It’s been a fantastic first year for Belle, and we’re have more and more fun with her every day. Enjoy the pics and vids of her birthday party and other adventures this month. Thanks to all the friends and family who made it special.

(click for pics)

No tags

Time is flying.  Belle has transformed in the month since she started crawling – her body has become longer and leaner, and her attitude is more adventurous.   She’s realized that she can influence the world around her a bit, and get’s frustrated when she can’t do exactly what she wants.  She pointed and called me “Dadt” when I came back from a business trip, lets go and stands momentarily unassisted, and feeds herself the small pieces of food Cynthia has cut up for her.

Here are the 11 month pics with lost of pictures of Nick and Fergus including Nick’s first birthday:

(click for pics)

Cynthia’s mom visited last week.  We did some Taipei sightseeing, and went down to the beach and aquarium in Kenting, the southernmost tip of Taiwan for a couple of nights.

(click for pics)

I continued the tradition with another highlight video:

No tags

(click for pics)

I also added a video highlighting Belle’s 10 month skills.

No tags

Casual readers can (and should) ignore this post – I’m only putting for up others who may be in the same situation and find this via a google search.  Basically, it explains why if you click on old posts the albums load faster and look better now.

I figured out how to use Apache Mod Rewrite to redirect my existing WPG2 links to the new, faster-loading Gallery 3 versions of the same albums. I think the rewrite rule recommended by the Gallery2 import module in Gallery 3 wasn’t friendly with the rewritten WPG2 plugin generated URLs that I’d been using on WordPress, and I couldn’t figure out why. I’ve been struggling to pull this off for weeks but made the breakthrough today.

I got a great hint from here, and then did some studying on Apache mod_rewrite syntax around the web to make the necessary modifications  ( I wasn’t able to fake my way through it like I can for php). It’s still a pretty rough hack – it takes advantage of the fact that WPG2 is currently using it’s own rewrites to make the URLs pretty by using the album names, which conveniently identically match the imported album names in G3.  So, I added these lines to the top of my public_html .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^v/(.*)$ /gallery3/index.php/$1/ [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

So, the WPG2 rewritten links are intercepted by catching the pattern “v/” in the URL, and then it’s forwarded to the G3 version instead.  The preview images for “old” albums you see in WordPress here on the front page of the site are still being served by the old Gallery 2,  but I think I can live with this as it  just costs me some redundant storage space, which is free.   I think the performance might even be better this way for the legacy albums, because I like showing bigger than thumbnail pictures as a preview on the main WordPress page, which G2 can create and cache.   G3 doesn’t have this functionality yet so you’d have to load a larger image and dynamically resize it ever time which uses more bandwidth and is slower.   Knowing what I know now about the syntax, I probably could better understand the hierarchy of rules and rewrite them to work “the right way”, but this is the KISS  solution at this point.

Going forward, new albums will be uploaded to G3 only, but I’ll have to use a post slug to paste the embedding code myself using the Simple Post Template WordPress plugin which is perfect for this.  It pastes this in and then I modify the links appropriately:

 <a href=”http://cassleman.com/gallery3/index.php/thailand_2012″><img class=”aligncenter” src=”http://cassleman.com/gallery3/var/resizes/thailand_2012/IMG_5040.JPG?m=1328792089″ alt=”" width=”400″ height=”266″ /></a>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>(click for pics)</p>

It would be even better if I could get the WPG3 alpha plug in to work, but it keeps crashing the entire site which I’ve never had a WordPress plugin do before.  I’ve made progress on a few of the issues, but it still isn’t functional, I think I’m just going to need to wait until it’s out of alpha.   The other G3 WordPress plugin’s don’t have the functionality I want – the ability to quickly choose the image from the album tree and make it link back to the parent album.  They all try to do embedded carousels and stuff which are neat but I either don’t like the way they look and/or they are buggy or slow.  I think overall G3 is just a bit too new to have the fully developed support that G2 did, but this should change with time.  In any case, G3 has all the features I need today, and everyone’s complaints about performance should be gone once and for all.

No tags

The era of “set it and forget it” parenting is over.  I taught Baby Belle to crawl forward tonight.

No tags