Today has been a long learning curve. When I say “today” I technically mean yesterday, but I always consider today and tomorrow to be relative to my sleep, not the time.

Today I have felt pretty pants all day. Not Christmassy, fairly moody and all I have really wanted to do is be left alone. Of course that is far from what happened, what actually happened is I was bugged left right and centre about fixing technical things, computers, media centres, working out why a radio stream wasn’t holding, working out why an aspect ratio wasn’t working in recordings… you get the idea, lots of bugs and issues that I just haven’t cared about all day. I have also been fairly argumentative to top it off (yes, I know, even more than I usually am).

I am pretty sure I know why today was such a bad day. Demelza was staying the past week and a bit and yesterday she went back home for Christmas, and while this doesn’t leave me in tears, “it sucks” doesn’t quite do it justice.

In all of today I have however learnt one thing about myself. I have always assumed I neatly rode line between introvert and extrovert and never really fell either side of it. I can today with some certainty say that I lean to introvert. I needed peace and quiet today to recharge.

With that analysis out the way I do now have some Christmas cheer. Unfortunately it has come in a rather sad form, but it is sticking which is nice.

My website has a gallery. It has had one for a number or years and it works fairly well. Over the last few months I have been re-writing it to have a multiple upload script so I can add whole folders worth of images at a go. I have also been taking in meta data like camera shutter speed etc and adding tags to images. As such it has been a full re-write. I got the basic set of features working about a month ago when I finally transferred all the old images to it. Unfortunately, when I did this I noticed a CSS rendering bug (AKA, the thumbnail view looked very strange and just didn’t work). This bug completely threw me because it didn’t happen with the Flickr images page.

This new gallery is the last price in the puzzle of moving my site to the new theme however and this has been very frustrating. The incentive has always been there however to finish this or work out the bug.

So, after a conversation with Dan on MSN about how he may actually roll out the new version of his site before I fix this bug and roll out the last price of my site gave me an extra reason to work mine out. So, i set about trying another method of displaying the thumbnail grid view with CSS only. I tried it and the same thing happened, it was a mess. At this point i realised I had a common bug. 2 mins later I had solved it… just typical isn’t it.

The issue came up because some of my image titles were going onto two lines. On my Flickr page they only ever used one. The padding above my images never took this difference in height for different titles. One height variable later and it is solved. ” other simple changes and the new gallery is now live. All the old data is there, all the comments, all the old links work and finally, in a long time my site is on the same theme. It finally looks like a site again.

Please feel free to try it out and tell me what you think: http://www.craigk.org/pictures/

Of course there is lots of work to do first, but for now i feel i better use my new found Christmas cheer for something more immediate, like Christmas.

Happy Christmas.