Today, we are re-launching our side project, NC Train Photos. Now with a blog-style narrative, we believe this will make it easier to view and appreciate the photos. The site features photos and information regarding trains in North Carolina, primarily on the North Carolina Railroad H-Line from Greensboro to Raleigh. Both Amtrak/NC DOT passenger trains and Norfolk Southern freight trains are featured prominently.

In addition to providing railroad photographs, the site is also an able demonstration of the abilities of WordPress and Gallery 2, in this case integrated with the help of the WPG2 plugin.

There’s not many easy ways to improve your Student Government’s placement in search results, such as those of Google. However, it is known that rich, frequently update content reflects highly on your site from the perspective of search engines.

One of the many benefits of the Student Government Information Management System is that it enables your Student Government Association to easily maintain updated and comprehensive information on your website. A typical SG will generate dozens of new unique pages each week.

SGIMS user NCSU Student Government has over 20,000 indexed pages in its installation. This SG’s website is consistently returned highly in the results of relevant internet searches.

Student Government Associations have a tendency to focus on their websites as an external communication tool, seeking improved outreach to student bodies and assistance in recruiting members. Having up-to-date content is a prerequisite to accomplishing these goals. As an example, it’s become an expectation that when a governance group is meeting publicly, that an agenda for the next meeting is online. When such content is missing, and all visitors find are references to meeting that happened months in the past, the creditability of all your content is hurt. People know SGAs are dynamic organizations–if the content seems stale, they will be unsure if officers terms have expired or if issues are still live. Those people move on and do not engage the student government.

The case is made easily that up-to-date organizational content should be a top priority for any student government website. However, the student government association is often limited by reliance on an able and proactive webmaster, when the reality is that on most campuses these people are very much in demand by other organizations and by better paying clients.

What SGIMS offers is a true web-based workflow for the student government association. By using the software as the primary vehicle for initial processing of documents, the webmaster is no longer a middleman and the publishing of documents no longer a separate step. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big fan of gallery2, including using it to power a personal photo sharing site. It’s management features are very good, but it lacks a good built-in solution for a slideshow embedded on a non-gallery page, such as the site home page.

I’m not one to usually run to flash as a solution for a web page, but the folks at Flash Your Web have published a nice lightweight XML powered flash slideshow for gallery2. It offers both some fancy options such as multiple transitions, titles, and dropshadows, as well as the ability to be configured to just gracefully fade from one picture to another. I’d certainly recommend it to anyone embedding gallery2 into a website.

It can be difficult to select a web host, as many features of hosting services are on the surface the same. Therefore, we like to provide comments on hosts that we have dealt with to aid others in service shopping. 

The first host that we’ll comment on is 100Megs Web Hosting, which we use to host washcreek.com. We’ve been using 100Megs for several years, and have been very satisfied.

We appreciate the fact that they have not been stagnate in their hosting plans, as well illustrated by the fact their namesake plan no longer includes 100 MB of space but rather 400 MB. That said, they haven’t been the most aggressive on disk space allocation increases, and if you are looking for huge storage capacities, they will not be the best value. 

The bandwidth quotas they offer are competitive, starting with 16 GB for their $5 plan. We appreciate their honesty in not labeling any plan as “unlimited”, as many “unlimited” plans actually contain fine-print limitations and exclusions. The availability of SSH support is valuable to developers needing to upload tarballs and other common tasks.

When working with a photo gallery, we were pleased that their PHP installation had high upload and memory ceilings. One can easily upload via PHP multiple 8 megapixel images, which the PHP installation has no problem generating thumbnails from.

There’s nothing worse than setting up on a new host and getting struck with a “gotcha” of some surprise minor technical limitation. We’re pleased that we haven’t had any of these with 100Megs Web Hosting; they deliver what they say will.  

Particularly if you are colorblind, or simply if you are in need of some color inspiration, a color scheme selection tool can be very helpful. I’ve found the interface on this scheme tool particularly convenient. If you have an idea of one color you’d like to start with, it can ably suggest additional colors to complement it.

The Wash Creek Blog exists for commentary and observations on pretty much anything. In particular, we’ll comment on software, techniques, and websites that we find useful in the course of our business.