I had neglected my photo site for a while so, as it had started to pick up quite a few Stumbles, I thought I should freshen it up a bit. Cue orgy of tinkering e.g. I got rid of the horrible banner and replaced it with another horrible banner.

One thing I had been wanting to try for a while was to load the photos into CoolIris (formerly PicLens) for display. This was remarkably easy and the result is quite pleasing on the eye (although a few people have said that the display quality is a little reduce from the existing FlashRelief galleries).

It was made easier by the fact that the FlashRelief galleries were already setup with XML feed files so that conversion to Media RSS format was pretty quick (if anyone wants a quick way to how to convert FlashRelief XML files to Media RSS files give me a shout). There is also a publisher tool to make this process easy.

What was particularly nice is that I created a separate RSS feed for each of the galleries and then chained them together (with next, previous tags) to create one seamless stream.

Another one of the cool things you can do once it is all setup is drop the gallery in anywhere. Check it out on the photo site.

All in all, a really nice piece of kit.