mybigadventures.com

The summer holiday has arrived after another long year, and what better time for a few website upgrades! When I first put the website together back in 2007, I created a map with markers making the path of our intended journey around Europe and had it linkefrom the homepage. I think I made it using one of the early versions of the Google Maps API, and it didn't take long for things to move on and the old map to become redundant. It's been over 10 years, but I started haviing a look at putting some geo-tagging functionality in for mapping out the places we've visited.

After a bit of tinkering I've now added geo-tagging for the albums and may look at adding it to photos and blogs in the near future. I've tagged quite a few albums to try it out and everything seems to be working. You should now see a map on the homepage with markers for the places we've visited, and small maps in the sidebar for albums that have been tagged. If I get a chance, I'll tidy up the user-interface a bit and make it a little fancier with links to albums when you click the markers. Let me know if you find any bugs!   

Whilst Dani has been finishing her marking, I thought I'd add a bit more content to the site. During our American adventure in 2013, the site was down and so there was no blog content. When I redeveloped the site a couple of years ago, I uploaded the photo albums but was a bit disappointed there was no description of our trip that I could link. However, on each of our big adventures -  Europe, America and Japan, we have kept a journal, which we've later turned into a photo book. So today I added the journal entries to the site and linked them into the relevant albums. It's still a work in progress, but should be complete over the next day or so, then I might look to do the same with Europe and Japan. You can find all the new entries under July and August 2013, or by following the tag #America2013

I've had a bit more of a tinker with the website this weekend and am hoping I've spotted all the bugs. I've added a few more icons about the place including on the home page - which I'm not too sure about. I've also tweaked the blog page to make a bit more of the tagging feature I added at Christmas. The blog is starting to come together quite nicely now I think, with blog suggestions in the top right from the archives (right now I have Happy Easter from March 2008), and the new 'more like this' section I've just finished; this displays the tags used on the current page and a few images from albums or photo's that have the same tags. I've also added album tagging now to make linking whole albums in rather than having to go through each picture.

I've also revamped the albums homepage a little, it now has a 'featured album' section which picks one of the albums from the archive and displays a preview of images along with the cover. I think it perhaps needs a bit more work but it's almost there. Finally I've got around to implementing date stamps on albums. It's one of those things that I really should have added at the beginning, but I didn't quite realise how useful it might be until just recently. When I upload old alabums, they currently display at the top as most recently added. I think I'd like this to be configurable so I can choose date order or the order in which they were added. It also means that I can link images to months and seasons etc, the possibilities are endless! OK that's probably enough of a ramble, I hope you enjoy the new features, let me know if you spot any bugs!

************ UPDATE **************

Albums are now displayed in date order including the album categories on the albums home page. I've also had a tidy and removed a few albums that I wasn't too keen on anymore. They're not totally deleted yet and may get a second chance in the members section but I guess you'll just have to wait and see.

I've been working a little more on restyling the image gallery. I decided the square thumbnails were looking a little dated so wanted to move towards something that looked a bit more like the tiled effect you may have seen on sites like flickr and pintrest. I had a look first of all to see if there were any pure CSS solutions but as yet there doesn't seem to be support for floating the images together so that they fit without gaps.

Old Layout

 New Layout

After a little research it seemed that JavaScript was the way forward as it can be used to calulate a suitable arrangment when all the images have loaded (if you're interested, this is the library I'm using though it looks a bit better on their site at the moment - miromannino.github.io/Justified-Gallery/). Right now that means a bit of a delay waiting for all the thumbnails to finish loading before they can be displayed. This can feel a bit slower than images displaying as soon as they have loaded, which is what currently happens when moving between albums. I'm hoping to optimise this further over the course of the next two weeks, but for now I've added a little loading animation to keep you interested whilst you wait for the pictures to load.

Let me know in the comments if you experience any particularly long delays on any of the albums. Thanks. 

Just been fiddling a little more with the CSS to update the responsiveness of the website. Responsiveness is now a bit of a buzz word with websites and refers to its ability to resize dynamically to best fit all screen sizes. Having worked on the mobile site recently, I thought I should giive the desktop version a bit of a tweak. It's still a work in progress but now should make more of the available space on large screens. I've given it a quick test and everything seems to be resizing as it should. The updated blog images now look a little larger and a few more albums fit across the screen on the album page. If the site only just fitted on your screen previously you won't see too much difference, apart from the currently lack of image banner. For now I've reduced it down to a thin grey strip rather than the image slideshow that was in place before. I think I may change it back to an image but need to sort out a better resolution image as the current ones are too small for the now larger website.

