If you check out that horizontal nav bar at the top of the screen, you’ll see a link to photography. Hearing somewhere that I’m a pretty decent photographer, you may have even clicked on it, only to be disappointed by the annoying “under construction” message. Well, let me explain what’s happening.

I’m still unemployed and, right now, that’s the numero uno thing on my mind. I built this site to be something of a show-off site to employers in addition to being a personal rap sheet. But, let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: this site sucks. There’s little content, no real interactivity, and nothing, other than my occasional ramblings, making you want to come back and stay a while.

I don’t like that.

So, I’m currently building a complete J2EE eCommerce/personalization suite. It’ll have a login! It’ll be backed by a DB! If I ever decided to sell stuff, you could buy it right on the site! It’s all part of my drive to build a suite I can use for consulting ventures. I’ll need to find a host that will take servlets and JSPs (EJBs will be pushing it — I’m currently coding around that necessity right now anyway) which means my free hosting price will suddenly cost me. But, I should have something I’m proud of that will draw visitors and, potentially, could bring in enough to support itself.

So, what does this have to do with photography? Well, while I have spent some of my off-time developing film and scanning some of it in, I’ve been too preoccupied with this whole “new site” concept to really dedicate much time to it. I currently develop film in my kitchen (yeah, Dani just loves that) and dry it in the hall closet in a large garment bag that I’ve lined with a towel and a bowl of DampRid. It works OK for my needs. For prints, I have a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual SCSI film scanner that I scored off of UBid for $150. It only gets about 2400 DPI, but that’s still something like 8 Megapixels, which is better than many $5000 digital cameras. Plus, I have the option of developing on paper if I ever get myself back into a darkroom. I mess with the contrast and whatnot in Photoshop and, if I want a physical print, I can send the photo to oFoto.com and have them handle it. My Epson Color 880 doesn’t do the greatest job on photos.

So, with all that, it should be easy to get a gallery up here, but I’m thinking I’d like to do it in a style similar to Photo.net, where they have the ability for people to comment on the photos below each shot. They use Ars Digita to run their site. I could use CGI to do something similar but a) I’m not the biggest fan of Tripod’s CGI setup (ERROR LOGS!!! I NEED ERROR LOGS!!!) and b) what a pain in the tuckus. I love Perl, and when we didn’t have such things as JavaScript, ASP, JSP, etc. it was a WONDERFUL way to add interactivity to a site, but the time it takes to fork the process and interpret the script can add unnecessary weight to the CPU. Plus, Perl is just not a great language for large applications. It’s PERFECT for most administrative or automation tasks. I like to use it as glue for all of my various apps on Unix. And, for supporting CVS tagging and such, it’s the best. But I hate developing anything reaching serious complexity in it.

Besides, I REALLY need to get more Java experience. I want employers to see that I’m not all talk — I do know my stuff. And for that, I need code samples. And a working application. And these things take time.