New Photo gallery

I’ve updated the look of my photo gallery and changed how the photos are stored. My goal is to make the gallery work better on mobile devices and modernize the look and feel. I also moved the hosting of all the photos from my website to Amazon S3. I’m planning to switch my web hosting to a private server and it will cost less if I don’t store my photos on that server.

Here’s a comparison of the look of the old gallery to the new:

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Moving data from MySQL to Google Sheets with PHP

I recently needed to pull data from a database and add it to a google spreadsheet. Google provides an API for working with Sheets, but like many of their APIs, the documentation isn’t great. I’ve got my program working and figured I’d document my steps for future me and anyone else who needs it.
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Take back the data – part 3

I have decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. In Take back the data – Part 1, I listed all the services that I use. In Take back the data – Part 2, I described how I plan to replace my cloud services with my own web server. In this post I’ll describe the process of setting up the web server hardware and software in more detail.

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New Photo Gallery

I have changed web hosting companies and re-designed my web page. The biggest change is to the photo galleries. There are a lot of photo gallery programs out there, but I couldn’t find one with the feature that I wanted. I wanted to be able to upload a large set of pictures, but only display a sub-set of them on the main page. The rest of the pictures would be “behind” the displayed set. So, if I go to Paris and take a bunch of pictures of the Eiffel tower, I can put one picture on the main page, but allow users to see the rest of them if that is something they are interested it.

I wrote my own system with php and mySql that lets me manage the photos and the galleries. It also lets me separate the galleries into public and private areas. I have been scanning prints of family photos from my childhood and I put those online for the rest of my family to see.