On the subject of the article How Do Christians Become Conservative? by Mike Lux, I had some thoughts I believe the world would do well to read, so I figured I’d make a couple posts about it.  The first one is here, which is a collection some general thoughts about the fallacy of equating a Christian worldview with political liberalism.  Of course, being a non-Christian, he stepped way out of his element by trying to explain Christian principles such as the nature of God, Jesus’ mission and teachings, the content of the Bible, heaven and hell, the church, etc.  So I thought I’d offer a different perspective, a Christian perspective, on these issues, and at the same time point out theological errors and logical errors in his arguments.

Understand that I’m not trying to school a non-Christian on Christian doctrine, but I’m trying to address the issue of Christians who are political liberals agreeing with arguments like this, possibly because he’s on the same side politically, rather than matching up what he says with the truth we find in Scripture and observe in human behavior.  He’s way off theologically, which is excusable, but what’s inexcusable is for Christians to agree with some of the theological errors.  If you read my former post, which you really should if you haven’t already, you will know that this response follows on the heels of a flurry of comments on a Facebook post.  A few lines at ta time isn’t enough of a platform to state my case, so I figured I could ramble on for as long as I wanted on my own blog.

So here’s a collection of logical and theological fallacies I thought I’d expose:

• “If that [not being religious or thinking about religious stuff] sends one to hell, at least I’ll be there with a lot of my favorite people.”
  Sarcastically saying that he prefers to spend eternity in despair based on his company, without the God Who is the source of all joy and significance, demonstrates that he has no concept of, or maybe no regard for, the teachings about hell that are in the bible he claims to know “pretty well”.
• “Conservative Christians’ primary argument regarding Jesus and politics is that all he cared about was spiritual matters and an individual’s relationship with God.”
  False and absurd.  I am, hang around with, and am taught by Conservative Christians, and we all know that He is concerned for peoples’ physical well-being, as well as economic and cultural status.
• “…if you actually read the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus’ main concern in terms of the people whose fates he cared about was for the poor, the oppressed, and the outcast.”
  Blatantly false.  If you actually read the gospels, you will see Him demonstrate that He cares for all people regardless of their socioeconomic status.
• His “serious class warrior” paragraph is all over the place — this could be a whole separate post.  “[Jesus] didn’t seem to like rich folks very much.”  So when Progressives spew their mantra about loving everyone, they mean everyone except rich people?  “In Matthew 6, he focuses on the love of money as a major problem.”  The love of money applies equally to people who have it and don’t have it.  “In Luke 12, he says that the wealthy who store up treasure are cursed by God.”  That curse is a consequence of misuse, not of being successful.  “…it is the poor who will get into heaven.”  Even if his beliefs aren’t as extreme as what he writes, we all know that getting into heaven doesn’t depend on a low economic status – if we thought so, we would try to keep poor people poor and make rich people poor in order for them to have a better chance of getting into heaven.  “He chases the wealthy bankers and merchants from the Temple.”  Presumably Lux is talking about Mark 11, which says nothing about the merchants being wealthy, and even if they were, that’s not why he drove them out.
• One of Lux’s favorite passages is the end of Acts 2.  But this passage talks about an individual church of faithful believers, not about a larger society – these people are bound together by their identity in Christ, not by being under some governmental authority.  Moreover, this small-group communal sharing is voluntary, not orchestrated by government.
• The thesis of his diatribe is that Conservatives do not do what Jesus taught about having compassion for the poor, because conservative politics are antithetical to His teachings.  Yes, the bible is loaded with passages about helping the poor, but contrary to what he wants us to believe, Christianity is loaded with conservatives who put this into practice.  Somehow pretending that it’s the political conservatives that are not doing the Word of God in this regard is just plain ludicrous, and propagating this nonsense is just plain irresponsible.

