Check Me Out Now

As promised, here's the new site.  Just in time for my swearing in later today.  (Then I'm still not a lawyer; I have to send in paperwork and wait for it to be processed.  Once I'm listed on the California Bar website, then it's official!)  Here's the recent news:

• Yelena & I got our first major appliances: a new washer and dryer.  We're like proud parents.  (Oh, wait.  I guess we are proud parents.)  They're simple, bottom-of-the-line Kenmores but they're brand new and they do a very good job of cleaning our clothes.  And I don't need quarters any more!
• Went to the SF Zoo with Yelena, Nathan, and some friends this weekend.  Had a blast.  Yes, I took pictures.  Yes, I'll put them online.  Eventually.
• Got our first utility bill.  Our new apartment is twice the size of the old one but the utility bill is one third the cost.  Credit better insulation, plenty of double-paned windows, and gas central heating with a thermostat.  Also a gas clothes dryer.  And, of course, our own frugality.
• Nathan has started learning how to do things that annoy us.  Like, yelling.  He doesn't have much to yell about yet, but for several days he did it anyway.  With gusto.  He also knows what he wants now, although he can't communicate it yet.  It's like he's already in his Terrible Two's, and he's not even six months old.  The good news is his coordination is getting better and better; he uses both hands now and loves playing with his feet.  And loves "This Little Piggy."

Now, about this grand website upgrade.  This is actually the fourth generation of my website; the very first used simple html and sat in an old computer on the floor of my apartment and every time we went out of town it would fail.  My most recent version used Wordpress for the blog and Coppermine for my gallery.  Both very capable programs, but I wanted more.

Wordpress vs. Drupal

I don't have time for a full review, but here are my basic impressions.  Wordpress is great for beginners who want a simple blog and maybe a few extra pages tacked on.  For the past couple years, that's all I wanted and Wordpress served me well.  The most recent version will even update itself and installing add-ons is hillariously easy (you don't even have to upload them).  But it's not well suited to a domain with multiple sites, and its layout options are limited.  Sure, it can be hacked, but it was quickly getting to the point where migrating to a better system was easier than continuing to hack it.

Drupal, on the other hand, is an industrial-grade Content Management System used by companies like Google, Nokia, Warner Brothers, ABC, etc.  It is flexible and has powerful built-in functionality.  I can build custom menus and put them anywhere I want.  Take a look: there's the "jordan | nathan | sarah | gallery" menu at the top and bottom, plus a "Stuff" menu on the side.  If you click on "Software Corner" it opens up a sub-menu; the "About" sub-menu stays open all the time.  This is all built-in functionality and is impossible in Wordpress.

Then there are things like "books."  Click on "Quotes" and you'll see my collection of quotes which I used to carry around in my backpack and share with cute girls (it actually worked, believe it or not).  Now it's a collection of separate pages, but they're bound together like a book.  You can flip back and forth and they're all contained under a single heading.  Not possible with Wordpress; built in with Drupal.

It's not that Drupal is "better" than WP; it has a much steeper learning curve and even simple things like installing a rich-text editor can be tricky and time-consuming.  But if you need the power, then there's no contest.

One more thing: integration, baby.  Gallery2 is integrated into Drupal.  It was actually very tricky, but the result is seamless.  You can't tell when you've left one program and entered the other.  And that's the whole point: a graceful, unified browsing experience between text and photos.  Just like in the Olympics, it's not enough to do something difficult.  You have to make it look easy.

Coppermine vs. Gallery2

While I was at it, I upgraded my gallery as well.  I'd been getting complaints about my old gallery, and it was admittedly clunky, cluttered, and difficult to use.  Plugin functionality was awkward (eg. ordering prints).  Gallery2 is much more popular, and now I understand why.

From the beginning, Gallery2 was friendlier and easier.  It guided me gently through the setup process, and when things got complicated, it gave me advice that was easy to understand.  Unfortunately my web host didn't have the latest version for automatic installation (this was also true of Drupal) but manual upgrading was relatively easy.  Coppermine had a "category" interface that was clunky and confusing, both to me and to my users.  The Gallery2 structure is much better; it's simply a collection of albums and photos and albums can be nested inside other albums.  Gallery2 comes with a huge stack of plugins ready to activate, including functionality that Coppermine could only dream of.  And when I looked to duplicate some of the advanced features I'd installed in Coppermine, such as shopping cart, it was already there.

When comparing Wordpress and Drupal, I found that Wordpress was less powerful but still had a lot to offer.  I hate to be harsh, but the same can't be said for Coppermine.  Gallery2 is easier and more powerful.  Unless you like the complicated layout, Coppermine has no advantages.  And you shouldn't prefer the more complicated layout; your users don't.

Unfortunately, the Coppermine-Gallery2 migration tool is rather primitive and had trouble with my large albums.  So I've left Coppermine in place with my older albums and only copied the most recent things into the new album: Nathan's photos and a couple recent Civil War reenactments.  All new photos will go into Gallery2 but I'm keeping a link to the old gallery in case you want to see my older work.  Some of it is decent.

Finally, you may notice that not everything got ported over to the new site, and in particular some functionality (like email subscriptions) is still missing.  I simply haven't had time to deal with every detail.  My priority was to get the site up and relatively polished so I could move on to more important things like job hunting.

Your thoughts?

How do you like the new layout?  Better?  Worse?  Anything missing?  Let me know.

All right, it's 2:30 am.  I really need to stop.

J<