shortly, I just need it to settle down a bit at home.

So I published the Silverlight + Flickr photo gallery. It has replaced my old gallery until I completely remove the old one OR find another different way. My Reasons for going with this solution were simple. I wanted to be able to publish photos from my laptop or my desktop without issue, to a central location, without editing massive amounts of files for each one.

So now when you click on the Photos it will take you to the SilverLight Gallery.

In other news, I started studying for the next test to be an MCSA, The 70-291, Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Infrastructure. As I am going through this at the moment, I am looking around at some of the job postings that are available, and they all seem to list the MCP as a desktop only certification. This is amusing because I intentionally started on the server exams just to show I am serious about them. I will need to do either 70-260 for Windows Vista or 70-270 for Windows XP. I have no fear about taking the XP test, I have been using it since it was called Whistler, then again I have been using vista since it was Longhorn Beta 1, but not as fully. I have had a lot of issue with XP so that made me stronger in it and more self reliant, I have not reached that stage with Vista yet, mainly because I have not had any problems with it. Oh well I will shoot for the best.

Wow that was a longer post, and I should start doing the video posts again shortly, I just need it to settle down a bit at home.

Ok so I found a solution to the photo gallery but it isn't exactly what I had hoped. I signed up for a Flickr account and I will be using that to host images. This is because Windows Live Photo Gallery has a Publish To feature directly to Flickr. The fact that I have been using and recommending Live Photo Gallery to just about everyone I know for other reasons, such as the ability to make panoramic's and the way that it organizes and index's photos and the pictures folders in Vista and XP. 

The next thing that lead me to use Flickr was the Slide Show be Vertigo. This has a lot of features and a lot of ways that it can be used to present the images. It does not have a lot of choices for where it gets the data for the galleries. It uses a single file that holds the information, data.xml,  the file contains the information for the pictures such as the location, thumbnail location, and description

   1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

   2: <data startalbumindex="5" transition="CrossFadeTransition">

   3:     <album

   4:         title="Animals"

   5:         description="Photos of several animals (cross fade transition)"

   6:         image="../../Images/a29.jpg">

   7:         <slide

   8:             title="Monterey Aquarium Exhibit — Jellies: Living Art"

   9:             description="Photo taken by Alan Le"

  10:             image="../../Images/s07.jpg"

  11:             thumbnail="../../Images/t07.jpg" />

  12: ....

  13: <slide

  14:     title="1/1000"

  15:     description="Photo taken by Scott Stanfield"

  16:     image="../../Images/s19.jpg"

  17:     thumbnail="../../Images/t19.jpg" />

  18: bum>

  19: </data>

Now, if I wasn't lazy I would just accept that every time I upload an image I would have to edit the data.xml file manually to add the items. But I am lazy and I do not want to have to edit it every time I upload a photo. By using Flickr it allows for people to "stumble" accross some of my images, and it would do an automatic update to the slide show pages, also add new galleries as well. The only down side I have found so far is that I cannot organize it manually. I am still looking in the control sets for how to organize it alphabetically. Overall though that isn't a real down side because it will show the newer galleries first. It also does not show newest modified galleries first, so if I add an image it does not put that "set" at the top, but keeps it in order of newest "set" first. 

I am going to go ahead and wait about a week and see if I get any complaints about it. It does require Silverlight.

Here is my gallery

Here is my Flickr