The tale of how simpleviewer inspired me to write GoodGallery

I first used simpleviewer a couple years ago and I really liked how easy it was to understand and how quick one could browse through a group of photos.

When I discovered the php script to build galleries serverside, I had never even thought something like that was possible.  I had no knowledge of serverside scripting and this script opened my eyes.  Unfortunetly I had a few problems with it on my Godaddy hosted website.  If the script took over 30 seconds to run, it would be killed by the server sometimes leaving half written files.  I promptly modified the php to not try to write thumbs that existed already, so I could at least just call the script a few times and build the gallery in multiple passes.  This worked and I was able to use the script on my site.

But I wanted more functionality...  I noticed that it did not delete thumbnails when the original was removed, it made it a little annoying to change galleries around.  Eventually I sought out other php photo scripts and I went through literally 800 different ones not finding the speed/ui quickness of simpleviewer.  A little over a year ago, I started writing my own gallery script from the ground up trying to replicate the attention to speed/ui that simpleviewer has while being more tolerant to different hosting configurations.  My journey led me to learn about HTML and CSS, Javascript, Ajax (a term I no longer use), and obviously PHP.  Four releases later, I completed GoodGallery 1.0

I solved all the problems I set out to solve and I'm pretty happy with the results.

-Thanks

(I hope I'm not being an annoyance posting on the troubleshooting page.)