Back Online
05/07/07 09:19 Filed in: commentary
I am finally back online after a nearly eighteen (18) month hiatus from WJG. Why did I stop updating? Technology and time.
In 2005 I thought I had found the most efficient way to publish my work. These templates and tools (RapidWeaver, RapidIdeas, Collage and iPhoto) enabled me to rapidly advance the photo publishing process. With these new tools, I was finally able to maintain a rich site in the minutes a week I had available. Without them, I would not have been able to deploy the improved WJG.
I used these four (4) technologies:
iPhoto
The leading photo management tool from Apple, free with every Mac. Plug in your camera, import photos, add catagories or tags. iPhoto has a feature called Smart Albums that allows you to automatically maintain a folder that contains, for example, the best pictures taken in India. Unfortunately it is unavailable (at least for another year) on Windows. More unfortunate (as it relates to my processes) is that Aperture does not have RAW processing and image processing tools that I find useful. I invested in Aperture last year to fill the gap.
RapidWeaver
An excellent website authoring tool from Real Mac Software (sorry Windows/Linux users). Although the name sounds a lot like Adobe's DreamWeaver, there is no relation. RapidWeaver (RW) is great for blogs, RSS feeds or entire sites. The killer feature for my purposes is the ability to create a Flash gallery directly from an iPhoto Smart Album. Thus I can add a new item to iPhoto and then use a simple Publish Changes feature in RW to place a properly formatted reduced size photo on the site. Unfortunately RW also has a few memory management issues that can cause serious publishing problems when a site gets large . WJG has more than a thousand pages & files.
Camilo
This is a style template from Christoph Richardet at the firm RapidIdeas. These are extremely well designed tools that integrate elegant stylesheets with RW functionality. It was simple to customize a new site with a few simple (no GUI here) edits to the RapidIdea templates. I also use RapidIdeas templates for wjones.com. There are no gotchas with RapidIdeas. Their templates and Christoph's support are the best dollar-for-dollar software investment I've made.
Collage
This is a plug-in for RapidWeaver from the folks at Your Head Software that makes it easy to build beautiful collage style pages (see this example). Unfortunately, this plug-in can exacerbate memory issues with RapidWeaver.
The combination of RapidWeaver ($49), Collage ($9.95) and CA Camilo ($15) enabled me to take a site concept to production in about a tenth of the time I would have needed with DreamWeaver alone. Unfortunately after I got the new WJG online I started to experience series memory issues in RapidWeaver. Opening the site in RW would use a gigabyte of memory and RW would often crash during edits or worse, crash on opening. It would soon take several attempts and hours of time to make the most simple edit.
By January, I was faced with the prospect of changing technology or waiting for improvements to the technology. I chose to change technology, but since I didn't have the time needed to re-create and manage a similar quality with another tool, I waited.
Within the last month I accomplished these changes:
- Upgraded RW to version 3.61
- Upgraded to the latest CA Camilo template
- I removed all Collage pages from the site
- I reconfigured flash settings to take advantage of new RW 3.61 features
I upgraded Collage, but it still severely worsened RW memory issues. After adding the India gallery, I couldn't even load RW. It would crash after consuming 1.1 GB of RAM (on my 2GB system). Removing all Collage pages solved the problem. Unfortunately, I still suffer from occasional RW memory issues. As long as I close RW and reopen it before publishing a moderate edit, it seems to work fine. If I edit for more than an hour at a time, I sometimes must restart the system, as RW has found a way to lose memory that even OS X's Activity Monitor can't clear.
Despite the memory issues, the value is clearly there if publishing is your hobby. If I had to make money off photography, I would have unfortunately needed to move to a more reliable tool. Hopefully the RW programmers will continue to keep one step ahead of my needs in the foreseeable future.
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