Recent Galleries on Front page?

hopeless

Is there anyway to list the last ~5 galleries on the front page? I often pass out cards or give people the link the my site but then they have to navigate through the categories to find a particular bunch of photos (and often fail to find them).

This seems like it should be easy / obvious?


Jamie
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http://hopeless.smugmug.com

denisegoldberg

hopeless wrote:

Is there anyway to list the last ~5 galleries on the front page? I often pass out cards or give people the link the my site but then they have to navigate through the categories to find a particular bunch of photos (and often fail to find them).

There is a feed icon at the bottom of your home page with text next to it saying "Available feeds". If you click there, you'll see the option of showing recent galleries.

That's not really obvious to someone who isn't looking for it though.

You could use the URL generated by clicking on the feed and add it to the end of your bio.

For example, if I click Available feeds on your page, then cick RSS, I get a feed based on this url: http://hopeless.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=nickname&Data=hopeless&format=rss200.

At the end of your bio you could add something like

To see my most recent galleries, click <a href=http://hopeless.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=nickname&Data=hopeless&format=rss200">here</a>.

--- Denise

hopeless

denisegoldberg wrote:

There is a feed icon at the bottom of your home page with text next to it saying "Available feeds". If you click there, you'll see the option of showing recent galleries.

That's not really obvious to someone who isn't looking for it though.

You could use the URL generated by clicking on the feed and add it to the end of your bio.

For example, if I click Available feeds on your page, then cick RSS, I get a feed based on this url: http://hopeless.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=nickname&Data=hopeless&format=rss200.

At the end of your bio you could add something like

To see my most recent galleries, click <a href=http://hopeless.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=nickname&Data=hopeless&format=rss200">here</a>.

--- Denise

Thanks. I'd thought of doing something with the feed (I already use it with Feedburner's RSS-to-email functionality in my footer). The problem is that IE just renders the feed as XML (yuck) and feeds are a little too technical for the average family member (most can just about cope with email and a browser).

I just thought that there should be a module like the favourite photos or locations that can be put on the front page of a gallery. I've only recently realised that this was a problem: 3 separate people couldn't find the photos I'd put up because they weren't sure how I'd categorised them :-(

darryl

hopeless wrote:

Is there anyway to list the last ~5 galleries on the front page? I often pass out cards or give people the link the my site but then they have to navigate through the categories to find a particular bunch of photos (and often fail to find them).

This seems like it should be easy / obvious?

It should be easy and obvious. Somebody made this a feature request back in February and I seconded the motion.

I wrote a *nasty* JavaScript hack to replace your Featured Galleries with Recent Galleries, but it 1) requires a Power User account, and 2) is slow to load. It does just what you're thinking -- grabs the RSS feed (through JavaScript!), parses it, and formats the thumbnails and album names (no descriptions!) to look like Featured Galleries.

It's here but I'm not happy that SmugMug has not seen fit to do this themselves. It would be *much* simpler and efficient if they did it in-house and yes, offered it as a home page module like Maps or Popular photos.

denisegoldberg

hopeless wrote:

Thanks. I'd thought of doing something with the feed (I already use it with Feedburner's RSS-to-email functionality in my footer). The problem is that IE just renders the feed as XML (yuck) and feeds are a little too technical for the average family member (most can just about cope with email and a browser).

I just thought that there should be a module like the favourite photos or locations that can be put on the front page of a gallery. I've only recently realised that this was a problem: 3 separate people couldn't find the photos I'd put up because they weren't sure how I'd categorised them :-(

I just created my own recent galleries gallery because I wanted to give people an easy way to find my recent galleries. It's an html-only gallery - no photos - that I use to highlight galleries with the newest galleries shown first. Clicking on the photo or on the galley name will take the viewer into the gallery. Here's a link to that gallery - http://www.denisegoldberg.com/gallery/3137264_NGWFU.

It looks like you have a standard account - although you could have a power account and just haven't done any customization yet. In a standard account, I believe you can still put html in the description of the gallery. You just wouldn't be able to turn off the message saying there weren't any photos in that gallery.

One suggestion that is a lot more straightforward than using html in a gallery description would be to use the 4 featured galleries slots to show your most recent galleries. Select "feature gallery" from the gallery tools from the galleries you'd like to feature. Then adjust the positioning of your home page so that the featured galleries come before your categories.
http://www.smugmug.com/help/arrange-galleries

--- Denise

darryl

Manually setting up recent galleries is such a pain though, Denise. Especially if you're a frequent snapshooter/uploader. :-}

I think Jamie's got a Power Account since he's modified his header and footer. (That FeedBurner form is cool, BTW.)

If you're looking for automated Recent Galleries, you can try my hack. But it really would be better if SmugMug just offered this very basic functionality.

--Darryl

denisegoldberg

darryl wrote:

Manually setting up recent galleries is such a pain though, Denise. Especially if you're a frequent snapshooter/uploader. :-}

Well, considering that I've moved away from using Smug's category screens, and that using featured galleries (or your recent galleries hack) doesn't give me the ability to add a description to my recent galleries, I think I'll stick with my html-only recent galleries - http://www.denisegoldberg.com/gallery/3137264_NGWFU - page. It's actually a pretty small task to keep my entries there up-to-date.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

--- Denise

darryl

Oh yeah, for somebody with a site as customized as yours, my hack probably doesn't make sense. (And yeah, lack of descriptions is disappointing to me to.)

All of the hacks I've done try to preserve SmugMug's layouts, because 1) I'm lazy, 2) I like the basic SmugMug layouts, and 3) I really think SmugMug should have this functionality built-in, so I'm at least making it look like it would look if they did the right thing and just fixed them.

Because I apparently have some free time on my hands (or in my head), I've decided my next hack will be to take the "Recent Photos" or "Keyword Photos" feeds and use them to populate the Popular Photos widget.

--Darryl

hopeless

Yeah, got a power account but I really like the Smugmug layouts too (and I don't want yet another set of HTML/CSS files to keep updating) so I do the minimum customisation necessary.

Nice hack Darryl, I'll have to look into it later. I'm with Darryl on this though... it should be simple, it should be easy and it should be built-in. It'd be almost trivial for Smugmug to provide this functionality wouldn't it?

hopeless

Thanks!
Darryl, just tried out your script and it works wonderfully. Like you said, it's a hack but exactly the sort of thing I'd have tried to do if I had the time.

Thanks for putting in all the work!