Moving pictures
The New Rope String Band play all sorts of interesting venues – but even for them, the Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo was something special. So we wanted to make the most of the pictures they brought home with them: should we present them as a gallery of static images, or as a slide show?
Well, both, of course!
Our initial plan was to look at the software already available on the web. There are plenty of sites offering to display your pictures as a slide show, or software to allow you to do so from your own site – and we are all in favour of using what’s on offer: why reinvent the wheel? (That’s why, when Michael Jecks asked us about a keeping a photo diary, we built a page which used blogging software hosted on his own site, and the third-party Flickr photo hosting site.
So we started looking at slide shows on the internet: this one integrated well with the look of the site, but the photo quality wasn’t great (and the rapid rewind at the end of the show made me a little seasick), that one had better picture quality, but ran on a third party site… Which is why, in the end, Roger decided to write his own routine which would meet all our specific requirements. Sometimes, if you want a thing doing well, you have to do it yourself.
And if you want to know more, have a look for yourself!