shiobara.com is getting a make-over

It's been over two years since we've taken the photo album down on the family website, shiobara.com--June 2005, to be exact. It's time to give it some proper care and feeding. The first step was to replace the old site with Wordpress, which required some changes to AOLserver in order to get it to work right. I then created a new theme that's a little less cluttered and with colors that aren't quite as offensive. Here's a "before and after" set of screenshots:

(shiobara.com, before)

(shiobara.com, after)

I realize I have no graphic design ability--hell, I can't even coordinate colors when I dress myself. Someday, I'll find someone who's ridiculously talented and wants to do the graphic design for me to save me the embarassment of doing it myself. Until then, I'll just keep hacking away at it myself.

Now that the site is all in Wordpress, the next step is to clean up the photo album. I took it down back in 2005 and wanted to redo it, but never got around to it. So, recently, I've started working on a Media Gallery plugin for Wordpress that uses jQuery, jCarousel Lite and ThickBox. It's pretty slick, and once we've launched the photo album, I'll release the plugin as open source. If you'd like a sneak peak to beta test it, just ask.

Tags: family, photos, Wordpress, plugins, web design, jQuery