So we see that Lux is incapable of handling and applying the biblical text.  Not that he should — after all he’s not a Christian and has no regard for biblical authority.  That’s what disturbs me about Christians citing this article as a “great article” — how can an article that’s logically inconsistent and full of falsehoods and mischaracterizations be “great” to anyone?  How can an article that mischaracterizes God and misquotes and misapplies His Word be “great” to any Christian?

So, a link to this article was posted by a Facebook friend…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/how-do-christians-become_b_570361.html

The title of the article is “How Do Christians Become Conservative?”, and the meta description that Facebook extracted to display is “Jesus may not have been primarily concerned with politics, but for what politics he did have, it is virtually impossible to argue that he was anything but a progressive thinker.”

Knowing that “progressive”, just like “moderate”, is a code word for “liberal”, you’d think that this is another article written by a liberal Christian telling everyone that God is a liberal and that if you’re a Christian you should be liberal too.  And you’d be right.  Except for the Christian author part.  It’s an article written by a non-Christian, trying to explain why he’s bewildered that any Christian can be a conservative.

If you haven’t read the article, do so now.
If you still haven’t read the article, do so now.
If you’ve read some of the article, and skipped over it because you liked it or didn’t like it or whatever, finish it now.

If you still haven’t read the article in its entirety, I encourage you to read on anyway through my comments, because they’re useful, but if you don’t get the complete context it’s your own fault.  What a terrible intolerant conservative thing to say, I know.

Here are Facebook comments I posted in reply to the original post, after some commenters said things like “nice article” and “great article”:

What a terrible article – a non-Christian taking his best shot at explaining the nature of God, Jesus’ mission and teachings, the content of the Bible, heaven and hell, the church, etc. is bound to miss the mark on many counts, and he sure does. I can excuse him for not knowing what he’s talking about, but I can’t excuse a Christian for accepting his false assumptions and being dragged along to some of the places he goes.

As expected, there were responses.  I would like to thank pretty much everyone who commented for being civil.  I hope the others can say the same about me.  A guy, I’ll call him “Ivan”, said:

So you have issues with the article. Fair enough…but you didn’t mention what any of them were. And you can’t accept a christian….I’m assuming a friend of yours…..from pondering this subject? Pondering, questioning….is a good thing. People should do more of it. God forbid someone might have a different interpretation. <name of unknown person>, help me collect some rocks so we can “stone” <Original Poster> when he comes to work. =)

I should have known.  Yeah, I did have an arm-length list of issues I was typing, but I didn’t want to be the guy who monopolized the post comments.  So I replied:

Ivan – I started to list my disagreements, but it was just too long. Look for Plan B, my own blog post, where anyone can make a comment.
What I said is that I can’t excuse a Christian for accepting false assumptions about the Christian faith from a non-Christian … friends included, friends especially. Pondering, questioning is indeed a good thing – I do so from one direction just as others do from the other.
<Original Poster>, I don’t want to stone you. My beef is with the content of the article and certain thought processes, not with you as an individual. I would like to caution Christians not to use the arguments Mr. Lux uses to arrive at  his conclusions. If you arrive at a similar place and can justify it properly, that’s one thing, but not the way he does it.

I listed out some example “issues I have with the article” and said I’d follow up with a more appropriate way to expound on them, to write as much as I want to without being too intrusive into someone else’s Facebook page. So here is is:

What I originally wanted to say and had to prune it down is this:

Mr. Lux says “I am always puzzled by how people who claim to be followers of the Jesus I read about in the Bible can be political conservatives.”  There are many who would say “I am always puzzled by how people who claim to be followers of the Jesus I read about in the Bible can be political liberals.”

What a terrible article – a non-Christian taking his best shot at explaining the nature of God, Jesus’ mission and teachings, the content of the Bible, heaven and hell, the church, etc. is bound to miss the mark on many counts, and he sure does.  I can excuse him for not knowing what he’s talking about, but I can’t excuse a Christian for accepting his false assumptions and being dragged along to false conclusions.

