Year: 2010

WordPress galleries – an underutilized gold mine

I think that one of the most underutilized features of WordPress is the image gallery.  It was added recently and all the proper announcements were made, but I still see too many WordPress based sites working too hard to display a bunch of images in post or page.  If you never made an image gallery in WordPress, I suggest you try it.  Maybe you are spending too much time solving your problem using something else.

Trying out the gallery is very easy.  Just attach more than one image to the post, without actually inserting those images to the post, and you’ll see a gallery tab in your media popup.  It will look something like that:

You can  manage the images in the gallery, their order, sorting direction, the size of the thumbnails, number of columns in the gallery, cropping options, and more.  It’s a very balanced compromise between flexibility (make it look the way you want) and ease of use (no coding required – all in mouse clicks).

More so, you can use some shortcuts in your blog posts and pages to control the appearance of the gallery.  There is a Codex manual which documents all options and provides examples of use.  Awesome, isn’t it?

To all those who complain of Linux being hard to use

Being a Linux-only user for many years now, I don’t even keep up on the never-ending flame wars of Windows vs. Linux.  But sometimes a sentence or a paragraph would catch my attention in a totally unrelated article.  Here is something that I think a lot of people will find surprising:

There’s an awful lot to be said about the simplicity and usefulness of installing software on Mac or Linux. In the latter case, you simply drag a file to your Applications folder, and you’re done. Linux package managers do all the heavy lifting without any user intervention. If a Linux program requires additional libraries, the package manager finds them and installs them automatically. In both instances, I can install new applications in a fraction of the time it takes to install something on Windows.

Read the rest of the article to put the quote in context.  Read comments to the Slashdot story too.

Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull

Everyone and their brother wrote about the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull in the last couple of weeks or so.  I read everything from personal complaints of delayed flights, to jokes, to serious analysis of the impact on the economy, and so on and so forth.  And nothing seemed to touch my nerve.  Yes, it’s Mother Nature and she has a way of showing to us how small, insignificant, and fragile we are.  But that’s nothing new, not to me at least.  But what did impress me out of my skin was The Big Picture blog post, filled, as usual, with stunning images.  I think unless you see them all, you haven’t really learned anything about this volcano.