Random Snapshots

I think I have settled on a new theme, but I will get in to that more later. First, I also did up my first widget. Ok, first we need to back up a step or three…

I have spent a lot of time over the last year looking for a good solution for putting my personal photos online. I will write more later, but suffice to say I have settled on JuxtaPhoto (JP) by Jeff Harrell. I have about 300 images in my gallery so far, and have lots more to go through yet.

I wanted something similar to the Flickr pools and such you see on other sites, but since JP is rather unknown, nothing exists for it… so I wrote one.

I have a basic understanding of PHP and mySQL, enough that I can hack a few things together. So I pieced together a some code, and used a helpful tutorial at Lonewolf Online to turn that code into a widget.

This is a very very early stage item here. You need to edit the code yourself to get it the way you want and to link to your own gallery. And your JuxtaPhoto gallery MUST be using the same database as your WordPress install, cause there is no provision for opening a second database.

Out of the box just set it up with your URL, verify the database tables, and you get a basic widget that displays 6 random image thumbnails at a 60×60 size. Eventually, I will see about re-writing things to make display options and such configurable from the admin panel. BUT, it works for what I want and need it to do… so if you are looking for those functions leave a comment to let me know. When/if there is interest, I will dig back in to this thing.

randomJuxtaPhoto v0.1