He uses his thoughts about God and the Bible to support the notion that political liberals care for the poor and outcast, while political conservatives don’t.  Hogwash.  The trend is this (not absolute, but a trend): Christian political liberals advocate empowering a government to deal with the poor and marginalized, while Christian political conservatives advocate taking personal responsibility for such.  Why the conservative perspective?  Because when God says to care for people, he isn’t talking to a centralized government – he’s talking to individual believers.  Not surprisingly, Mr. Lux doesn’t communicate that.  Pagans can feel good about pooling their money to give to some societal entity to distribute as it sees fit and believe they’re being altruistic, but if Christians do that, they’re being irresponsible.  I don’t want to beat up on liberals (because, honestly, some conservatives weaken the conservative position by doing so) but rather offer some challenging food for thought: if we really want to help the people who need it, we should take responsibility for it ourselves — a responsibility God explicitly gives to individuals — instead of passing it along to an impersonal entity.  I say impersonal entity to be purposefully general — this could be local or state governments, a federal government, a charity or cause that’s funded by government or businesses, whatever.

If the resources over which I have stewardship aren’t taken by a government to be mismanaged, some of which gets to the people an impersonal entity determines need to be helped by it, then responsibility falls on me to use those resources to help the people I personally am determined to help.  Do I embrace that?  Do I like that?  Not necessarily, admittedly, and less than I should, but that’s the way it should be.  God mandated it.  When He (in the person of the Father in the OT through the prophets, and in the person of Jesus in the NT) tells his people to care for others, he’s talking to “me” and “you”, not to the unbeliever or to “society”.  There are a lot of issues in play – here are some that come to mind:

• Even the most socialist liberal wacko will agree that governments are wasteful and inefficient.  If the US government collects $1.00 from me to help people, how much has already been spent because we’re trillions of dollars in debt?  Answer: all of it.  But let’s put reality on hold and pretend that the government isn’t in debt: How much of that dollar is eaten up by overhead?  You have to pay government employees to process those resources, pay their benefits, pay for the buildings and air conditioning, etc., not to mention some of it undoubtedly swallowed up by corruption (arguably more in a socialist government), overspending.  If 43¢ of the $1.00 I give is absorbed in overhead and 16¢ in mismanagement, that leaves 41¢ to go to the recipients.  If I distribute that myself, it’s the whole $1.00.  If the process is managed by a small or concentrated private group, there is incentive to be more efficient.  If that organization is Christian, the incentive is directed by the Holy Spirit.  (If you’re not a Christian, I lost you on that one, but Mr. Lux’s article is explicitly addressing the Christian perspective, so I am too).  If I find a good reputable organization that uses 17¢ in overhead and loses 6¢ in mismanagement, that leaves 77¢ to go to the recipients.  If I truly care about people, I’ll pray really hard and ask God if he wants the poor and outcast to get 41¢ or 77¢ of His $1.00 that He’s entrusted me to manage for Him.
• As a Christian, if you embrace the responsibility to help people yourself through your own social network, you target where your resources go.  So if you have a particular affinity or desire to minister to a focused group of people like Muslims or single moms or the elderly or photographers, you interact with those people and understand their needs on a personal level, and are more able to determine their needs than someone who sits in a building in Atlanta and processes a check to send them every month.  Does that mean you don’t care about Buddhists or jobless fathers or children or painters?  Of course not, but you are making your best effort to care for a group of people you have in your sphere of influence, investing resources including money but also including prayer, time, materials, social connections, and other things an impersonal entity is ill-equipped to provide.
• Speaking of targeting resources, if a “society” pools its resources and a central entity determines who needs what out of that pool, there is the very real issue of those resources used in a way that individuals don’t agree with.  From the conservative Christian perspective, if those resources are ultimately used for <insert heinous immoral filth here>, the control and responsibility of those decisions has been taken away from the individual.  The point here isn’t which things are bad and which are OK, the point is that individuals and focused groups are the right ones to make those determinations, not politicians and lawmakers and agency officials.

