markpetrowsky.com

It’s been quiet around these parts with little action on the ol’ blog the last few months. Why you say? Well in the past few I left my job at G2 Switchworks (who was recently acquired by Travel Port) and took a new position with Duo Consulting. I guess all that shuffling around and getting up to speed in a new environment caused me to neglect things on the site. So far my job switch has been great and I’m really impressed with caliber of people I’m working with. Oh, and now I’ll have a second home online to wax-poetic about design and development.

I was looking for a way to display a small sampling of recent photos on the site. Ideally I wanted a solution that tied in with Flickr so I could manage my photos from one location. While researching I ran across a WordPress plugin called FAlbum from the people at RandomByte.org.

The plug-in, as I was thrilled to find, pulls your photos from flickr and displays photos, albums, and tag sets right in your WordPress blog. Considering I was looking for a solution much simpler I was pleasantly surprised at how robust FAlbum was! The setup was pretty painless. I’m still in the midst of tweaking some of the presentation but so far everything seems pretty customizable. The only small snafu I ran into was a few database errors on initial setup. I’m running WordPress 2.3.1 and after installing the plugin (version 0.7) I kept getting a caching error that read “WordPress database error: falbum_cache’ doesn’t exist] DELETE from wpfalbum_cache…

I read on the RandomByte wiki that if you manually create the falbum_cache table it would take care of the database errors issue and sure enough it did. It looks like they just released a 0.7.1 update to FAlbum. Taking a quick glance it looks like they might have fixed the database cache issue.

I told myself months back, heck maybe even years ago, that I’d get my personal website up and running in a somewhat respectable state. Well many weeks and beer cans later, as the story goes, the promise I made myself was not fulfilled.

Although there have been many variations of markpetrowsky.com, most of them usually consisting of random directories and splash pages for freelance projects I did in my off hours, I’ve never had a nice clean user friendly site that communicated with the outside world just who I am and what I do as a professional. As many designers may know, I personally have always found it extremely difficult designing anything for myself. In fact maybe it’s the toughest job a designer may ever have to deal with. You know all those questions that get turned on yourself, instead of the client (OK a little overboard I know, but maybe I’m just being dramatic to compensate for my procrastination for all this time). God knows how many wasted nights at the drafting table and how many abandoned mockups, html, and css files are crumpled up in my local trash bin. Well, it may be be a bit too early to jump and cheer just yet, but I’ve got a skeleton up with the help of my trusty friend Wordpress and hopefully over the next month or two things will become a bit tidy around here.