Let me know if you experience any problems.

I've just been tweaking the site a little more as I was experiencing a few issues with load speeds on photos. I've made a couple of changes that will hopefully speed things up. To start with I've added a new optimised image size. Essentially when you first visit one of the pages, a bit of code grabs your screen size and saves it into the session. Assuming I've captured your screensize, each time you load a full size image, nested in a blog entry or by clicking album image, the website will decide if it's worth while loading the larger image or if it can show you a reduced resolution. So it basically now means for each album image I store at least 3 copies of it, one full size, one reduced resolution (1000px max dimension) and one higher resolution (2000px max dimensions). If you're viewing album thumbnails for example, the site will serve up the thumbnail images which speeds up download for you. If you're looking at a large image in an album, that will either be the 1000px or 2000px image - depending on your screen resolution.

The image below should resize dynamically depending on your resolution. If you right click it and open image in a new tab, the majority of you should see a 1000px wide image, however, if you're running a resolution higher than 1500px wide you should get the much larger, slower to download 2000px image.

I've also tweaked the image loading on the PHP side of things, I was previously loading images into memory using imagecreatefromjpeg in PHP. It turns out that this was a bit of a hog on memory for the site and also led to a much slower load for end users. It now does a simple redirect if possible to static files, which again should improve things.

Hopefully you'll see a difference when browsing though the site. Let me know in the comments if you experience any load issues. 

I've managed to find a bit of time over Christmas to add a few new features to the website. The changes aren't huge so you can be fogiven if you haven't quite noticed. There are a few improvements to make posting content a little easier on my side and a couple of new features for my site visitors to enjoy.

Blog Photos

I've tweaked the photo setting for blog images so that those of you with larger monitors can enjoy higher resolution pictures.

Mobile Website

I've also spent a bit of time updating the CSS for mobile users, so if you're visiting the site on a small screen you hopefully will get the mobile layout which is a little easier to navigate and read.

Blog Insights

I've added some previous blog insights to the main blog page - they show up in the right hand side of the page and show blog summaries from the same month in other years. Right now I'm getting a couple of blogs from 10 years ago all the way back in 2006 when this blog was first getting off the ground. 

Tags

This is probably my favourite new feature but it still requires some work. The feature has been around on other CMS platforms for years and bascially provides another way to link data together. Right now it only exists on blogs - have a look at the bottom of a few and you might see tags like #Christmas and #DaysOut. Clicking the links takes you to all the content with the same tag. A few of my favourites are from our big adventures:

#Japan2016
#Italy2015
#Europe2007

Let me know how you get on!

I've just been making a few tweaks before we take our trip and decided to add in a new feature - album comments. It seemed like a big job until a few recent changes that made it all possible so there you go. You can now add comments to blogs, albums and individual photos. The new comment link appears only on albums containing photo's and can be found under the album cover and summary which appears on the right of the screen. 

I've also added a few icons to give the site a bit of a facelift. If anyone's interested I'm using the fontawesome font set to generate the icons. Its really straightforward to use and there's lots of icons to choose from. I've got quite addicted and added them all over the place, many of which only Dani and I will ever see! That's all for now, let me know if you have any issues.

After finally adding the forgotten details page, it got me thinking about what else to improve. I started to look at the social networking side of things. There's been a few facebook sharing links around on the site for a while, but there's always been issues with them displaying correctly. Facebook uses a system called open graph which provides a bit of structure to the content you share. The open graph system relies on meta data on the website - for those that don't know, meta data is basically data about data. The meta data in this case, provides additional information about the thing you are trying to share. So after a bit of an update and lots of checking on the facebook scraper, blog posts and photo albums can now be shared from the site, and should provide some contextual information related to where you are clicking the share button. It's certainly not perfect right now, but it works! To complement this wonderful new sharing functionality I've also added some fancy new buttons with a little help from sharingbuttons.io/. That's about all for now, in the mean time, go mad, share something!

This is only a short one just to tell you about a bit of new functionality. After a couple of people had trouble logging back in, I thought it was about time I added the forgotten details page and associated functionality. Along the way I also reinstated site based emails. So if you're already a member and are having any trouble getting logged in for that exclusive website content, head over to the forgotten details page, tap in your email address and minutes later you should get a new email with some temporary login credentials - happy days! Whilst you're back, why not add a profile picture and add some comments. 