There is a whole lot more to being a Christian liberal or Christian conservative than helping the poor and outcast, but Mr. Lux (thankfully) doesn’t go into that in his article so neither will I.  Staying on-topic: certainly, the conservative is in danger of being a hypocrite by hoarding wealth as his own rather than using it to further the kingdom of the One who entrusts him with it; conversely, the liberal is in danger of being a hypocrite by substituting ‘society’ for a personal faith and integration within a community of believers.  Shamefully, Mr. Lux and others are quick to point out the former but ignore the latter.

So in terms of “helping the poor and outcast”, the political conservative approach is more than compatible with God’s will, and I would argue, even a better fit than political liberalism — assuming that either is wrapped an authentic biblical Christian worldview.   In the spectrum of political conservatives, it’s obvious that many are to some degree heartless, uncaring, ruthless, tyrannical, profit-oriented, oppressive, immoral.  You’re fooling yourself, however, if you believe that the same doesn’t apply to many political liberals.  What’s at issue here is, assuming one is a Christian, how does that Christian worldview inform the political philosophy you have regarding care for the poor and outcast?  To further narrow it down, what if you are a Christian and have a decent biblical perspective on the nature of God, sin, and the person and work of Jesus, and are at least trying to do a fairly good job of obeying His Word?  If that’s where you start, where I believe I am, then the mandate to care for the poor and outcast is to be embraced on a personal level (the political conservative approach), and not on a societal level (the political liberal approach).

Furthermore, I believe that the societal approach does a discredit to Christianity by divorcing the meeting of needs from the gospel.  Mr. Lux wouldn’t agree with me here, but I frankly don’t care: the purpose of a Christian showing love and mercy and care for people who need it is to demonstrate God’s provision connected with the gospel message, not to make them more comfortable — this isn’t to say that God doesn’t want you to be more comfortable, it’s to say that God wants you to realize that true comfort is by His provision, not by the provision of “society” or an intangible “goodness”, or a pagan deity or impersonal “spirituality”.  If we take the societal approach, we give the impression that humanity’s greatest needs are solved by governments and institutions and programs rather than by a personal God interacting personally through His people.  If the problems are addressed on a personal level by Christians, that personal interaction will (should!) include an introduction to the God who cares enough about the person to interact personally.  The societal approach sends the message “society cares”; the personal approach sends the message “God cares”; the personal approach coupled with a proper perspective on God and the bible sends the message “God cares, and by the way, let me clarify what I mean by ‘God’”.  Yes, you can fall on either side of the political spectrum and still be engaged in the personal approach, but I would argue the conservative side is no less biblical, even more so, because if the resources a person is using aren’t dumped in to society’s pot, the individual — on whom the responsibility lies –  can better target their use.

Whoa, this post is quite long.  But quite good, if I do say so myself.  I have a slew of particular logical and theological problems with what Mr. Lux says, but in order to break things up a bit I’ll make another post about them.

While checking out a link a friend posted on Facebook concerning the proper spelling of things, I became aware just how awesome The Oatmeal is.  Except for the fact that everything (font, spacing, images) is just so dang big… but maybe that’s what he’s going for.

Consider this gem, an artist’s rendering of the breakdown in the Web Design process. I have witnessed similar things in my experience.  No, I’m not a designer… well, not a graphic designer, not an artist who can create a visual concept from scratch.  But I am somewhat of a ‘technical designer’, someone who can work with a graphics person to incorporate visual and usability elements into the overall design — and by design I don’t mean just the look, but the sensibility also, the flow and relative physical and logical placement of elements.

I thought I knew where things went wrong at first glance… way back when the Client tells the Designer, “just a few minor changes”.  That’s the point where the Designer’s expertise gets usurped by the Client who thinks he knows better, where the expertise of the expert takes a back seat to the whims of one who’s making decisions based on feelings.  Don’t get me wrong – feelings are important. In some cases.  But here, feelings are poison if they’re not seriously diluted with reason.

