We spent today playing up on Leckhampton Hill. I took the oppurtunity to play with my new camera.

I haven’t got the hang of action shots yet at all – I struggled to get the riders even vaguely in focus. More experimenting needed there methinks. The light wasn’t great either, which is never very helpful, but thats life. I had a bit of fun playing with the macro modes, getting nice close-ups of various bits of the bike, as you can see below.

As for the riding itself, it was ace. I struggled with the mud a bit to begin with, but once my confidence started to return I really enjoyed myself. I was starting to flow really well until blammo! My chain device decided it wanted to lose the chain — for the first time in months. Maybe it was something to do with the chain having more mud than lube on it, or perhaps running the chain a little too long isn’t helping. Maybe one of the grub-screws coming loose had something to do with it. Either way, a few minutes with an allen key sorted it out, and it didn’t come off for the rest of the day.

We rode most of what Lecky has to offer today — everything from tight nadgery singletrack to flat-out wide open rocky chutes. It really is a great mountain bike playground. If only it was a little bit bigger…

You can see the pictures over in The Gallery.

Its entirely possible that there’s a new camera sat on my desk now, along with a gert big memory card :o)

That’s quite impressive service from Amazon – I didn’t order it until about 22:30 on Friday night!

It took me a while, but I found one. A simple PHP based gallery system, that uses XHMTL and CSS for the layout.

If only I’d googled “Simple PHP Gallery” in the first place I might well have found it at my first attempt. Because its called just that – and it comes from relativelyabsolute.

The only pictures in there at the moment are some from a trip to Bringewood in July of last year, that I was using to test it all out. I guess I’d better get a new digital camera to fill it out a bit then. Canon Powershot A85 anybody? Update: Its entirely possible that I’ve just ordered that very camera…

Right, non geeky readers can stop reading right about now and go look at the pictures…

The Geeky Bit: Implementing SPG

Still with me? Good.

Installing SPG is dead simple. Download the .zip file, extract it, and then upload that to a folder on your website. As the system is so very very simple, its dead easy to customise it to fit in with your site aswell. Just alter sp_index.php and sp_styles.css to suit.

The hardest part came about because I’m using a fixed width template on this site. Left to do as they pleased, images that were wider than the site quite simply broke it. So I decided to set a max-width on the images, then let the user click on them if they wanted to see them full size. Easy enough, or so you’d think. Just set the max-width in the CSS file and alter sp_index.php to put a link around the image. No problem.

That is to say, no problem until we come to test it in Internet Explorer. IE doesn’t actually support max-width does it? JavaScript to the rescue then.

With a bit of help from the peeps on the SitePoint forums, I knocked up a simple little script especially for IE, that figures out if the image is too big and scales it appropriately. You can find it in the head portion of the gallery pages.