My baby daughter is beautiful. And I needed a way to show her off that was simple to use, easy for friends and family to navigate, and I wanted to keep the pictures on her blog. I didn’t want to host them on a file-sharing site because I wanted to keep the pictures out of the general web (with my daughter’s own blog, I’ve used the meta tags to tell the search engines not to spider it), and at the same time, I didn’t want to have to password-protect them from friends and family. And besides, I don’t want my visitors having to click away to an external site.
Anyway, there were already a few wordpress plugins that can help to host a gallery of images, but I had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted, and rather than trying to get someone else’s plugin to do what I wanted, I decided to write my own.
It’s worth pointing out that I didn’t originally expect this to be anything more than a useful tool for myself, but as I learned more about wordpress, I realized that I could easily turn my code into a full-fledged plugin that anyone could use.
Anyway, the plugin can now be downloaded by any and all through sourceforge.net. The link is http://sourceforge.net/projects/wp-album-plugin/
To see it in action, and check out pictures of me, my wife, my daughter, family, friends, and random people standing in the backgrounds, go to http://honorwolf.com. Click on any of the thumbnail links on the left-hand side of the screen.
This is probably the project I had the most fun working on. Even though nobody was paying me to write it, I had a great sense of satisfaction from taking my own vision and making something uniquely mine. And I’m always happy with the result every time I look at it. I create new albums from right inside the wordpress administration area, edit them there if necessary, and with hardly any effort at all I’ve managed to get my parents to stop complaining that they never see any pictures of their only granddaughter.
Creating a new album – step 1
Creating a new album – step 2
Selecting an album to edit
[UPDATE 9-27-07: I’ve made Album Viewer version 1.1 available on Sourceforge.net. This marks a significant improvement over the previous version. The plugin has now been “widgetized”, allowing people to share their albums in the sidebar more easily. In addition, it now automatically detects whether users have ImageMagick available on their web hosts, and will default to that for thumbnail creation if they do. Thus, for many users, they are no longer limited to only sharing photos under 1 million pixels.]
August 30 2007 | open-source | 2 Comments »
This project was based on a concept developed by Loral Langemeier. The idea is to help people pay off their debts by using a fixed amount of money every month as part of her “5-step debt-elimination plan”. Basically, you take all of your debts and order them in order of how many months they will require in order to be paid off. You pay off the shortest-life loan first, and then apply the payment from that loan to the next, so that both payments go toward it. As each loan gets paid off, you keep adding each payment together until the longest-life loan has the full amount from all the other loans going toward it. Basically, the more your monthly payments are on your loans, the faster you end up getting your loans paid off. (Loral herself explains the concept much better than me in her book “The Millionaire Maker“.)
So what I did was create a calculator that lets people type in each of their loans and what their payments are, and then it figures out how many months it will take to be debt free under the 5-step debt-elimination plan, showing the order the loans should be paid off, and after how many months each loan will be paid. Since Loral also recommends adding a “jump-start” amount to the first loan to be paid off, users can see the effect of applying that amount each month. To check it, go here: http://inside-success.com/EdocPublisher/calculator.php
The calculator was written in php, and was my first project to involve sorting multi-dimensional arrays.
August 25 2007 | php projects | 1 Comment »
Why am I starting a blog called “Hire Mason Wolf”? Well, I guess the simple answer is that I would like someone to hire me, and my name is Mason Wolf. Simple enough.
Currently I’m a web developer, and I really like doing it. In past careers I’ve been a teacher, a salesperson, a dishwasher, and a lab tech, plus numerous others. Each job had its pros and cons, but I’ve found that I enjoy the current one more than I liked any of the others. So, I’ve made it my goal to get really good at doing it. Hopefully future entries will show that I’m well on my way.
Having a blog will enable me to easily showcase my work and give prospective employers some sense of who I am before they ever contact me about an interview. Plus, by having a blog I can invite passersby to leave a comment if they happen to know something that might be useful to me. And just maybe I’ll be able to contribute something worthwhile for others to read.
I don’t expect this to be a particularly active blog. I’m going to spend the first few days putting together my portfolio and then after that making only infrequent updates as I happen to finish something new to showcase or when I get a new certification worth mentioning.
My fondest wish is to see this blog be short-lived. I want a new job, and once I’ve got one, I won’t have much use for this blog anymore.
August 20 2007 | Schmategories | Comments Off on Raison D'etre
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