I think it is time for Gallery to be retired from this blog. I will still keep it for Alison and Mum, but I am actively looking for alternatives for my photos. SmugMug is very nice, and looks like a good candidate.

So why? Well, although Gallery is a nice piece of software, I am getting seriously pissed off the the Drupal and Wordpress integration is ALWAYS the bit that breaks when I upgrade anything. This week I upgraded Alison to the latest Wordpress and WPG2 and her blog threw errors on every attempt to view a page only when she logged in. It was fine for me, and for non-logged in users. I traced the fault to a problem with G2’s embedded user mapping.

Next, I am working on porting this site to Drupal 6 – I do quite a bit of Drupal freelancing, and want to get up to speed with how Drupal 6 differs. My own site is good motivation to learn. But, how about Gallery integration. Oh good, there is a dev release. Oh bad, it requires Gallery 2 V2.3, which isn’t even released yet. WTF. So, the guys working on this (for nothing, I understand) think it makes sense to write the code to integrate a released Drupal 6 to an unreleased Gallery 2! I note, that ALMOST everything else is working for Drupal 6. There are some settling down issues with quite a few modules, the most inexplicable being XMLSitemap, but at least it works.

So, I think, what is it that wastes HUGE lumps of time every time I do an upgrade (and for my family, I have 6 sites). Gallery2, every time.

So, what do you think I can use as a replacement for other family members? It needs easy steps for linking a photo into Wordpress, other than that, just easy to use.

Most Mac software is in the magic “no-brainer” price range of $20-$30, which means I have a horrible tendency to just buy it. If I ever manage to write something handy for the Mac then it is a business model that I will adopt. There’s no thinking “Do I really want it, can it wait till next month, perhaps I’ll ask for it as a gift”, instead, “Oh! It’s only $20, I’ll get it NOW”. Unfortunately, this happens a few times per month and it all adds up. Oh well.

Productivity

• iGTD
• OmniFocus

Business

• Parallels
• OpenOffice

Utility

• KeePassX
• QuickSilver
• MacFUSE
• iBackup
• VoodooPad
• Unison
• Chicken of the VNC
• CoconutBattery
• iStat pro

Communications

• Adium
• Twitterific

Web

• FireFox
• Yaki
• Cocoalicious

Authoring/Design/Editing

• Adobe Photoshop Elements
• Coda

Personal Finance

• Moneydance

Fitness

• Ascent
• Garmin Training Center

Miscellaneous

• TomTom HOME

Yaki is a Wiki/Blogging platform with some really nice features. The main one is that it is extremely light weight. Pages and posts are simple files, with a set of headers at the top that define the details (tags, dates, etc). Mirroring and backups of the site can then be done with any file synchronisation tool.

I toyed with using it on this site, since I wanted to add Wiki-Style behaviour, but ended up using my old favourite for more complex sites, Drupal.