March 20, 2001, 10:29 AM —
This column stems from a gift a reader sent me. I blamed my wild-eyed prognostications for 2001 on dreams I had one night after enjoying some particularly potent habanero peppers. After finding out that I really liked the hot stuff, the reader sent me a sampler of Panamanian habanero salsas. Wow! I tried some of that hot salsa on my Sunday omelet and it burned the "same-old, same-old" right out of me. In fact, it put me in a different mood completely. After that breakfast, I needed to experiment, to find and try new applications I had never seen before, to do something novel. As my namesake Papa Jack would say, "I had them pioneer blues."
A lot of my experimentation lately has been about graphics: cameras, printers, and scanners. It dawned on me that it was time to do something productive with all those toys. I decided to put together an online photo album so that friends and family could easily keep up with the latest happenings in my life, and maybe share rare old family photos that up until now could be enjoyed only in person.
I began my latest expedition the same way I've started many others, by visiting Freshmeat.net (see Resources for a link). Searching for "album" returned almost 60 possibilities. I'm sure that I missed a lot of good ones, but I quickly found one that not only had the features I wanted, but also had precious few dependencies, and promised to be easy enough for even a dweeb journalist to install. So I chose LiveFrame Gallery, an application for Web-based photo albums. It is under the GPL, and was written and maintained by James Home.