Which makes me rethink where the whole process goes wrong.  It’s actually a couple steps above, when “you both laugh at how terrible” the current web site is.  I think it’s all about pride. When we get to then end of the process here and look back, the same thing is wrong with this new site that was wrong with the old site: namely, elements are implemented by people stepping outside of their area of expertise.  This could have come about in one or both of these ways:

• Control/Pride: the Client, in this case, the CEO, or often officers or marketing people who are not design people, fancy themselves as design people and thus make a mess of it.
• Distrust: the Client doesn’t trust the Designer to do what he hired him to do, so the Client makes a guess as to what would be better than the Designer’s recommendations.

So, more than being just so dang funny in that “it’s so funny because it’s so true” way, it made me think of how these things can go wrong.  In designing just about anything: a house, dinner party, game plan, school curriculum, or military strategy, it pays for the responsible parties (owners, managers, leaders) to restrain themselves from stepping out of their area of expertise into that of the people to whom they’ve delegated the task.  Shelve your pride, and trust the people you put in place to do what you’ve tasked them with.  Or at least trust them to do a better job than you will yourself.

I got this from AT&T, waiting in my Inbox for me on Christmas morning.

I saw it coming long ago.  In my high school Physics class in 1987-1988, a dude brought a cool new sound medium to class — a Compact Disc, which was better in many ways than the vinyl records we all had been using.  He said, you could throw it around and scratch it all up and it would still play (well, the truth is you have to be more gentle with the scratching), and it was much smaller.  Not to mention, and it was shiny and required a laser to read.

I’m not sure when it was, but back when I started replacing my cassette tape collection with CDs, I began to wonder what the next meduim would be.  Maybe a chip that you would plug in to a player, take out to add/remove songs, then plug back in – potentially hundreds or thousands of songs could fit on this chip of the future.  Well, the chip of the future came about a few years ago, with the iPod and then any number of brand names of media players which would play WMAs, MP3s, etc.

Fast forward to Christmas Shopping Season 2009.  Ginger’s gift wish list included 3 or 4 CDs, complete with links to the product info page for each on amazon.com.  No problem… of course instead of paying for shipping, I would just go to any number of local retail stores and pick one up or look for something similar.

Not so fast.  A local mall used to have a Virgin Megastore right in the middle a few years ago.  There’s no such thing anymore — I suppose they’re out of business or got bought by someone else.  CD Warehouse has a sorta-nearby location.  Instead of being a Warehouse, it’s a little store in a strip center sandwiched between a nail salon and a donut shop, or something like that.  I get coupons for Borders every week, so how about there?  Neither Borders I visited even has a CD section any longer — all the CDs they have fit into a couple cardboard displays in the aisle.  The most promising visit was to Best Buy, who still has a pretty large selection of CDs.

About two visits into these trips, it struck me — the CD is dying.  For years, now, really, people have been getting their music online, downloading MP3s and retrieving music from iTunes and such for storage in their digital libraries, for playback on-the-go on their portable players, with adapters to let them plug them into systems with speakers, like docks or car stereos.

Who needs a collection of four shelves worth of CDs that can scratch or break or warp, and require players with spinning parts, when all those songs will fit onto an 8GB SD card and slip into your media player or phone?

Yessir, the death of the CD is upon us.  What will the next form of media be for music?  I suppose it won’t be stored locally on a portable player, but likely be stored centrally in a worldwide repository, with real-time streaming access across a fast and reliable wireless data stream.

Ginger and I went to see Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs today.  As usual, we got there early because it’s a fairly new movie and we wanted a primo seat.  So, as usual, we sat through the pre-movie on-screen stuff — what we used to think of as ‘previews’, but I thought a little harder about this time than usual.

Advertisers are having to adjust.  It’s been going on for some time now, and this may not be new to you, but I’ve see advertising take at least two whole new directions lately.  One of these ways has to do specifically with movie theaters, and that got me to thinking about the other one.

