I’ve moved all the photo pages except the individual bodybuilders to the new format. Another week at the outside and Coppermine will be going away. Yay!
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Category: Bodybuilding
Shots from the 2013 Gateway Classic, held April 27 in Lake City. are up on the site.
I was getting over some crud but I’m still happy with the shots.
Tony put on a wonderful show as usual and there was a very good calibre of competitors. Enjoy.
As you may recall I’ve been complaining bitterly about Coppermine (and, by extension, most photo catalogue/presentation software*). For my purposes, it is clunky, bloated, slow, death on search engine rankings, and terribly difficult to integrate with my sites theme (“Eos”, by SRS Solutions). Cross-browser support has been iffy at best, integrating the site navigation is a nightmare… It had to go. It’s ugly and takes way too much mousage to achieve the goal.
I said to myself, “Self, this is not as hard as we’re making it.” I created a static page by copying the output of a WordPress page, a little regression here, a little aggressive refactoring there, a LOT of jQuery everywhere, bake at 400 degrees for about a month, et voila! A very nice photo presentation page, lightweight, simple, FAST (by design), easy to maintain and expand, much-improved integration with the WordPress portions of the site, and if I’m not mistaken (ask me in a few weeks) my SER should be on the mend.
I can not say enough wonderful things about the various contributors to libraries such as jQuery, CodeIgniter, et c. I sat down to write the display page planning for two days to write it from scratch (a.k.a. beat it with an axe handle until it submitted). With jQuery the thing was working in an hour and done in two. And another major hat-tip to the people who posted their CSS3-based megamenu tutorials. As soon as I saw those I knew they were the right answer for navigaing the whole site– and with no server-side coding needed it was a cinch to integrate into the WordPress layout as well.
One of the big sources of the speed increase is the elimination of the database. Databases are great for doing weapons-grade data circulation, but far too often people use them to replicate the file handling tools built into the operating system. I’ve decoupled a handful applications from unneeded functionality and I’m always amazed at the performance gains.
This was and is a fairly extensive project for such a small site. All the contest photos had to be copied and resized, maintenance tools had to be built, et c., et c., alll in parallel with the existing site (and not crashing it!) And there is still a lot of work to be done– the schedule is still the aged 2001 design, all the individual portfolios still have to be converted and moved, and I’m sure I’ll find tiny bugs and gotchas for the next month or more.
But that’s all right– I’ve reached the point where it can stand alone and support the outlier pages until they are fixed. My primary goal was to get the contest infrastructure up and running before deadlines forced me to add another show to Coppermine (sorry Lake City competitors, they’ll be here soon now, I promise!). My secondary goal was to reduce the amount of maintenance I have to do going forward. I have managed to automate a few more things but of course that means extra skull sweat up front (when there are already so many other things going on!)
So bottom line is, I’m delighted with the update so far, and while there is still plenty of conversion and cleanup to do, I’m fairly confident that the infrastructure design is appropriately scaled– put another way, on the happy day that I unplug Coppermine, no part of the updated site should be affected.
I’m rambling on and all you probably care about is that it looks nicer and it’s more consistent on more pages and it’s way faster and you don’t have to click around as much.
When the river runs out, you know what? That’s all I care about too. I hope you enjoy it.
*Apologies to Zenphoto, which seemed to be striving for the right goals, but which would have eventually encountered the same issues, I think.
‘Nuff said.
Sorry for the delay; I spent some time refactoring the maintenance interface to the database.
I cleaned up some of the SQL, scrapped some hard code for jQuery (hey, it’s an OLD interface now!), added some indeces– usual stuff. But it was worth it, I probably saved almost as much time in the entry process as it took to make the changes.
Just as a reminder, these entries are based on notes and are not to be considered ANYTHING like final yet. The only official source of Florida NPC contest information comes from their Web site.
As the NPC and show promoter’s sites get updated I’ll update the schedule, but remember that stuff haapens: venues have date conflicts, sanctions can be denied, and so forth and so on. Always confirm your participation plans with the show promoter.
So anyway, here is the unofficial 2013 NPC schedule. Enjoy.
I recently uploaded some new photos of Peggy H. on the site.
Peggy needed some shots for a magazine and graciously allowed me to use a handful on my own site.
To say I’m happy with them is an understatement.
Peggy is wonderful to work with; she enjoys being photographed and she’s patient with the process.
The new shots are towards the end. I hope you like them too.
Man, am I behind in my posts! I’ll try to make up some time here.
Shots from the 2012 All South, held November 3 in St. Augustine, FL, are up on the site.
Got there later than I should have, so seating options were more limited. I chose a decent seat in the middle so the angle gained me more accurate and consistent color balance but lost me an unblocked view.
I think what I really need is a 30-foot tripod. Or a radioactive spider with a bad temper.
Promoters Gene and Pete put on a great show as usual. This wraps up the 2012 schedule for me. And by the way, the preliminary unofficial run-it-up-the-flagpole uncertified unauthenticated first draft of the 2013 schedule will be going up on the site shortly.
Enjoy.