Naveen’s Journal

I have been longing for a custom picture gallery for quite some time, to showcase my pictures, but did not want to go for a ready made solution like Coppermine or Gallery. Sure these are great products with endless features, but would not give me that MADE BY MYSELF feeling So I decided to tinker with Prototype and Script.aculo.us , to see if any good carousel is available which I can use as an image slider. I had previously used YUI Carousel by Bill Scott of Yahoo! but did not want to use it because it was way too heavy and hence slow to load initially. So I decided to take a look into jCarousel by Sorgalla which is based on the excellent jQuery Javascript framework. Both jQuery and jCarousel are very lightweight, feature packed, customisable, and contain almost all, if not all, the features of prototype and scriptaculous.

So after a little toying with the carousel and learning a few cool effects of jQuery , I made up http://gallery.naveeng.com . Right now it is very very basic and it’s development is still under progress. I will be adding a lot more features to it, which include:

• Multiple Albums
•  Admin Panel
• User Comments
• Ratings
• Last Added Pictures
• Random Pictures
• Tags

It may take a lot of time but one day all the above features (plus a lot more!) will be there for sure! The gallery has a lot of jQuery JS code, with the image details stored in XML format on the server. The server side scripting and image manipulation are done in Perl using the fantastic PerlMagick API of ImageMagick .