BrandonMoeller.com

Well, it’s been on my to-do list for a while: Check out Jalbum, and see if I like it better than Plogger, and consider using it as my default way to show off my photos.

Well, I don’t and I won’t. Not yet, anyway.

A flying dragon dude at the
Texas Renaissance Festival 2007.

First off, you have to install a new program, and then you edit and upload the photos from there. It takes your photos from one folder, and builds a gallery in another one: Default set for My Documents folder. So you end up with a big folder that controls the style of the album, the original photos, newly made thumbnails, and all the info about the edits you make to the photos.

Then you have to upload this huge folder (About 265 files for this gallery I created that had 35 images) … maybe it will get faster when I upload more albums later? Geez, I hope so.

The Jalbum registration process was easy enough, but it seemed to take me longer to edit my photos with the clumsy built-in editor once I started building my photo gallery.

And when I was done with it all, I didn’t like ANY of the built in “skins,” so I had to go and download a better one, called FotoPlayer. That one is flash based and super nifty.

But, some of my thumbnails were altered by another skin and it’s not so obvious how to change that now.

All in all, it took a few hours to do 30 something photos from last year’s outing to the Renaissance Festival. A big time kill: When using the program to upload to my new Jalbum profile, I kept getting an error message. So I gave up, and - apparently successfully - tried two different ways to upload it to my own Web site.

But, anyway, check it out.

First, here’s the version I directly uploaded to my Web site through my FTP program:

http://www.brandonmoeller.com/Jalbum/071110%20Ren%20Fest/album/index.html

And here’s the version that was uploaded to my Web site through the Jalbum program:

http://brandonmoeller.com/071110%20Ren%20Fest/

I think they’re the same. But after all this, man I’m tired. I’ll try to dig deeper into Jalbum later.

Welcome to the official blog of Brandon Moeller. Right now, this blog is being used to demonstrate the new WordPress theme I created for Barefoot Drums of Houston … I will be installing this theme + WordPress on the organization’s server soon and this theme is activated so the organization can see what its future blog will look like once their new design is installed on their server.

Click to return to BrandonMoeller.com.

Click to return to the Barefoot Drums of Houston working redesign.

I have begun to play around with FriendFeed and have added it to my Facebook page and most recently to this blog. Does anybody else use FriendFeed? I like how it allows all of my content that I place elsewhere to be placed within it, but I’m still not sure if this is good or bad. For instance, some content is really only for some eyes. If you’re my friend, and you’re internet savvy, then you’re likely connected to me on one of these social media networks. But FriendFeed allows me to broadcast my activity on these sites here on other pages … and I’m not sure if that’s what I want. Hmmm….

Recently, I accepted a Web Developer I position at the Department of Instructional Design and Technology at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston.

It’s an exciting position that I am very much looking forward to. I start on Oct. 27.

For me, it’s kind of like a homecoming, since I graduated from the University five years ago after working for The Daily Cougar for most of that time and for the Journal of Classroom Interaction in the College of Education for part of that time.

Feel free to wish me luck on my new endeavors here, and to everyone I’ve met and had the pleasure of working along side at The Houston Chronicle: Thank You.  Keep in touch.