Day: June 24, 2008

Gallery 2 and WPG

Gallery is a free, open source photo sharing web application which is a bit like saying a Ferrari Enzo is just another car. Gallery 2 pretty much lets the user set up a photo gallery from as simple as a couple pages of photos to as complex as dozen of albums and sub-albums, with dynamic keyword-based albums and other features thrown in for fun. It has options for password protected albums, RSS feeds, a commenting system, etc. There’s no feature I can think of that I really wanted that wasn’t already part of the core system or easily added on through a plugin.

Like WordPress, Gallery benefits from an active community of plugin developers who have extended the features of the software. One of the nicer features for WordPress users is the WPG2 plugin which integrates Gallery with WordPress so, for example, my Gallery pages use the same theme as my WordPress blog and appear to be simply pages under WordPress. Additionally, individual images can be easily inserted into WordPress pages or posts using a special WPG tag.

If you’ve got your own server, Gallery is a cheap and highly flexible way to host a medium to large photo site.

Jungle Disk 2.0

Jungle Disk recently announced its 2.0 release. If you’re looking for a secure, online data backup system, this is hands down the best consumer-level one. It is also the best for price/reliability, since it uses Amazon’s S3 storage which is 10 cents/gigabyte for data uploads and 15 cents/gigabyte/month for storage. There are cheaper options out there that will promise unlimited data backup for very small monthly charges, but their reliability and long-term fortunes are, at best, suspect.

With Amazon and Jungle Disk, the only thing limiting online backups is the anemic upstream bandwidth that most of us have (I feel lucky to have 2 megabits/second up). Even at 2mb/s, that’s a long time to upload the hundreds of gigs of data I need to back up.

Yahoo! Raising Domain Name Renewal Costs?

Web Worker Daily is the latest to report that Yahoo! is going to increase domain renewal costs to $34.95/year effective July 1. Can you blame them? They need to raise revenue somewhere. If I were Jerry Yang, I’d start charging $20/Yahoo! search. That should bring in revenue, and give the DIY Yahoo! Resignation Letter generator more material.