Colemania.com

I’ve made a lot of changes to colemania.com over the last few days and they don’t all look right in all browsers. Well, actually, they all look great in Firefox and some of them don’t look so hot in IE. Bear with me.

I added some photos from January and February to the photo gallery. I used the free Picasa 2 photo software for cropping and resizing. Here’s what I think of it…

Picasa is *very good* for managing photos. It can find and index photos on your hard drive quickly and makes browsing thru them fast and painless. It also has (at least) two useful ways of sorting my pictures as I browse them.

First, it has a “star” button that you can press while viewing any photo. That’s it. Tell Picasa to show you all of the photos you starred and it will. Second, you can create ‘labels’ and assign them to photos. Then you can choose to view only those photos with a given label.

Picasa also makes it easy to crop and correct photos. It’s tools (crop, red-eye reduction, contrast/color auto-correct) are easy to use and give pretty good results. The best part, though, is that none of the original image files are changed as you edit them. From within Picasa it *seems as though* you’re changing the image file, but Picasa is doing some sleight of hand: your original file is unchanged, only inside Picasa does it appear to have been edited.

The only really obtuse thing I found was that I couldn’t resize images easily. I had to tell Picasa that I wanted it to create a web page to display some images and then it would let me select what size they should appear on the web page and write out the new files and the HTML. I’d rather just be able to write out the image files without the HTML.

I’ve added some late-October photos — including Halloween photos — to the photo gallery here.

I’ve added some photos from October to the Image Gallery. They include shots of cute children and a trip to Camden Yard to see the Orioles.

I’ve very recently added both August and September albums to the Image Gallery. There are sub-albums within the September album that focus on our vacation trips to Eliok Farm, Rocky Gap, and the Baltimore Zoo.

I’ve moved all images over from the old CMS. Enjoy.