Over the past few months, I have been hard at work on a new version of Monkey Album, the software I use to display my photography at this site. The new version is now live, and includes the following changes:

Per-Picture Comments

This is a feature I've wanted to do since day 1. Visitors to this site may now leave comments on each picture, via a handy WordPress-style comment form. Akismet is being used for anti-spam purposes (it will be interesting to see how well it works), and several built-in WordPress functions are being used for sanitization purposes. I'm a little nervous about turning this feature on, but I will gauge how well it works over time and adjust as necessary. Thanks to the magic of cookies, you only need to enter your author information one time.

Better Album Previews

The previous album selection page was sorely in need of an update; it wasted too much screen space and generally looked bad. No more! Album previews are now handled in a much more professional manner, and I'm proud of the results. I really like the wide-screen style preview image, and I hope you do too.

RSS Feeds

Two feeds are now available for my photo album: a feed following new albums, and one following new comments. The latter is probably not as interesting to you as the former, but I'm making both available.

Cleaner Presentation

The overall presentation of my photos should be a little cleaner now. Vertical space has been improved, color schemes now match my primary site theme, and other minor tweaks have been made here and there.

In addition to these changes, a number of administrative changes have been made, all of which will make my life much easier. As always, if you find a bug, please let me know. So much has changed in this new release, that I'm sure a few things fell between the cracks; letting me know about them will help get them fixed quickly.

Enjoy!