TWO: the advent of TiVo a few years ago, and subsequently all manner of DVRs that aren’t the TiVo brand, threw advertisers for a loop because people began to skip their commercials as they watched TV.  You can set your DVR to record something, then start watching it whenever you want to later on.  When those annoying commercials come on, you just skip over them and pick up your show at the next scene.  Instead of complaining to Congress that people were subverting their attempts to try to get them to buy stuff, the advertisers have adapted and innovated.  I don’t watch much TV except for baseball, but word has it that product placement has escalated in recent years, basically companies paying networks to embed their product into the show, thus increasing exposure inside the show instead of during the oft-skipped commercial breaks.  What I’ve noticed a lot of during baseball broadcasts is that the announcers do short 5-10-second shout-outs: typically after a commercial break, a car manufacturer’s or beer brewer’s logo takes up most of the screen while Joe Buck or Jon Miller tells you that today’s game is brought to you by XYZ company.  After the first out of the inning, the Pitcher Profile, the Batting Lineup, the Call to the Bullpen, the RBI Leader Board, etc. are all brought to you by some deodorant or snack food purveyor.

ONE: this is the one that gets me in movie theaters.  I’m making myself sound old, I know, but “in today’s postmodern microwave society”, attention spans are at an all-time low.  No, I don’t have a scientific source for that assertion, but you know what I mean.  Advertisers can’t trust their audience to sit still and pay attention to what they’re selling for a 30-second commercial, so they have to get creative and try to tell the audience that they’re doing something other than watching a commercial.  And they reinforce it in much the same way that I was told to write my papers in high school: tell what you’re going to say (introduction), then say it (body), then tell what you just said (conclusion).  Before the previews started a few years ago, the theater had house lights on, curtains over the screen, and maybe some music playing softly.  But nowadays, advertisers are taking this opportunity to show commercials.  In the intro to the block of ads, someone comes on and tells you you’re about to experience some sort of spectacle giving you an inside look at something of paramount interest.  Then they play a bunch of commercials – you’re the one who’s in the know about this cool new PDA, video-sharing web site, upcoming movie, sweet new ride, or must-see television event.  Then at the end they wrap up by telling you that you’ve just experienced a First Look or got some great insider information on some gizmo’s features.

“Huh?” I ask myself and my wife.  “I don’t have any special insider knowledge about the Nissan Cube mobile device; I haven’t been a participant in what goes on behind the plot in Jada Pinkett Smith’s new drama series – I just saw a bunch of commercials trying to get me to buy something or watch something.”  Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining or saying that what the advertisers are doing is wrong in some way.  I’m just saying that I take these “experiences” and “insider looks” for what they really are – advertising.

I spent some of January rebuilding NeilAndGinger.com.  Seems a trivial task for a professional web developer to ‘redo’ a web site, but there was surprisingly a lot going on, so it took some time.  Here are some of the issues addressed and resolved:

Design

The old design just grew kinda ugly to me after all these years.  It had been the same since I originally built it in 2002, before we even got married.  It was too harsh and dark with the dark blue background, the bordering around the tables was kind of messy, the font was too small,  and the main content area was just too narrow.

I’m not a designer, so everything I do design-wise needs to be quite minimal or I’ll be in over my head in no time.  Fortunately it didn’t take too long for me to arrive at something I think looks decent, and I didn’t want to spend too much time fiddling with the look because I’d end up undoing what I did.  So now the design is (in my opinion) much cleaner with softer colors and a little more spread out without being too condensed.  Seems like the majority of people even with notebooks nowadays have displays wider than 1024px, so things can be spread out more and typically look better that way.

The whole design aspect of the project was an exercise in CSS.  I have a big style sheet that defines the styles of a slew of elements, both aesthetics and placement.  I became a big fan of nested tables many years ago and used to make everything with nested pages.  But now knowing about and gaining experience in using margin, padding, float, and display (among others) properties of the CSS definitions, it seems a better way to let the CSS place things rather than using a bunch of tables.  I can say that now that most browsers’ implementations treat the newer generations of HTML and JavaScript and CSS mostly the same way, so it’s not an insurmountable task to make a site look (almost) the same in all graphic user agents (browsers) and on all platforms.  As I got into it, I made it a personal challenge to do the whole site without using a single table.  And I did it!  If you find a table on neilandginger.com, I’ll give you $500.  No, not really.

