Will Wright Photography
This is my personal website for my amateur photography. It is built in .NET 3.5 using the AJAX toolkit. There is a lot going on behind the scenes to help give the user a more fluid experience and to help me stay up to date. I also used a lot of opensource effects packages for the UI.
The popup AJAX status notifications were built using the roar notification library. The underlying Javascript framework is MooTools. The lightbox uses Slimbox. The contact form is styled using Pretty Forms.
I built a "Library" object that both holds references to all the picture objects, as well as insuring that all picture objects have the nessecary resources. What I mean by that is that each picture on the site is treated as an object and each encompasses more than just a single image. Each picture object is based off of a master image file, which is non-web accessible, has a copyrighted image, a thumbnail image, and EXIF information. When the Library object is built it searchs the master image directory and if it finds new or updated master images it makes sure that the copyrighted image is created or updated, that the thumbnail is created or updated, and that the EXIF information is read and stored in the database.
This strategey let me accomplish two functional requirements that I had set for myself. First, in order to add a new image to the Library I only need to upload it to the master image directory. The next time the site is loaded it's copyrighted version and thumbnail will automatically be created for display. Second, I wanted to have a sort of tag cloud that let users explore the content in a unique way. The resulting menu in the header is dynamically created based on the EXIF tags of the master images. More occorances of a particular tag results in a larger font size while fewer results in smaller. Clicking on one of the tags causes an AJAX request that brings back only the Library items with that particular tag attached.
