Recently I've been doing a bit of web development. The goal is to make an attractive looking art portfolio / gallery site. To start with I looked at a couple of open source image gallery web apps like coppermine, gallery and so on.

I did some installs and they worked well as far as they went but the resulting experience always felt a bit sterile. These projects often allow for a lot of customisation, and I realise that making my own theme could do a lot to make the site look better. However the functionality of these projects is huge and complicated, and to be honest is massive overkill for a simple portfolio gallery. They don't feel right for the task.

After quite a bit of looking, I found Galleria and embedded it in a simple custom page of my own design with simple CSS menus at the top. Galleria is built on top of JQuery, a GPL'd Javascript library. I didn't delve into the internals of this jet, but it looks pretty interesting. Certainly Galleria is very nice.

The CSS menus are a little problematic - because of terrible CSS implementation IE 6&7 do not render the menus properly. I suppose I should really re-implement the menus using javascript or something (since the gallery part uses it anyway). But I'm feeling pretty lazy, and I can't help thinking that IE6&7 users get what they deserve. Not professional, but this is a labour of love.

After making working prototype pages, I split them up into templatised components and wrote a customer per script to generate the site. I'm working to generalise this process, and will publish it in a bazaar repository when I've done that.

Stay posted.