Merging of Two Websites

Recently I’ve been talking about the merging of two websites on Twitter as well as Facebook. Well today I decided to tidy it up and make it happen live. Though I am sure there are some little aspects to deal with (such as redirecting one site to another site).

So what sites am I talking about anyway? I decided to merge TylerIngram.com and TylerIngramPhotos.com. Since TylerIngramPhotos.com is primarily a photo showcase website with little traffic, I thought it might be best to just merge it into this site (the blog) since I tend to update this way more often than my photo site. I also think it might be easier to share one website with people who are interested in my photos, but might also find my writing to be of interest as well and vise-versa.

What was done?

Since TylerIngramPhotos.com was more of a one page sort of site (that was manipulated to look like many), I thought I would look through the code I wrote and port it into a WordPress environment. TylerIngramPhotos.com uses the Flickr API extensively and since most of my code is function base, it was fairly simple to move over into the WordPress Environment without too much trouble. There was some CSS issues that I dealt with, though for the most part they should be corrected now.

All the photos are pulled from Flickr from a particular Collection. This collection stores various Sets which holds the photos themselves. The great thing about using Flickr’s API, is that I can pull any data from my photos that is stored on Flickr. The tags, or keywords that the photos on Flickr have are used here to pull up the top 5 most related blog posts. I hope this helps people who land on a photo stick around a little longer and check out some other things here on my site.

You can check out TylerIngram.com/photos for the Collection itself.

What else needs to be done?

I find that I am forever adding, tweaking or changing so I am sure there are other things that need to be done. It looks like I might need to fix the positioning of the top header menu so it aligns vertically better with the social media icons.

I need to look at my Photo of the Day script and implement that in an easy and fun way.

Add more photos into my Portfolio Collection (the collection on Flickr for which my photos are displayed from). Granted not all photos are everyone’s cup-of-tea, but, I do like what I have there so far. I know there are more photos to add, and I am sure I’ll look at ones to weed out.

I need to redirect TylerIngramPhotos.com to this site and reactivate the Photograph Page I have stored in the WordPress database. Perhaps add some sub-pages to the Photography section for Services/Prices that I offer.

What Can You Do?

A couple of things you can do for me. First off, if you come across any weird issues or bugs, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ve so far tested this in Firefox 3.* and IE 7. Typically I find that if it works in those two, chances are it will work in the rest (mostly).

Second, you can Like my Facebook page! Yup, I created a single Facebook page to run for both my blog here and whatever photography stuff too.

Last but not least, if you have any suggestions for my site, I am always listening!

Hope you like the changes!