Andrew Jones briefly answers a question about putting photos into your blog at : Mac, blog and photos. Both the suggestions cater for simple blogging – Blogger + Flickr or Typepad. (Flickr can be used with other blogging systems too – see here for the list).

Now that works probably for a lot of people but I’m thinking about setting up some photo galleries – with the option of using some of the images in a blog or two – but want more control for the set up. I already have my own web host with database, PHP/Perl and other features, and would like to configure the set up how I’d like. I’d also like to be able to provide access control – for viewing and for others to upload – and to set default parameters for maximum photo dimensions and file sizes etc. I’m also not keen of “giving” my photos to someone else to manage and then having people who need to access them giving personal information to a third party.

Enter Gallery which seems to do most of what I need, is open source and has some sort of integration with various CMSs and blogs like Movable Type (plug-in here). From the Gallery web site,

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

Now, I have all of my photos set up in iPhoto on my iBook where they have meta-data (comments, dates, times, titles etc.) linked to the photo. I don’t want to have to do the whole export photos from iPhoto to a folder (losing the meta-data), use the Gallery Java-based importer to upload them (slowly) and then have to renter the details in Gallery. So I was overjoyed to discover: iPhotoToGallery which is a plug-in for iPhoto (version 2+) that allows you to select your photo’s in iPhoto, select export from the file menu and send them to Gallery on the server (see screenshot). How cool is that? Now my only limits are disk-space and upload bandwidth.

Anyway, for those of you who have a technical bent, want more control over the look-and-feel of your photo sets, and access controls for others then this might work for you. I’ll be trying it out over the next few weeks to see how it works but as always YMMV.

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is a web site that brings together information and links related to things like “transhumanism”, technological augmentation of human beings and technological approaches to longevity and immortality.

By promoting and publicizing the work of thinkers who examine the social implications of scientific and technological advance, we seek to contribute to the understanding of the impact of emerging technologies on individuals and societies.

To keep Paul happy I’m also posting the link to the Chiefs wallpaper.

Official Super 12 Chiefs Site : 2005 Poster

You can download the 2005 Hurricanes wallpaper and screensaver (Mac & PC) here .

Spent Easter up in the lovely Bay of Islands where we went to a family wedding and just spent a bit to time unwinding. Here are a couple of panorama shots at the place we were staying – The Pukeko’s Nest. Well worth effort to get there (it’s about 30 minutes off Highway 1 near Kawakawa but a lot of that is dirt road). Serene and safe surroundings (unless you’re a 2 year old with a desire to investigate the mangrove swamps) with no imposition of “modern life”.

Mangroves are a nice metaphor for Easter for me. There is this swampland, covered by the sea a high tide, that looks just like yucky, sticky, smelly mud. Yet out of this seemingly “dead” land life teems – mangrove trees grow up, crabs scuttle, pukekos nest – the place that looks initially uninhabitable is a rich, ecosystem. But you don’t know that unless you take time to “unwrap the grave clothes.”

Lawrence Lessig’s recent blog post never again links in nicely with the discussion Tim highlighted at SanBlogue: When copyright fails. In it Lessig comments on the restrictive nature of “Publication Agreements” and the loss of author’s copyright. His slant is that he will now “not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.” Interesting to see if it can be done.

Tim’s post here points out that sharing copyright with journal publishers does come with strings attached – as in you might not be able to submit it to an electronic repository (as hypothesised here a day or so ago).

See: SansBlogue : When copyright fails…

Might be interesting to see what the definition of a repository is. Tim and co’s idea seems to be for a place to upload files to. I wonder if instead each person is responsible for hosting the files (via department space or their own domain name) and then the “repository” merely provides an indexes to those files. A biblical studies Napster?

Following up from the posting about making theological vignettes on video, there might be an easier way to do it first up – via pod-casting. Have a look at : Wired 13.03: Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star.

Read the following essay the other day on the train which seemed to link in with a number of other ongoing threads of discussion out there.

In his essay ‘Web of Babylon’* on the nature of fan fiction Kurt Lancaster ponders the nature of power relationships within publishing and the generations of new micro communities. [Fan fiction is where writers take aspects of an existing literary world - say a television show like Babylon 5 - and create a new but derivative work that expands upon the canonical literature. So you might take character behaviour demonstrated in the TV show but place it into another unvisited context.] So the original text isn’t simply produced and consumed only as directed. Rather as Lancaster notes it is transformed and transforms the readers.

‘Fandom here’, media scholar Henry Jenkins tells us, ‘becomes a participatory culture which transforms the experience of media consumption into the production of new texts, indeed of a new culture and a new community’. Fans may create new cultural texts, but they do not necessarily build a new full-sized community. In anything, what evolves out of their creative productions are micro-communities. (p.309)

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Just had the video of Alain de Botton’s Philosophy : A Guide to Happiness out of the library for the week (I don’t think it ever made it onto NZ TV). It’s a television version of his book The Consolations of Philosophy where he summarizes what six different philosophers said about things like love, self-esteem and anger (one philosopher per topic) and how that might give wisdom for living in the everyday.

It was the format of the episodes (30 mins each) that attracted my attention (the content did too). Started wondering whether you could do that same thing with theologians – pick 6-8 theological figures and then look at how each one might relate to an aspect of the Christian life. Turn each into a short video for use in class or with discussion groups. Emphasis upon the practice of faith.

BTW – my favourite part of the video was in the Epicurus on happiness/good living episode where an advertising agency is approached to develop ads that counter consumerism.