New collection: David Charles Cummer

David Charles Cummer
Plastic bag of 1500 snapshot prints, rather jumbled, that I was brought from David Cummer's apartment.
A plastic bag of photos

My old friend David Cummer died quite unexpectedly early in March. Thanks to some work by Ann Totusek with his family, I got a plastic bag with about 1500 snapshot prints (and a few sets of negatives) to scan what I could use for this archive (which is around 500; with around 300 making it to the site).

Spent most of March and April on that, but as of today I have a preliminary sort of the photos, and have them posted to the site. They’re all together here, or integrated by convention, date, and person in the various other ways to view the archive.

Each new collection brings a new viewpoint into the archive, and that’s always interesting, often a learning experience.

Official Launch

The Minn-Stf Fan Photo Archive, and hence this web site, will be formally launched at Minicon 55. I’m giving a presentation at 4pm Friday, 15-Apr-2022 in the Park 1 room. Sorry, it does require Minicon membership to attend.

Since we’ve been operating informally for a while, this won’t really change very much. But it’s a chance for people interested in this (or archiving other aspects of fannish history also) to get together.

Maps!

I’ve been experimenting with putting geolocation information (GPS coordinates, basically) into photos. I’ve only done a few hundred, but you can already see clusters of images at different locations in Minneapolis.

Gallery page showing map

And I finally got the plugin to display this information in the gallery website activated and configured; so now, if you’re in a gallery with geolocation information, there’ll be a map (somewhat inconveniently shaped and located). You can also click on the groups of photos showing on the map to see those photos. (When all the location info I have is a city, I’m using the center of the city or the city hall for the location I add. Mostly we have a little more precise information than that.

I guess this means it’s worth the trouble to add the geolocation information!

Mystery Photos

I’ve put up three galleries of mystery photos from DavE’s collection. Anything people can figure out about when or where (and there are some open “who”, too) would be useful.

A collation, A fallcon, and a Bozo Bus party.

WordPress Themes–—Bah, Humbug!

Oh, there are probably many wonderful ones. But the process of finding them is deeply ugly.

For this site, I’m looking for a theme that supports a homepage image that’s not on the other pages, that supports featured images in both pages and posts and a sidebar (I think I’d prefer right) on the homepage, posts, and pages.

I don’t actually care if it supports picking fonts and sizes and such for everything in the UI; so long as they’re implemented right underneath, that’s easily set in custom CSS. I do however want good modern “responsive” layout so it works on phones and tablets and desktops, and on non-full-screen windows too.

Despite it being a photo site, I don’t care about gallery or lightbox support in the WordPress part; that’s all down in the Piwigo gallery section.

Oh, and is free. Or at least a one-time purchase (I see the rental price of $49/year remarkably commonly), but there are so many decent free ones that it seems irresponsible to pay.

Anybody who stumbled on the site after I turned off the login requirement today (or any of the few people I notified for the “soft open”) may have seen it flapping from theme to theme as I played with another half dozen today.

(The theme here right now, as I’m first typing this, is the free version of Seos White.)

Known Problems

Current Problems

Fixed Problems

I believe these problems, previously reported here, are fixed.

No way to register

Until just now, there was a problem that the top-level WordPress site was requiring logins and not allowing new registrations. I believe that is fixed.

These problems are fixed, I think. I’m leaving them here for a bit, until I’m sure, and that everybody has had a chance to notice.

Some images don’t show full-size

Some images don’t show when you click through from thumbnails. You can probably get to see some larger version of the image by selecting the photo sizes icon (a box with arrows diagonally outwards to upper left and lower right) and picking a different size. It doesn’t remember that size when you go to the next photo, or when you come back to this one.

Original image display opens pop-up window and then errors

However, the settings that made this happen make the “some imaged don’t show full-size” error much less common.

Soft Launch!

Possibly this site has enough content for it to be time to get some outside opinion on it. So, welcome to the “soft launch” of the Minnesota Science Fiction Society Fan Photo Archive. (Since that’s such a mouthful, mostly I will refer to it as the MNSTF FANPA.)

The main article about the archive is at “About” on the main menu.

Not everything works quite right. The content is nowhere near complete (a bit over 6000 photos). And, worst, there are things I haven’t figured out how to do at all, and other things I’m not sure what I’ve chosen will work well for us.

I don’t anticipate having comments or discussion here on the top blog site. The gallery site will allow commenting on photos, and rating, for registered users.

Welcome!