Enjoy!

Just a short one, for all those visitors that have been trying desperately to add comments to photos. I didn't realise it was broken, but nevertheless it is now fixed. So comment away!

A couple of weeks ago I gave the existing hand coded lightbox an overhaul and replaced it with the much better looking JQuery FancyBox 2 plugin fancyapps.com/fancybox/. It was very quick and easy to set up and was soon working. It wasn't long however before I started tinkering. Previously I had a comments section in place, and it wasn't clear how to make this work with the new fancybox set up. I had a look around on the Internet and found a few implementations that customised the title section for each photo, but this wasn't quite what I wanted. In the end I decided on a custom comments box to the right of the screen (You can see this in action by browsing any of the photo albums).

The first job was actually getting a box on the right side of the screen. This turned out to be a little more challenging than first anticipated. In the end, it was achieved by specifiying a margin in the fancybox options, and then using the aftershow callback to populate the comments. I've included the code below for those that are interested:

$('.fancybox').attr('rel', 'gallery').fancybox({
    margin: [20, 300, 20, 20],

    afterShow: function(){
        var commentsContainer = "<div class='lightboxcomments'></div>";
        if ($(document).find('.lightboxcomments').length == 0) {
            $('.fancybox-overlay').append(commentsContainer);
        }

        //CODE GOES HERE TO POPULATE COMMENTS
     }
});

Each time it loads a new photo, it checks to see if the comment div exists and if not, it adds it to the DOM. It then uses a JQuery getJSON() call with a callback to populate the comments when loaded from the database.   I'm sure there are probably better / more efficient ways to achieve the same thing, but it does the job well for now. 

So a couple of years ago we went on a big summer holiday to America. Having been teachers for a while we thought it was about time we made good use of the holiday before they eventually take it off us, and so we headed off to America for 4 and a half weeks. Unfortunately the website was not up and running at that time, and so we weren't able to document the trip on here. Now that everything is running fairly smoothly and to celebrate a brand new shiny gallery, I've added some more photos. There's quite a few, organised into the different cities that we visited during the trip to please have a browse. Sign up, leave some comments and let us know what you think. 

For those interested in the new gallery - its powered using the FanscyBox 2 JQuery library. It was pretty straight forward to add in, although there was a fair bit of head scratching involved to get the photo comments back up alongside images. I'm pretty happy with the results though. Enjoy the photos

So this is just a quick update to tell you all that the sign up page is now up and running so you can create an account and become a member of mybigadventures. Not everything is quite there yet so please bare with me whilst I iron out the remaining bugs. You will however be able to setup a new account, complete with profile image that you can change until you find one you're happy with. Please register using your email and choose a name (this will be displayed whenever you add a comment so keep them sensible please. 

Please feel free to go through and add a few comments to some of the photos and blogs and let us know what you like and would like to see more of. Enjoy!

Now that the photo functionality is up and running I thought it was about time I added some of our photos. For now I've added a selection from 2012, 2013 and 2014 to join the recent additions to 2015. 

Whilst I'm talking about updates, I've also been working on the member side of the website as I want to re-enable the signup page so that you can comment on photos and blogs in addition to subscribing to updates. I've also added another photo to the banner slideshow of a Canada Goose taken at Roundhay Park in Leeds.

Hopefully there should be some progress over the next week or so. Until then enjoy the new photos.

Just thought I'd add a quick note to wish everybody a happy bank holiday weekend. It's a shame the weather is cooler again after the past few weekes of warm sunshine but I'm sure we'll still make the most of it. Headed out last night to see the latest Avengers film - Age of Ultron. We both enjoyed it and were back quite late last night so had a slightly later morning. Not sure what to do with the rest of the day at the moment - it looks like the sun is having a go at coming out so might just go for a bit of a wander.

Added a couple more updates to the site although sadly nothing visible. I updated security and error handling (yawn) which hopefully should just make the site a bit more robust. Also added some inheritance to the code controlling much of the processing on the website which again just makes things a bit more secure and easier to maintain. Finally just updated the blog front page so that it will always load the most recent blogs even if I havent added anything in the last month.

I still need to finish off the album code so that I can finally add pictures again, although I haven't decided how I want this to work. I currently store images in a database rather than as files on the server and can't decide if I want to change this. I also haven't enabled any user accounts, so sadly unless you were a member way back when and can remember your login details, you won't be able to access anything apart from the public blogs and images. I suggest looking back at the 2007 blogs, which is where most of the content is. 

Maybe in the summer I'll get some of my raspberry pi content together and start putting that up here . . there's quite a few projects to write about from scalextric lap timers and control, to robot arms, IR tranceivers and autonomous video streaming tanks and cars.

Until then enjoy . . 

Well I thought it was about time I made a few improvements to the website aesthetic as its looked a bit stuck in the past for quite sometime - some might argue, since its inception. The black is gone, as has most other colour replaced by a lot of white open spaces. Hopefully it looks a little cleaner and still remains easy to navigate. There have also been a few updates in the background to help things run more smoothly and a few more features from the old site have been converted to now work in PHP. There's still a lot to do but it is certainly the most significant update the website has had in a good few years.

In other news we went to Kew garden yesterday. The weather was nice and sunny if a little cool in the breeze at times. Fiona came to meet us so we had a good catch-up. Everywhere is starting to look a lot more green and colourful now that the flowers are starting to come out and it's beginning to feel quite summery. Here's hoping the weather continues - I'm pretty sure I saw an article last week promising a three month heat wave, so here's hoping!

It's been a busy time at school on the lead up to Easter getting all the work finished including over the break itself. Both Dani and I were in with year 11, 12 and 13 students for revision and coursework completion sessions. Now that we're back after the break, we're entering the exam season at school. A lot of deadlines are looming for entry of coursework marks and it's not long before year 11 are sitting their first exams.

With the summer getting closer we've started to think about the break and what we might get up to. We're not sure yet but have started to go back through the journal we kept on our Europe trip to give us some ideas, so I guess we shall see.

Hopefully I should get a few more updates on before the summer. There's still a lot of the album functionality that doesn't work from an admin perspective. I can't upload new photos to the site yet. Keep checking back though and feel free to look though the archives where most of the content currently resides. 

Who would have thought it, just 3 short years (to the day) after the last update and we're back online. All that was required was a total re-write from Java to PHP. Simple! I've added a few updates that make things work a little better along the way. Now you can see what albums the random images on the front page belong to, and even more interesting for us - see what the random comments link to. I think that's all for now folks! Rock and Roll!

Well perhaps it is a little more than a week, but on Thursday afternoon next week it will finally be the Easter holidays! It has certainly felt like a long term not helped I think that I started back after Christmas a week before Dani and now she is finishing for Easter a week earlier than me! I'm sure it all works out to be the same number of days in the end though.

Hello again, just a quick one today to let you know I've been busy uploading some more pictures. You can now find a few of our London photos online. Enjoy! 

Wow!!

Its been way too long since I last wrote something here and thought already a month into 2009 it was time I put in an update. So I have no idea how long since my last post, and although I could find out, that would require looking and then I'd probably lose interest and never write this update at all.

So since the last update I've moved to Leeds and become a fully fledged ICT teacher at a nice school close to where I live. School is going well, and seems to be racing by. I'm already half way through my first year with several parents evenings down and numerous reports written. After christmas I took over a year 8 form group which is going pretty well, they're a noisy bunch but a pretty nice group and I've picked up their names in record time. Learning names was always a bit of a weak point but I think I've got them all now with the exception of a couple of technology groups that I teach (they change every term so its another 80 or so names I've had to learn since christmas.

Dani is getting on well on her course - she's doing her teacher training this year so is having a pretty busy year with essays, planning, marking and learning how to manage a classroom. She just completed her first placement and is having a fairly quiet week this week before starting her second placement at school near Bradford.

Well thats an outline of whats going on with us. Other than that - snow!!! I had a second snow day in the same school year on Monday and celebrated with some snow man building. Unfortunately Tuesday was not qite such a success and to my disappointment we were one of the few schools in Leeds to open and I had to go in :-( - it wasn't too bad really but was a bit of a wasted day as only half the kids turned up so lessons were a bit hit and miss. I wonder how many years before the next snow day . . ?

Right thats a pretty short and fairly boring update, but thats going to be all you get for now. With any luck and a bit of effort I might manage another one this year!!! Hope everyone is well. Talk to you all soon.