The inner-workings for a clever little plugin named Photon that enables photo export from iPhoto directly to Movable Type and other publishing tools (to create photo galleries like this) are now available for anyone to explore and build upon. Jonathan Younger, who originally created the plugin, doesn’t have enough time to dedicate for updating and expanding the plugin. So he generously released Photon’s source code under the GNU Lesser General Public License so that others could continue evolving it.

So if you lament that you can’t use Photon because you’re not on a Mac, or you don’t use iPhoto, or for whatever reason, and you’re good with application/plugin development, here’s your chance to grab Photon’s source code, morph it, add to it, expand its function or supported formats, or whatever you want to contribute.

Since describing and pointing to my photo galleries back in January this year, I received lots of positive feedback, requests for the templates, and questions asking when they’d be available. Since the galleries are a personal, non-paying hobby, they took a back seat to other more pressing projects. In my spare time for the past several months, I made lots of additions and tweaks to the gallery pages. Meanwhile, I also started generalizing the templates, keeping in mind that I might eventually make them publicly available some day. That day has finally come. continued

Update: Good news! The templates I reference below are finally available for download by anyone to use. See the followup post: Photo Gallery Templates available.

Over the past two months, I’ve been lying low when it comes to the writing on this site. I’ve responded to very few emails, and fallen severely behind on the blog and news reading with which I normally keep myself updated. In the past two months, I’ve opened up my feed reader exactly two times. Both times, I quickly got disgusted with how many unread items popped up before my eyes. Too much to keep up with, especially after getting back from a month-long tour of Down Under.

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A few times while traveling around Australia, either I’ve noticed a slight glitch on a site (Stopdesign, or a client site), or someone else points out a bug or problem with some file on a site I have control over. I left my laptop and cables, etc. in Sydney to shed the weight, so I haven’t had access to the tools I normally have at my disposal. Any of these changes are usually quick edits or corrections of previous oversights, assuming I have any type of net connection and my normal toolset with me. However, I’ve been missing some sort of text editor that can work on files remotely via S/FTP. continued

Welcome to Phase II of the new Stopdesign. Baby’s got new shoes. As if I weren’t busy enough as it is with current projects. For some reason, two weeks ago, I decided to start a full-blown redesign by yanking my own style sheets, encouraging me to do something sooner, rather than wait for a lighter workload. For those that count, this would be design version 3 (not counting the short-lived lightly styled version this one replaces). continued

There’s a wholelotta recent buzz around using Movable Type for more than just weblogs. In addition to the comments and tips Jay Allen has been providing here on Adaptive Path’s MT use, Matt Haughey gives us some great insight into how he takes advantage of MT’s flexibility in Beyond the Blog. Just before reading Matt’s piece, I followed Jay’s pointer to Brad Choate’s Doing your whole site with MT. Both of these are interesting reads given my recent foray into the use of MT to power portions of this site. continued

As I was starting a follow-up entry on the Adaptive Path redesign, Jay Allen posted a comment under Wednesday’s entry in response to another reader’s question. In an earlier comment, Leonya wrote:

It would also be great to see some technical details about the programming side — MT plugins used, tricks, etc. I’m doing development with MT, so such details can be very helpful.

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It seems I’ve not had many chances to toot my own horn lately with announcements of new designs or projects with which Stopdesign has been involved. When a print design is complete, the wait for a finished product merely depends on the printer’s schedule or a publisher’s distribution cycle. Some design projects for the web are application-based, and get tucked behind a login screen preventing access to the majority of the new design. Other projects get held up in lengthy development cycles and iterative improvements which delay public release. But once a new site design has been thoroughly produced, staged, analyzed, tested, and deemed ready for the world, making it available is almost as simple and instant as flipping a switch. continued

The conversion to Movable Type is going smoothly so far. I’m continually amazed at the application’s flexibility, power, and speed. The ability to expand its functionality with the plugin architecture gives MT endless possibilities for small-scale sites like this one. continued

I’ve been talking about it for what seems like forever. Over the past week, I finally started to make the jump. If you’re reading this entry, the DNS changes have propagated to your neck of the woods, which means you’re getting the new version of this site. The title of this post is a phrase former colleagues at Lycos used when we were redesigning a site or changing the backend while the site continued to function live on a public server. A task which seemed impossible, but had to be done. continued