Crooks.net

For my Easter birthday we got a 9 1/2 pound cake from Costco. Chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate mousse inside. Yummy. It’s a cake for icing lovers, for sure.

Calvin has been having fun lately with the iLife iWeb application. Check it out at http://calvin.crooks.net.

Pretty obvious what his current fascination is….

The Crooks.net domain turns 10 years old today. We would be celebrating Crooks.com turning 11 years old today instead, but 11 years ago I wasn’t smart enough to realize that dropping $70 on a domain name was worth it.

It’s come a long way, starting out as pure junk managed with Microsoft Frontpage, moving eventually to its current form, junk managed by Drupal.

Here’s hoping for 10 more years of boring content that 2 or 3 family members can sometimes take a look at.

I’ve decided to return to Smugmug for managing the Oakhill pictures. Smugmug is a wonderful commercial web site whose sole purpose is to host pictures.

The Oakhill pictures are now at pictures.SnapsAndShots.com/Oakhill.

Announcements of new Oakhill pictures will still be emailed to the New Oakhill Pictures announcement list (sign up at the bottom of any Oakhill picture page), and also posted at www.SnapsAndShots.com.

So why spend more money and use Smugmug instead of what I have now?

• The people running Smugmug have nothing to do but sit around all day working on all aspects of managing pictures. I’m lucky if I get 5 minutes a day. That means that you will have a much more enjoyable experience viewing the pictures at Smugmug.
• Lots of parents want to download my pictures. For a variety of reasons I’ve always had trouble providing that well. I can easily set up Smugmug to allow downloading pictures where I choose to allow it. All Oakhill pictures can be downloaded at no cost for personal use. Click on the Show me how to download a picture link at the top right of any Oakhill picture page for instructions.
• Lots of parents want to get prints of my pictures. I’ve never been able to offer that on my own. Smugmug offers an amazing array of beautiful prints in many different sizes, as well as things like mugs, aprons, playing cards, t-shirts, and many other items. If you buy merchandise, I will receive a tiny amount of money from each purchase. I want to be upfront about that. It’s not much and you can always avoid it by downloading the pictures for free and printing them elsewhere. The Smugmug yearly fee at my level of use is not insignificant, and my hope is that maybe I’ll make enough money this way to cover it. So if you like the pictures and want to help out, just buy some prints or mugs or something. :-)

I have over 4,000 Oakhill pictures dating back to 2004, so at the very least you can have fun looking and reminiscing. I have a baby girl on the way this fall, but I will still do my best to take plenty more pictures during the next school year for the yearbook and for the parents.

Please help me spread the word about these pictures. There’s no link on the Oakhill web site so I think there are probably parents who have no idea they’re available.

Enjoy.

Calvin’s pictures from his Washington, D.C. field trip are now online. My mom reminded me that I still hadn’t pushed them up…. I’ll try to convince Calvin to add descriptions to some of them.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The final Cerner field trip in this group, this time with Hickman Mills kids.

Another Cerner field trip with the Lee’s Summit kids.

Next up for a Cerner field trip are the kids from Raytown North & South.

This summer Cerner is hosting a few field trips for kids in summer school camps. First up were the middle school girls from Harrisonville.

All the picture galleries on Crooks.net have been overhauled. I totally changed the way they are handled internally, with the hope that the presentation and ease of viewing will be much better.

Some of the nice features now available:

• The thumbnails for a set of pictures are all displayed on one page for easy viewing. No more paging through thumbnails!
• Clicking directly on a thumbnail gives you a fancy popup view of the picture, sized to fit your browser window. No more scrolling to see a full picture!
• When you’re looking at a picture in that fancy popup view, you can either use your mouse to click the forward/back buttons, or you can use your keyboard’s arrow keys to move forward/back. Now you can quickly quickly flip through a large view of every picture in a gallery!
• Alternatively, if you don’t like the fancy popup view, you can click on the title under a thumbnail to open a new page with a large view of the picture. On that page you can also read a caption there is one, click forward/back to flip to another picture, and post a comment if you’re so inclined. This is also the spot where registered users can download a full-size copy of the picture.

There will undoubtedly be a few glitches here and there as I finalize things, but it seems to be working pretty smoothly. Send me email at if you have any comments or see any problems.

The pictures are found at the same links as before: http://www.crooks.net/media or http://pictures.crooks.net to go to the list of all galleries, and http://oakhill.crooks.net to go directly to the Oakhill pictures.