Technology

I started by building a small template index.php file that just called functions that built the header, navigation, main content, footer, and other areas; these functions spit out snippets of HTML code that are mostly simple <div>s that are rendered as specified by the main referenced .css style sheet file.  When the basic look and feel was put together, I dumped in slightly-edited versions of the functions I already had from the old site – stuff that would suck out and display main page content and the news and contact sections from the already-existing MySQL database.

Pretty URLs

WordPress got me started thinking about the ‘best’ way for URLs to be presented.  There are several advantages to having the URL www.neilandginger.com/travel rather than www.neilandginger.com/?page=travel.  This was no trivial matter.  For a couple days, I read article after article about .htaccess and mod_rewrite, but nothing actually ended up working right till that one night I stayed up late and dreamt up a new plan.  It hit me what (I thought) actually goes on in WordPress’ URL rewriting mechanism – and I was right.  Being a programmer myself, I didn’t have to hack the WordPress include files to see how to do it – it was easy as pie once I confirmed what I was suspecting.  Mod-rewrite and .htaccess actually has very little to do with it: the only rewrite rules were that if the URL requested was neither a file nor a directory, one single control file was loaded (in my case, /index.php).  From there, index.php does all the work.  It takes a URL like “travel” and breaks it down into pieces separated by “?” – everything before the first “?” is the URL, and the rest starting with “?” is discarded.  Then what’s left is broken down into pieces separated by “/” – everything before the first “/” is the “page name” that it deals with, and the rest is discarded.  So it just looks up what’s in the database having this page name and displays the content (or some ‘not found’ stuff is there’s no such page name). A final nice touch is to force the “www” in case the user omitted it.

Photo Galleries

This took the most time.  I had developed a clunky photo gallery viewer years ago, which was a PHP script that I made pop up in its own browser window: JavaScript resized the browser window to a a size specified in height and width parameters, and PHP identified how many images there are in the directory specified by another parameter, displaying one of the images (specified in another parameter, or the first one if not specified), having little links to click on to display an image by number or previous, next, first, or last.  Also, a photo caption was read from a .txt file of the same base name in the same directory, is it existed.  The image was scaled down to a small size, not actually resampled to a thumbnail size, so the small image actually takes a little while to load.  Clicking on the small image would launch the full-sized image in another new window.  It was too easy to have a bunch of windows opened up, hidden behind other windows.  Like I said, “clunky”.

I had previously stumbled upon Lightbox and similar scripts to make image galleries pretty, so I figured I’d try out Lightbox.  Install and setup was surprisingly straightforward, quick, and painless.  But alas, there were some tweaks I really wanted to do, which proved to be quite the task.

I got some unsolicited but welcome feedback from someone who previewed it: “how am I supposed to know that I’m supposed to put my mouse over there to click to see the next picture?”  Yeah, I could see that someone looking at a Lightbox gallery with no experience would just see a pretty picture but then want to get rid of it without knowing what to do next.  So I wanted to make the Prev and Next always show up.  But that presented another problem: I didn’t want the Prev and Next to cover up part of the image, so I wanted them moved above or below the image.  Not only this, but when viewing an image more than about 800px tall gave me problems: it would be too tall to fit within my browser widow — my 1680×1050 resolution isn’t abnormally big, so I figured a lot of people would have the same problem.

All these issues taken together made me want to move the lightbox up to the top of the browser window and place the caption and Prev/Next all up at the top, so that in the case that an image was too tall, the user wouldn’t have to scroll down to get to the navigation.  The forums were somewhat helpful, guiding me toward solving a couple problems and giving me good info about the coding that was useful for figuring out some other stuff.  I had to make some trivial and non-trivial edits to the CSS and several spots in the lightbox.js file to accomplish all of this.  As with most projects of this sort, the reading and figuring out took more time than the actual edits.

