Today I finally found time to do one last remaining thing for this site: fork the nextGEN gallery plugin to allow for customizable captions for lightbox. If you click on the random image on the right, you’ll notice the caption includes the name of the gallery from which it’s taken. Simple little change, but it required customizing the templates. My change lets you enter the caption format within a setting.

I’ve contributed the code back to the project via bitbucket here, but I’m really not sure whether or not they’ll want to use it. It’s a pretty big script and although I was careful not to introduce any regression risk to the millions of users the plugin already has, it’s entirely possible they’ll have no use for it.

Anyway, it’s there if you want it. :)

[EDIT: I heard from Michael Weichert who seems to think it’ll make it into a version at some point. Cool.]

*sigh* boy, WordPress sites are sure vulnerable. Yesterday I noticed that my site was advertising “Cheap Cialis” which came as something of a surprise…

I haven’t gotten to the source of the hack yet, but I’m doing all the usual stuff to prevent it from happening again.

So in case things look wacky, bear with me. :)

My goal was to reach 400 bird species sighting this year: as of Nov 15th, mission accomplished! During my travels I took a number of photographs of the birds listed here. Check out: http://www.benjaminkeen.com/birding/

Fiji (12)

Fiji Parrotfinch
Collared Lory
Pacific Reef Heron
White-faced Heron3
Common Myna
Wandering Tattler
Red-vented Bulbul
Vanikoro Flycatcher
Collared Kingfisher
Wattled Honeyeater
Crested Tern
Fiji Woodswallow

New Zealand (61)

Bellbird
Pukeko
Song Thrush
Stitchbird
Tui

…

The last few years I’ve been getting more and more into bird watching, or “birding” as the more officious insist on calling it. When I was traveling last year, a lot of my time was going to various birding spots in New Zealand, Australia and other countries. I thought it was high time I updated my site to include.

I’ve open-sourced a lot of the images through wikimedia, so if you need any of them – for whatever purpose – let me know and I’ll ensure they have the appropriate “rights” to let you do whatever you want with them. *sigh* what an absurdly legal world we live in.

For the moment, I’ll start with some local wildlife shots I’ve taken, then over time upload some older shots. Enjoy.

Well, Google I/O was as fun as always, but now I’m back to real life for the foreseeable future. No trips planned, no vacations, nothing but work. Yikes.

As mentioned elsewhere my focus open source-wise I’m focusing on the generatedata.com rewrite, but that has to wait for a little while. I’ve been roped into doing some domestic work around the house – building a new cat run for my girlfriend’s mum – which is a fair bit of work. So for the next 2-3 weeks I won’t be getting much open source work done.

Oh, that and car-hunting. This week my car died a terrible death and was declared “unsafe to drive”. Double yikes. And it was a 1990 Dodge Shadow – who could’ve predicted that…?! *

* sarcasm.