As I was discovering that my scanning project was working exactly the way I intended I started to think about what the next project would be that I could follow this up with. It had been a while since I had a website. I’d tried posting pictures on Facebook or Instagram in the past but had never liked it. I had some Flickr and Smugmug galleries but they were too much of a hassle to maintain and I was mostly shooting film and couldn’t really scan it effectively until now. Maybe things had come full circle and having a personal website was going to be relevant again (maybe, we’ll see).

I’d occasionally thought about putting together a new website on a more modern platform. I don’t know how cutting edge WordPress is anymore but it certainly has a broad reach and excellent support. The underlying technology was familiar to me and the price was right (free) so it was easy to try it out. I didn’t think my expectations were high but apparently they were way higher than they should have been. The whole experience of starting from scratch with wordpress was a bit shocking.

The worst part about it was that I had (in my head, and also on paper) a bunch of ideas about what I wanted my site to do and how it wanted it to look. None of this was crazy stuff the world had never seen before. This was a personal photography website, there are thousands of these. I thought maybe some of the stuff I wanted to do was cool and all but I’m not reinventing the wheel here. Surely any modern CMS could handle this right out of the gate, right? Not really.

It’s kind of crazy. Plugin, plugin, plugin. You want to put a table in a block of text? Install a plugin, make the table in a weird editor and then insert a tag for that table in your page (eek). Bullet list? Stop what you’re doing, find the ordered list module, fill out the list… the monotony of it was shocking, and that’s just for writing simple text. This doesn’t even get into the functionality of the site.

It’d be boring to go through all of it. It won’t make any sense to people who haven’t done it, and those who have will understand but also will have moved past it all – which I have too.

Just like the large scanning project, having a detailed idea of what you want to do and understanding what you’re flexible on, and what you’re not (even if they’re minor things) before you start will help you be able to get through it.

I’d written everything down that I wanted to do and then just treated each page, or piece of functionality, as a punch list and I’d figure out 2 or 3 ways to do it in wordpress with a plugin, or natively. There was this one thing I really wanted to do, which was to have an easy and consistent way to put image metadata below every picture, kind of like a newspaper caption, without having to just manually type everything for every picture. Doing this with EXIF data is pretty easy with a number of different plugins, but since I was posting images that were all scanned with the same camera/lens combination the existing EXIF data wouldn’t work.

Part of the scanning project involved tagging every image in Lightroom with the camera, lens, film, developer, and a few other things. The i’d have to export images with tags, or move the tags over to other IPTC fields. The Negative Lab Pro plugin provides some metadata fields for doing exactly this but I wasn’t sure about using it long term.

What I decided on was to manage the website data as part of the website through an enhancement using Advanced Custom Fields in WordPress. The way it works is that I create a pick list of everything I might use (cameras, lenses, develops, films etc). This is integrated with the media manager in WordPress so when I upload a images for a post I just quickly select the information for that image and then that information is displayed consistently as part of every image.

But… I got so lost trying to figure out how to do this in WordPress I ended up hiring a developer to do it for me. That was a whole project in and of itself with the various marketplaces out there. I eventually found the right person though who was very helpful and made quick work of the project. Seeing how he did it also helped me understand the WordPress platform even more which helped me figure out how to add other pieces myself later on.

In the end I went through 3 completely different website builds over the course of maybe 10 months to arrive at this site. And then I basically let it sit there idle for 2 years before I felt like I wanted to deal with it. Most of this is due my own stubbornness and/or lack of an actual deadline during the pandemic where time stood still for certain parts of life. A big part of it was that I kind of enjoyed figuring how to build a website more than I wanted to deal having a website to maintain again.

Over the course of this extended period of time I’d try to give myself an occasional exercise to see if I could actually use the site or if it was just going to die on the vine. The sort of synthetic end-to-end test a product manager might use to test every piece of a complex workflow.

A good example of this was: shoot pictures and make a website post with those picture(s) in the same day (without skipping work or forgetting to pick the kids up at school). I mean that’s the biggest thing right there, right? It’s the instagram “take a picture of your meal with your phone and post it before you take the first bite” test.

So I did this a few times:

• get up early, take a walk up the big hill near our house (preferably with a grumpy kid who’s only in it for the croissant at the coffee shop)
• Bring kid to school
• Develop film (easy 30 minutes end-to-end in the outdoor darkroom), hang film to dry in the laundry room
• At lunch time set up camera scanning rig (10 minutes)
• After school/work: scan film, import+process images, export files, cut, sleeve, file negatives, stow scanning rig (~20 minutes)
• Upload a couple of images to the website with a post of some sort (5 minutes)
• done

Here’s an example

All the pieces worked great, and I iterated on it by making some website specific export rules in Lightroom, and creating a staging area in the media library of the website. Again mostly just coming up with some easy ways to handle a somewhat complex workflow. The idea being that if I can do it all in a given workday without any real disruption it’ll be real easy to do under the more normal circumstances of developing a few rolls of film after a week or 2, scanning them a day or so after that, posting (or not) some of those images later that week. And using a digital camera? even less work.

So now I’ve got this website that i’m pretty happy with. I’ve also got a list of things that I want to change, or add or cleanup or whatever, but I know that I can do that anytime without having to rebuild the whole thing from scratch.