My other half makes cakes, and like a good hubby I did her a website some time back - but like the old saying about cobblers children it should really be a bit more impressive than it is.

The main part is the gallery, and I started off with something I knocked up in an hour or so, but recently thought it needed some attention - didn’t look very good or work well, and was a nightmare to maintain.

So, the old quandary - do I start from scratch, search in vain for the perfect thing, or find something that’s close and adapt it (or put up with the failings)?

I went through a few gallery packages, and they either were to huge and clonky, or didn’t work (or I couldn’t be arsed to fiddle to make them work) or they had entirely the wrong feature set so I’d have to turn too much off. I didn’t want comments or other UGC / sharing / web 2.0 type features, I just wanted a nice simple way to display categorised groups of images with a little bit of description.

And since the images were being taken on a 6mp camera, and we didn’t want / need the full size image online, there should be an easy way to do the resizing / thumbnail generation etc.

And it should be light, and simple, and … nice.

I was just about to give up the search and write my own - I was thinking ftp images up into folders and have a very simple script that if it saw a new image would just display it, and if it found some meta-data in a text file or some such would disply that alongside. No need for databases or anything complex.

And then I found SPGM - and I found that someone had already written it. I’ve commented before on my love/hate with open source, but this is defintely on the love side. It’s just the thing, and almost exactly what I had in mind - in fact better because I didn’t have to write it.

So I install it, and it works first time, and I start thinking “OK, it’s great, but it could do with a basic tool to help with thumbnail creation and editing the meta-data” and then I read on and found that had been written too - SPGM Webministration - it was light and it worked first time and was just the thing. Two for two!

So I’ve knocked up a quick Firewoks macro to automate the process of generating 640×480 images to upload (don’t want to waste too much bandwidth by having the conversion done on the server) and 100 odd images are now online and looking funky(ish), in practically no time. And I start thinking “I wonder if there’s a tool to do that side of things too” and I check, and there is.

But I haven’t tried that one yet - no sense tempting fate.