i don't think i mentioned that i have taken over running the web site of the ealing photography group. so i gave it a redesign. i did most of the work round christmas time. you may not remember what it was like before but i used it as a chance to teach myself a bit about stylesheets and am simply writing the code for it rather than using any software package. i have hopefully gone for something clean and simple using some of the structure of the previous designer that also looks like it is part of london independent photography

part of my theory round it is that i want to try and shift some of the work over to members of the group – so rather than me creating galleries i have suggested people create sets in flickr or create a slideshow using 280slides – see my idiot's guide . then i can simply paste the code for their gallery into their members page. it seems to work pretty well though pages can take a while to load up the slidesets. for flickr sets i am using pictobrowser – see my member's page for an example. and for 280slides it gives you the code – see brig's page for an example

the only irritating thing is that when i created a group in flickr for the recent garcin challenge it turns out that only photos from people with a pro account show up in the slideshow so i have had to create a slideshow after all.

i have also set up a blog for anyone in the group to use with tumblr – tumblr seems a very straightforward interface. and i have then found a widget to pull the feeds into the blog page. widgets are ugly but my coding skills are such that i wasn't sure how else to do that and i have tried to make the widget as clean as i could. if anyone knows another way let me know…

web design and coding is not my area of expertise but it's surprising what you can do with a cheap book on html and a bit of blog experience. now is the challenge of encouraging participation in the group many of whom probably preferred it when someone else did everything!