Category: Life

Congratulations to Jim and Wendy on the delivery of a baby girl. They have given her the beautiful name of Sarah Madison Victoria Gooch. I’m sure there will be many photos to come.

I arrived back from the webdu conference late last night. I have a lot of things to be doing this weekend including playing with some of the new knowledge that I have learnt so I will post more about the conference along with some photos later.

I had a wonderful time and definately will be going again next year. I learnt a lot and enjoyed meeting and talking with the people who’s blogs I often read or whos examples I admire.

Well subsitute the porridge for suflower seedlings.

Some horrible beast ate the top of all of my sunflowers lastnight/today. I was planning to pot them into the gardern this afternoon but they are too weak now. So I have planted them in some bigger pots and moved them to a different location. Hopefully this will keep off the nasties till I find a better solution this weekend.

Well my little seeds have grown dramatically over the last week. I realised last night that the beans had grown out of the bottom of their seedling pot and needed to be planted in the ground as soon as possible. So that was today’s job. I have far to many plants for the room that I have to plant them but could not deny each of them a chance to grow in the ground.

Today I also found really baby strawberries and a tiny grass heads of the carrots.

I have been getting back to nature recently and expanding my gardern. I started with planting some strawberry, carrot and cucumbers on Sunday afternoon. I then planted sunflowers, dwarf sunflowers, butter beans and rockmelon on Monday. Then the left over bean seeds on tuesday since I had run out of seedling pots.

Yesterday I was really excited when I noticed some small sprouts. Today I was even more astonished to find some of the sunflowers had really sprouted and the cucumbers have leaves. One of the rockmelon seeds has sprouted. The rest are still thinking about it.

I also decided yesterday that it was time to do a bit more work on my own website. The blog software (word press – I highly recommend it) has made my job of posting news a lot easier so I thought I would try out some photo galleries. At the moment I am working with PhpWebGallery. At the moment I am finding it interesting. It deals with files a lot differently then the other galleries I looked at for the guild wars blitzers website. Instead of uploading images through a backend form, you upload them to the site (including your own made thumbnails) and run a feature in the backend to match them up with the database. At first I found this odd but I like it at the moment. My current photo page (very lacking in content) has the thumbnails as interesting cropped pieces of the picture and I have decided I like the fact that I can easily use my own thumbnails. There is also a thumbnail generating feature in the backend but they don’t suggest you use it unless required. I would not recommend this for a group of people who want to upload photos to the site, but it does seem to fit what is required for myself to manage the photos. If you are looking at a group site gallery then I suggest coppermine. It has the ability to connect to a phpBB forum along with other php applications.

The gallery now lives at http://fun.koali.com.au/gallery
I will be customising it to look like the website and making a few alterations. My first plans is to make the front displayed image for a category randomised and also to add a description column for a photo.