Overview
Alder is a PHP script based static gallery generator, designed to public one picture per day to a website with RRS2 image feed, taking style from CSS templates and having overall, year, month and day archives. Whilst intended for a single image per day, it is designed to cope with up to 1000 images per day and will automatically create thumbnails and optimise all images for loading speed.See it in action in my gallery.
Aims
This project was started because I am terrible at getting the photos I take published: I want them to be displayed with some controllable style, with EXIF data available for those that wish to view it, have large enough images to actually see the content and to degrade gracefully when no 'fancy' features like JavaScript or Flash are available. The biggest single item was the ability to have images appear via RSS, so there is no need to pay a special visit in order to see my latest photo - having the entire site as static files was a fairly large secondary aim so it's trivial to move the data to almost any random web space provider, or mess around with load-balancing.I tend to shoot photos in bursts: I have often had more than one week go by without picking up the camera, but some weekends I may have a few hundred images to sort through. This program will release one image each time it is run, allowing me to stockpile decent photos and release them in a way that is easy for viewer to pay attention to. Discovering that an RSS feed suddenly has 20 items in it means that the impact of each one is lessened. There's a reason why Dilbert is published one strip per day.