A few weeks ago was a friend’s birthday. We decorated her locker and made a huge banner and put it up in the hallway at school. I took some pictures of it and stitched them together with a little Photoshop and some of my own hardwork. Since I didn’t take very smart pictures for a panorama Photoshop didn’t do a very good job, so I ended up putting them together by myself, it turned out alright.

I had to document this because of how big this banner was. Here it is:

Update: Make sure you actually go to the single post page for this post and don’t just stop and look on the homepage, it get’s cutoff by the sidebar.

I’ve been pretty happy with the new-ish WordPress gallery. I haven’t used it a whole lot, but for the Photos that I’ve taken it has worked decently. When they first released the new gallery, it seemed like a huge thing with tons of features, but it really isn’t. Sure the new image uploader is nice, and the gallery pages are cool, but if you want more than that, you’ll have to hack your way to what you want.

I made my gallery page display a thumbnail from the gallery next to the info. This looks great, but it only works when there is a photo in the first spot. If for some reason the photo that you tried to upload didn’t go, or you decided that you didn’t like it and deleted it then there’s nothing.

I would also like a simple feature that returns a random image from the gallery. There’s nothing that can do this. It would be great to be able to display a random image in my sidebar, or on gallery pages, but right now that’s impossible.

What I really want

The random image thing is simple, just the simplest template tag for a random gallery image. Maybe you could even specify posts that you don’t want included, but easy stuff.

The default gallery thumbnail is a little more complex, but not much. I want something that lets you choose an image from your post to be the ‘default gallery thumbnail’. Then a template tag that returns the default gallery thumbnails. Then you could even have it setup so that if you change your mind on a particular gallery, you can go back and change the default thumbnail.

I’ve been looking for a solution to this for awhile, maybe I’ll try to throw something together that accomplishes this.

Well, I added the Seesmic plugin for WordPress so people can record comments with Seesmic. We’ll see how that goes. I think we’re all going to be using video in the future, so why not get started right now? I tried to record a video for this post, but I guess you need to pay for Jing Pro to be able to save a screencast in mp4. The only option with the free version is .swf and I don’t know how to convert .swf to anything else, so I guess I’m stuck. I tried to find visualhub, but I didn’t have a Mac when they decided to cancel it 6 months ago. I was going to use my camera on a tripod, but the batteries were dead. I got the first part recorded in PhotoBooth, but it wont make very much sense if I just put that up.

If anybody knows of any free screen capture software that will let me use some kind of real movie format let me know. I’m going to remove Jing right away. What a waste of my time.