As some of you are experiencing and others of you have no doubt heard about, there’s a heatwave in the northwest US. Even though it’s cooler on the mountain than it is in town, and cooler in town than it is in the city, it’s still plenty hot on the mountain. We don’t have air conditioning, which isn’t unusual here, so we’ve been making do with fans and ice water and whatever other strategies we can come up with. I was originally supposed to go to outdoor events both Saturday and Sunday, but stayed up on the mountain instead because neither was important enough to push ahead with given there was an Excessive Heat Warning in place. (The Saturday event went ahead without me; the Sunday one was canceled.) With the time thus freed up, I intended to work my lengthy to do list, but the heat has made that slow going. Sure, I can do things, but I need to take frequent hydration breaks, especially if the tasks require moving my body more than a sloth might. So it wasn’t as productive a weekend as I’d hoped. Bleh. And we have days of this to go, with the hottest temperatures still to come.
One thing I did do—that wasn’t on my to do list for the weekend but was on one of my longer term project lists—is figure out a gallery solution for this journal. I headed down that road when I started on the “write HoT entry” item. The entry I needed to write is about the vacation Mr. K and I took earlier this month, which means lots of photos, but since I stopped paying for Flickr I can’t upload them there anymore, and I don’t want to put every photo in the journal entry but I do want to be able to see all the pictures from a trip in one place. This hasn’t been an issue in the months since I stopped posting photos to Flickr since we hadn’t gone anywhere. But now we are going places, so I decided to work on the problem again.
I’d gotten stuck before when I couldn’t find a gallery plug-in for WordPress that worked with my template. I didn’t especially want to fuss with my template or start over with a new one and have to customize that, so I put the whole problem on that longer term list and left it be. Yesterday, I picked it back up and did more research on gallery plug-ins, and tried a couple more that looked promising, but found neither of them worked with my template either. They did work with other newer templates, though. So what I decided to do was another WordPress install just for photo galleries. Is that the best, most elegant solution? No. Is it better than not having photo galleries to go along with entries when I want that? Yes. So I forged ahead, picking the plainest template I could find and stripping it down even more via customization, installing the gallery plugin I’d liked the best, and messing around until I got a gallery page for the May trip that I could live with. There are still things I want to tweak, and still things I need to figure out, but the basics are there. Go here to see.
Now I’ve just got to sort through all the photos from the June trip (I’ve done one day so far, which leaves nine to go) and write the entry and try not to get distracted and try not to melt from the heat. Seems do-able; I’m just not sure in what time frame.
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