I have switched both my blog and photo gallery to run on 3rd-party systems. My blog is now powered by WordPress, and my photo gallery is now powered by Coppermine. Both of these systems are open-source, built on PHP and MySQL, and licensed under the GPL.
I developed my old blog and gallery myself, which was a lot of fun. They worked ok, although not great, especially the photo gallery. I found myself posting most of my photos to my blog instead, because it was easier.
I recently moved my site to linksky. I had already moved the Virtual Planet there, as well as a site I am developing for a client. The client wanted WordPress, so I installed it and learned how to adapt the code to his needs. I liked what I saw, and was thrilled to find that there are thousands of free WP themes available. I downloaded a couple from Lilac Pixels.
Linksky offers quite a few 3rd party content management systems, including WP and Coppermine. I had just seen that Leo Laporte switched his photo gallery to Coppermine, so I decided to give it a try. I love it. There aren’t as many themes as there are for WP, but doing batch uploads of photos is a snap. I also love how you can create categories for your photos. So from now on, photos go into the gallery, and words go into the blog. As it should be!
Importing my old photos into coppermine was a snap. I was also able to import all of the captions from the existing database. But I have decided not to try and move my old blog posts here. I put a link in the link section to my old blog. They can live on there forever.
I hope that you like the changes as much as I do.
-pattyb
