I'm starting to develop a new "but hasn't everyone else done that already" program: a web photo gallery.

I looked on freshmeat, but amazingly I couldn't find any with the one "feature" I'm looking for: showing several photos together on the same page. All the programs I found were geared towards showing one photo at a time.

I was originally thinking about doing this in PHP; a language I don't know, but which seems to be a mishmash of languages I do know and is popular for webapps these days. I got the O'Reilly book Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL, but when I got to the part which described (and praised) using the PEAR HTML_Template_IT templating package. That made me think "If you're going to use templates, why use PHP? The whole language was developed around the idea of mixing program code with HTML."

I knew that using templates is good advice; at work I'm doing jsp stuff. Some of the old code uses scriptlets while the newer stuff is all tag libraries. The pages with scriptlets are like a train wreck of java and html!

I recently discovered the HTML::Template perl module and I'm think I'll be using that (along with CGI::Application) to write my new app, which I've tenatively decided to call photopage.

It will be pretty easy to just generate the pages of photos, but I might want to do some AJAXy thing to get photos from the following page downloaded in advance. I'll just do the dumb thing first, though.

I continue to be frustrated by my inability to send Chinese e-mail from Mozilla without setting my entire environment to Chinese. The one time I managed to get chinput to come up it interfered so badly with my ability to enter plain English text (which is what I do 99% of the time) that I pretty much gave up.

I recently found this Firefox input method plugin for Indic languages, and I'm thinking that's a good approach for me. It would also be nice to just be able to enter accented characters and write peoples' European names correctly.

That's a much more interesting project than my dumb photopage one, but I don't have any pictures the most recent two months of my son's life online yet, and I don't want to get the real solution together instead of just putzing around with static html again (and again, and again ...) So photopage it is.