The Wachusett Reservoir is an ideal motif for wyatts.org. All of the children grew up a 1/2 mile from it, learned how to fish there, and have driven over the reservoir’s Route 12 bridge thousands of times. Carrie used to bike around the reservoir and it’s now become my favorite jogging route. Furthermore, the family-favorite Bob’s Hot Dogs is next to the Reservoir; a hot dog on a nice day there is simply unbeatable.

On the technical aspect of the theme, I just want to say two things. First, I’m so glad that Creative Commons exists and that the photographer, HeartLover1717, decided to make their work available. Secondly, this was my first use of style-sheet transparency … and I can’t believe the dumb-tricks you have to go through to get the text to be full-opacity over a transparent background. How has someone not fixed this yet?

I choose Smugmug for several reasons, including:

• Photos are stored securely with trustworthy Amazon S3 storage.
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth for one price.
• APIs to access photos, so I can add them into wyatts.org easily.
• I like their UI.
• Great features:
  • Uploads worked well.
  • AJAX-y features are simple but effective.
  • Album categories and sub-categories are great.
  • Tagging works for identifying individuals and events.
  • Geo-tagging is a nifty little feature I’ll have fun with.
  • Viewer comments with captcha spam protection.
  • Per-album privacy features.
• The site is customizable.  I haven’t done much yet, but I can change the logos and CSS. 

All of the above for $40/year (or $60 with the customization) seems like a bargain to me.   Some of the open-source software (Gallery2) has comparable features … but I’m happy paying to avoid the hassle of dealing with maintaining the software and hardware.  (Sidenote: If S3 integration with Gallery2 doesn’t already exist, it should.)

My next task is scanning in 12+ physical photo albums and 5+ shoeboxes of photos and negatives.  I’ve done some preliminary research and outsourcing this task sounds like the only feasible solution to hundreds of hours of manual scanning.  There are several companies vying for the opportunity to scan my photographs … will report back how they turn out. 

If you’ve got any suggestions for scanning services, please comment.

Off topic: it’s a fun exercise to imagine the product features I desire, go looking for such a product online, and then try to understand the differences between the desired vision and reality.  Sometimes reality is poorly designed, sometimes reality isn’t intended for my desires, and sometimes my vision — after reflection — was actually a lesser design.

My first priority is to organize the photo albums; over the coming days I’ll be transferring photos that Brad had on the old site to this one.  The second priority is to get accounts up and running for family members so that everyone can post here.  After that, I’ll try to make my custom no-frills theme a little more fun.

Well, thanks for reading and please subscribe to the RSS feed or come back to visit soon.