Crooks.net

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….

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.

I know there’s likely nobody interested in this but me, but just in case….

If you want to use this site on something like a mobile phone where screen real estate and/or bandwidth is limited, you can now do that at http://mobile.crooks.net.

Crooks.net is built on open-source software called Drupal. I spent the weekend doing a pretty massive update to the latest released version, going from version 4.7.3 to 5.5. I also tinkered just a little with how things are laid out. You probably won’t notice much difference, and hopefully you won’t see any problems, but if anything seems odd please .

Use the Gallery search.

When you’re looking at a Gallery page, in the left-hand column you’ll see a text box that says “Search the Gallery”. Type search words in the box and press Enter. The Gallery will be searched against lots of different things, including keywords that I’ve added. I’m usually pretty good at adding some basic stuff like “McDonough, Ian”, so a search for “mcdonough” will find all the pictures with that keyword.

Here’s the new Crooks.net site, created using Drupal.

=== What’s the deal? ===

Finally, content access is based on who you are. People who don’t register can see only a few things. People who register can see more, particularly if I classify you as “family” after you register. (Family members can even have blogs on here if they want, along with book reviews and someday soon movie reviews. Whee.) You only need one username and password for everything, including pictures. Life is good.

But you do have to create a new account one last time for this new site. :-) Just click on “Create new account” up there in the top left.

There’s still a lot to do, but now at least everything has a place to come together. Please if you have any questions or find any problems with the new site!