Bay Area Wildflowers (Shallow Thoughts)

Bay Area Wildflowers

Spring is in full swing, and all around the bay area the parks are ablaze with the colors of wildflowers -- blues and lavenders at Alum Rock, blues and yellows at Rancho San Antonio and oranges at Arastradero.

I've been shooting photos of wildflowers for years, always intending to collect them into a web page -- for my own reference (I always forget which wildflowers are which) as much as anyone else's.

At the same time, I've been gradually working on finding better ways of displaying photos on gallery pages. Most of my old pages use tables, which work fine in all browsers but don't scale very well with page size -- 4 images across may look fine in an 800 pixel wide window but look pretty silly at 1600 pixels. After playing with various CSS-based ideas for showing images and captions, I finally found the answer ("display: inline-block" is the key) on this brunildo.org CSS gallery demo. I adapted it for my site and wrote some PHP glue to generate the pages, and here's the result: Bay Area Wildflowers.

Update: Isn't it always the case? Just when you think you're done with something, you find out there's more to do. I wrote the preceding a week ago and then didn't manage to post it before leaving for a desert trip. And the desert was blooming! So here I am, ba-wildflowers site barely made public, newly back from the Mojave with a disk full of desert wildflower photos that aren't from the bay area. Looks like the "Bay Area Wildflowers" site needs to expand to a wider area ...

Tags: nature, wildflowers
[ 22:13 May 01, 2009    More nature | permalink to this entry | ]