The way we were ...

It all began at a job I had a while ago. I had one of those HP multi function fax printers. I found that it had a scan function. We recently had the birth of our son Isaac and so I scanned a few photos to put up on one of those Yahoo Photos pages.

Since I had made lots of little sites is the past, I decided to make a little geocities page. The web had begun to call out to me.

About this time I found out the place I worked for had a digital camera that it was not using so I adopted it as my own. Now I have more photos for my little site but i grew weary with everything about geocities.

That got old quick.

So I registered carlandtracey.com and made a little site using FrontPage. The web was happy for now.

I started taking lots of photos and putting them on the photos page of my website.

I used photoshop to make the albums with the thumbnail pages and manually coded a main index page. I would use the FP Template function to get the PhotoShop derived pages to match the rest of the site.

People would knock FP but this worked pretty well. I even threw up one of those "Made with FrontPage" buttons on the front to let folks know I was not embarassed. (You can see people try to hide the evidence but it shows in the file strcture. I figured, "Why try to hide it?"

About this time I put together my first Flash animation. It looks pretty funny in retrospect but what can I say?

The entire site took very little maintenance and the whole thing looked decent, but then the web began to call out to me again.

I wanted more flexibility but I definately did not want to hand code my own photo pages. After all, this was the whole reason I started the web site. So the upgrade was put on hold.

Then one day I found Gallery.

This was a PHP script that would handle all of my photoalbum needs. The only problem was that I knew nothing about PHP. I mean nothing. I could not even figure how to unpack the tar.gz file. Another problem was that I had decided to edit my new site with Golive and I could not figure how to do anything with that either.

After several months of heartache and headache, I was able to put a couple of things together and the new CarlAndTracey.com site was unveiled.

I got the Gallery Featured Photo script working and got Nedstat going. If you look in the upper right, I even figred how to have a link send me an IM (useless and took entirely too long to figure out).

Truth be told, I pretty much hacked up someone else's site for my last site and so I wanted to pump out one of my own with a little more cutom look. So, along with more than one web tutorial, I dusted off my photoshop and got to work. I was really happy with this layout. I though it looked really cool. The problem was that it was a little narrow and did not stretch well when faced with a wide gallery submenu or large picture.

But it stayed this way for a long time.

I finally changed the site again to the layout you see today. I wanted a wider layout and a more traditional look. I also wanted to switch to CSS from table dominated layout. There are still some tables here in the site but the main structure is css. This includes going from graphic controlled navigation to css navigation. I am really pleased.

The main problems I had in making this switch was two-fold. The first was that Golive did not like the css layout. It kept dropping </div> tags everywhere. This was not helpful. So I had to finally make the switch to Dreamweaver. Since Adobe bought out Macromedia I figured this was coming anyway. But I could not get Dreamweaver to use templates properly. This is a big pain since I have to update every page that needs to be changed. But I did it.

(update April 2006)And so another chapter. I changed everything no the latest site to make all changes dynamic. Every page only contained the content. When a page was accessed, it called the header, navbar and footer. This allowed changes to the entire site with the change of only one to three pages. This made me quite happy. But good things can't last forever. I wwent back to the future in a sense with the latest version of the site. I used tables in the main layout and css for styling the site. Some say this is a cop out but I really do not care. I think that Dreamweaver may even play nice with templates in its latest version so there you go!