OlgaSmith.com launched
I am happy to announce that my wife has now joined the Blogosphere. This has been a long time coming. I wanted to plan things through and set aside enough time to make sure that I could do a top-notch site. She wore the "Creative Director" hat on this one, so everything that you see is a result of her tastes and how she wanted things as far as layout and style. I can only take credit for facilitating her already good eye for design.
The site is fairly simple, with only three main sections: About, Blog, and Fotos - abbreviated for space on the menu. While it is something of a micro-site, the actual code driving the thing was a challenge. The roll-over buttons were a pain to get to work correctly in Safari. I owe the bug fixes to Mike over at ScreenFlicker.com, who pointed out that Safari requires heavily styled UL's to be wrapped in a Div, rather than just giving an ID to the UL itself.
The Fotos section presented another challenge. I needed to do more than just show our recent Flickr photos, because I want her to be able to update a gallery of well-taken shots, aside from my miscellaneous random nerdy photos. So, I struck a compromise. The Fotos section shows the typical 12 latest Flickr thumbnails, and her more personalized area runs on hacked version of SimpleViewer by Airtight Interactive.
I got it set up so that all the images she uploads via Textpattern are automatically put into rotation on her site. It just takes running a little PHP script when new photos are added, which in turn outputs a small XML file, then used for loading the images into the Flash animation. The PHP script also generates the thumbnails, so the whole process is pretty seamless. The only drawback to doing it this way is the lack of batch uploads.
All in all, I'm very happy with how this site turned out. It's fun to do web design motivated by love, and certainly is cool when you can share a common interest. So, expect to see counseling / psychology / shopping related articles posted semi-regularly from my lovely wife. Visit her site: OlgaSmith.com.