Initally experimented with a xoops camera picture site. Trouble is I wasn't very interested in the subject matter which was the kiss of death really as far as developing the site on a regular basis was concerned; so I parked it! Anyways I have knocked up 2 more sites that still deal with pictures but on subject matters I AM interested in - Cars and Motorbikes.

The motorbike site is, or was, just a site for pictures initially but I have developed it a bit more now. The motor car site I have created in the last few days and is perhaps a bit more interesting. Reason being in that I have carried over the experience of tweaking certain modules on the motorbike site to the new site. Also I have added more modules and carried out some tweaking of the code on them too. For instance the Gallery categories and albums are being controlled by new htacess redirects to make the user experience a lot easier and viewing smoother (I hope!).

Of interest maybe is the use of javascript to show the same upper block on all the modules - bar for the Videos (different block used) - on the first page fof the module only. Once inside the module on a different page the upper block module is removed. I prefer the site this way as users do not have to scroll when viewing pictures - forum posts etc. You can see the code I have used if you right click and view source. I will be reducing the amount of code soon now that I have the sites more or less he way I want it.

Both the sites have links to onsite youtube video searches within the Gallery. These links are auto-populated with the picture name and can be seen when viewing a picture.

Both sites need work - which they will be receiving in the forthcoming weeks.

Sitemap Creation using urls only!
The Motorbike site has been populated with over 300 pictures and is already indexed with Google - I have created an url sitemap creator within the admin on both sites. Also when a new upload occurs in the Gallery the sitemap is updated and google is pinged each time. Google seems to like this system and has practically indexed all of the urls of the motorbike site already - 326 out of 350!

The sitemap creation process produces a sitemap with urls only such as this:


The creation of the sitemap is extremely fast with no pressure put on the server each time.

Anyways the sites are these:

uk4wheelers.co.uk
(will be populated with loads of pictures soon!

and

freemotorcyclepictures.co.uk
will evertually be an identical site to uk4wheelers in looks and modules usage.

Both sites are running on a low powered home server with Ubuntu Server as the choice of server software. I have also created a new site for my experiences with Ubuntu as I have just bought a Dell Poweredge 2650 dual processor rack server to experiment on. I have yet to find time to carry out any work on the site yet though - soon...

Regards