The purpose of this section is simple: no Sptifire Site would be complete without a decent set of images, and indeed I would like every picture on this site to tell a story. Therefore I have been working on a solution where not only every photo is described, captioned and credited, but also to allow readers to add their own comments, sharing further knowledge they may possess about a particular photograph. To achieve this, I wanted to use Blogger as publishing platform, but putting together a good template for category-driven library explores Blogger’s capabilities to the limit, at least when the latter is set for publishing to external site.

All this puts a requirement for Javascript to be enabled in your browser to access the photographs, but, as my statistics tell me, for 98.99% of visitors this should not pose any problem: pages will simply appear as usual. However, for this reason I’d also like to see the solution as something of a beta (trial) version. Please let me know if you experience any problems with it.

For the benefit of other Bloggers here’s the outline of the solution. Aircraft enthusiasts are kindly asked to excuse the geeky language below this point.

The solution, which took some scratching in the head to develop, required a degree of Javascript to be employed. In particular, I found an extremely useful code snippet for Automatic List of Labels for Blogger Classic Templates / FTP here. For those researching for similar solutions, there are also ASP and PHP scripts here, here and here, but the Javascript version is by far the most elegant and actually based on the supported interface of Blogger as opposed to various workarounds.

Other dynamic features have also been incorporated in the template, particularly to achieve the following benefits: