I’ve been evaluating Zenfolio and Smugmug, as more professional alternatives to Flickr. I don’t have the money to waste on two subscriptions, so I got trial accounts for both (you don’t need a credit card for either, which is great), and gave them a shot.

I soft of gravitated to Zenfolio, its admin interface made more sense to me, I liked the page layouts better, and its wicked fast. I know a few people with Smugmug galleries though and they are pretty slick too.

Unfortunately, Zenfolio doesn’t have a Wordpress plugin, but they do have an API, and offer direct links to various sizes of your pictures.

Here’s a photo I took over the Vermillion lakes in Banff. I had to do the formatting manually, but was able to quickly cut and paste the links from Zenfolio’s admin page:

Feel free to click here and order a print for yourself!

I’ve switched offTheHill from Typo to Wordpress.

Typo has some great features; its simple, easy to set up, the pages are elegant and nicely AJAX enabled. I loved the live preview when writing new posts. Also, the Ruby-on-Rails code is elegant and simple.

The problem is, I got tired of the Application Error – Rails app failed to start properly” messages, and I’m sure that wasn’t getting me any repeat readers (like anyone reads this anyway).

So, I used Dreamhost’s one-click install to install Wordpress onto a development sub-domain. Then I used Max Newell’s typo4.1 migration guide to import my articles and comments. Categories didn’t seem to carry over, but since I have less than a hundred posts, I don’t mind manually updating them.

I also needed to install the Textile 2 plugin because I used Textile in all my Typo posts. Now I can keep using it, and I don’t have to update my old posts.

Lastly, I installed the Flickr Tag plugin to take the place of the typo:flickr plugin. Unfortunately, since the markup format isn’t the same, I need to go through all my posts and update them. Its not a terrible job though, so no big deal.