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.

1.  I can have unlimited SQL databases instead of being limited to two, which among other things allowed me to upgrade from Gallery2 to Gallery3 and enables future expansion of the site if I so desire.
2. Faster upload speeds which should save a lot of time uploading all those pictures of my baby you come here  to admire.
3. Host Gator uses the fantastic and powerful Cpanel site config software, which is superior to StartLogic’s Vdeck
4. I can ssh into my server and do stuff like delete a directory in two seconds which could take hours before via FTP.
5. Rsync support, which will make the backups I do from my NAS at home less of a kludge.
6. I’ve consolidated domain hosting and web hosting, which centralizes administration for me and should reduce the chance of outages (like last year) since I only have to maintain one account.
7. It’s much cheaper, due to the aforementioned consolidation of hosts and more competitive pricing – only about $41 a year.
8. Best of all, Host Gator migrated the entire site for me for free.   This saved me untold hours of debug and frustration (don’t worry, there was still some of that).

The old gallery will stick around for a while – all the pictures are already imported to gallery3, but I need to update the old links or decide it’s not that important.  I wanted to make this new version of the site 100% shiny new before making it live, but this isn’t possible due some of the idiosyncrasies of gallery3 wordpress plugins running on a server that didn’t resolve without host file overrides.   That was fun to write, but it was not easy to figure out.  You don’t care.

In other news, I plan to use this site to document the imminent birth of our daughter in real time.  I’ve installed a new WordPress plugin that should simulcast the updates on Facebook as well.  Stay tuned!

Oh, also I changed the blog theme.  I may bring the old one back, but I can’t figure out how to manipulate the style sheet to make it look better on wide screens.

The WordPress learning curve wasn’t too bad and I’ve became obsessed with making things look “right” over the past couple days. I was surprised with how much fun it was; I’m feeling a load of nerd pride for hacking on the default theme to make it my own without knowing a damn thing about style-sheets and php going in. It’s reassuring to know that part of me that could read, write and debug code is still around. I just didn’t want use a standard template – that inexplicably felt like a cop out to me. This is especially ironic given that even now when I feel independently differentiated from the WordPress herd I’m still leveraging like 99.9% of the code untouched. Still annoying: the site seems slower and I’m not sure why. Anyway, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

The blue header was Cynthia’s suggestion – she said navy blue was a “Pat color”. “Blog-like substance” popped into my head during the setup and I was compelled to use it in the tag line. I may experiment with some entries that are not related to new pics in the gallery or site maintenance . . . the wordpress backend makes posting even easier then on Cutenews. The real question is not one of ease of use or even motivation, it’s how often I have something worthwhile to say to everyone/no one. With pioneering peers like Dave, who have >800 quality posts in less than three years, the bar is high in this corner of the internets.

This is not a blog, so don’t get your hopes up. If you want a real blog, go to Dave’s. It’s an addictive daily read, and I’m a recurring character there.