I already had many directories of photos, having had assembled galleries from events and trips over the last few years.  And I would like to be able to build new galleries in the future simply by uploading photos and their caption files to a directory and pointing a script at this directory to build the gallery automatically.  So in my PHP file I wrote a couple of slick functions to take apart my proprietary <lightboxgallery> tag and build the gallery.  This way in my page content, I could just specify a tag like this:

<lightboxgallery dir="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14" group="1" linktext="Photos from 14 Sep 2006"></lightboxgallery>

The functions read the directory and make a lightbox gallery grouping consisting of all of the images and caption files, making the link text the clickable link to view the gallery.  The stuff in the <lightboxgallery></lightboxgallery> tag is replaced by the HTML code that the functions generate, resulting in:

<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6157.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title="Caf&eacute; from which we got breakfast or a quick sandwich a few times.">View Photos from September 14</a>
<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6158.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title="The bus to take us on our first castle tour in Bavaria (southern Germany)."></a>
<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6159.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title=""></a>
<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6160.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title="View of the Hauptbahnhof from the bus pick-up."></a>
<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6161.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title="In the bus."></a>
<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6163.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title="Munich traffic on the way out of town."></a>
<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6164.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title="Some of the countryside as seen from the bus."></a>
<a href="/photos/europe2006/8x6/2006-09-14/IMG_6165.JPG" rel="lightbox[1]" title="Out on the autobahn."></a>
...

A little work up front to get this stuff in place one time will save hours of tedious link-making in the future!  All I have to do to make a gallery in the future is upload the photos to a directory, and make a <lightboxgallery> tag that points there.

More Image Stuff

I wanted to keep the scheme on our vacation pages of having thumbnail-ish images on the right side of the page instead of the common news and contact navigation.  So I spent a large amount of time (several two- or three- hour stretches) cropping and resizing photos, renaming, uploading, and editing the PHP functions that read them.

The Little Things

A lot of people do the big things right.  Sure, that’s OK, but the little things are often what separates the ordinary from the top-notch.  Here are little things that don’t make much difference to a site visitor but are just a little extra-special:

• I made a favicon.  Web sites are just better with favicons.
• The navigation links across the top of the page are actual anchor tags now.  Used to be, they were styled table cells where JavaScript gave them different colors via onMouseOver() and onMouseOut(), and the OnClick() fired a javascript:location to get the user to a new page.  It’s very unlikely that search engines will index a “link” like this.  Yes, I was ashamed of myself and eventually did it the right way.
• I am redirecting the old-style URLs to the new-style ones.  So if anyone happens upon an old-style URL like “neilandginger.com/?page=travel”, that’s redirected to “neilandginger.com/travel” (A 301 redirect, which tells the user agent that the content has moved permanently).  What difference does it make?  Not a whole lot on my litttle personal site, but search engines will update their indexes to the new URL (when they get around to it) – so it’s good to know for companies that want search results to index the proper pages as stuff gets moved around.
• If you go to “neilandginger.com” without the “www”, it will redirect sticking the “www” in there.  What difference does it make?  Not a whole lot on my litttle personal site,but some search engines are known to regard “neilandginger.com/europe2006″ and “www.neilandginger.com/europe2006″ as separate pages; if you’re a company concerned about search engine rankings, you may get penalized in this case for having “duplicate content”.
• Page titles are personalized by page.  So in your browser’s title bar of the home page, you see “Neil And Ginger »  Europe2006″, whereas on the Dogs page you see “Neil And Ginger » Throckmorton & Abby”.  Again, seems like a small deal for a personal site, but search engines like title tags that are relevant to the page content.
• The Contact Us page now has a little image with numbers in it (a “Captcha” type image), designed to ensure that a human is typing in the form rather than a bot submitting it.  The idea here is that a human can interpret the picture as having a number on a splotchy background, but a computer can’t.  This is not for your benefit – it’s for mine; since I kept getting spam posts, I thought I’d block them, even if it means a little extra typing for you.