I have had several people ask me if I accept donations for the work I am doing on Acidfree. I guess I could say no, but that wouldn't be very gratious, now would it. Besides, my wife, Lauren, would probably appreciate the nice dinner date that your donations would finance. I figure that is only fair — Acidfree takes me away from her — so you can ensure that she allows me to continue to work on Acidfree by giving a small amount to me to encourage her with flowers and fine dining. So click on the logo below and make a contribution.

Acidfree is meant to a simple, yet full featured photo album for Drupal. It was designed from the ground up as a node type for Drupal, so it is very well integrated into the Drupal architecture. It is much simpler than Gallery to set up and use, but most definitely has fewer features. And it will never have as many features. If you want more features, by all means use Gallery. But if you want a simple, easy to use, full featured photo album, this is the place for you.

Acidfree includes support for various image types (and it is easy to add more) and for basic video types (think short clips from your digital camera).

For the past three years, Sith has been the trusty server that this website and many of my other services have resided on. Over the past year, he has been showing signs of age. It has certainly been nice to have a server that I could administrate and do just about anything with. While having absolute power over the box was very nice, it was getting to the point that it was not worth the trouble of needing to fix all the problems. Let's face it, I always get lost when I go downtown and this is one less reason to get lost.

I noticed that one of my friends had a link that said hosted by Site5. So I went to check it out. I have been looking at virtual server plans for quite some time. Most plans were at the price where I would end up sharing the virtual host three ways just like I had been sharing my real server for the same price. Disk space was really at a premium for almost all of these plans. With Sith I had 8 GB of space all to myself. If I shared three ways, that would be at least 24 GB (unless we wanted more space) at which point almost all the virtual server plans were out of my price range. I had completely discounted hosting plans because I didn't think they could do what I wanted them to do. Well, it turns out that most really don't, but Site5 does. As I looked through the features they had listed, I was very impressed. So I made a list of things I use Sith for.

About a week ago, vernon.mauery.com and www.mauery.com both had a major overhaul, though it probably (hopefully) went unnoticed by all the users. I had been running Drupal 4.6 for about a year, ever since I started using Drupal. Drupal 4.7 was released a couple of months ago and I finally got around to upgrading my website. I figured it would give me a chance to work on a few Acidfree bugs over the holiday weekend as well. I managed to fix/close 25+ bugs over the the holiday. Granted, some of them I closed as "won't fix," but I did actually fix some bugs and implement a couple interesting features. And now that I am running Acidfree 4.7, it will give me more motivation to make sure it works correctly.

After nearly 2 weeks of coding and testing, I am happy to release some major updates in the Acidfree code base. The changes really are very subtle from a user's perspective, but are quite intrusive considering the code size. The code base is about 2500 lines of code and nearly 1000 of those lines were changed. But it was definitely for the better — better video handling, better image manipulation, better mime-type handling.

Please try it out and let me know what you think. Submit bugs and feature requests if something is not right. Submit patches if you want. I want to make sure Acidfree is done The Right Way™, so by all means, take it for a spin and give it feedback.

Acidfree is the 4th generation of a brainchild of Darren Hart, Bret Gundersen, and mine as we sought to create a cool webpage that our families could use as a communication hub. The original photo albums looked about the same, but were so integrated into the website that it was a bit of work to extract them and insert them into my own young website. The code was, frankly, not my best work ever. But I was young, inexperienced in web development, php, and user interfaces so my shortcomings can be overlooked for this first generation. The important point is that I got better.

It was brought to my attention that videos have been broken up to this point. I fixed the problems and made the pages XHTML 1.0 compliant. Then, I tested the video page enough to satisfy me. Here are the supported platform / plugin / browser setups I have tested:

• Linux / mplayer-mozilla / Galeon
• Linux / mplayer-mozilla / Firefox
• Linux / mplayer-mozilla / Mozilla
• Linux / mozilla-plugin-vlc / Galeon
• Linux / mozilla-plugin-vlc / Firefox
• Windows XP / Windows Media Player 10 / Internet Explorer 6
• Windows XP / Windows Media Player 10 / Firefox