What an afternoon of random ideas. During a rather slow drive home from work, I started thinking about new site designs for Ka’anapali Dreamin’ and came up with a few goodies. After some quick browsing for inspiration and a handful of pencil sketches, I arrived at something woth throwing together in Photoshop.
Getting ready to fire up the laptop, I soon became distracted by yet another idea while looking at one corner in my office at home. You see, I have been a fan of the Islands Gallery Day Calendar
for a few years now, and whenever I come across a day that features Hawaii, I put it on my wall.
for a few years now, and whenever I come across a day that features Hawaii, I put it on my wall.
As you can imagine, one would gather quite a few of these over the course of 3 years (I’m counting 39 so far, with a few of them practically duplicates). And in all of that time, I had yet to think of using my own photos to create an online version. But for whatever reason, today I did.
I already have a Today’s Photos section of Ka’anapali Dreamin’ that features three different photos each day (albeit it on a rotation). The same three photos can also be found on the site’s home page in the sidebar as a slideshow using the Google AJAX Slideshow and a custom feed I put together.
I also already have a daily game called Is It Maui? that features a new photo (via Flickr) each day that was taken on one of the islands of Hawaii. Each of these photos has a subtle (or sometimes obvious) hint in them that tips off which island it was taken on, and the object of this simple game is to guess whether it was taken on Maui or not, and if not, which island. I have to use additional photos from Flickr because all of mine are from Maui (and that would have just made for a pretty lame game otherwise).
Yet despite having those daily displays on the site today, I still have this urge to make something like this daily calendar just because I can probably do it in a day or two. There is, of course, the laborious task of going through and finding 365 pictures to use (I don’t plan on cheating and including the weekend as one photo). I have certainly taken my share of photos that I could use, but that part of this would still be very time consuming.
Then, there are the options of what I could do with it once it’s finished. Obviously, I’d find a home for it on the Ka’anapali Dreamin’ site somewhere (no doubt in the Daily Maui section). I could also publish it as an RSS feed and style it for a Google Gadget that people can add to their iGoogle page (even if it’s just me). And as being an RSS feed, someone could also just add it to Google Reader and see a warm Maui photo everyday. And then maybe I could integrate it with Facebook, … well you get the idea.
I’ll probably have a working prototype up by the end of the night, and then I’ll see if I’m still as excited tomorrow about having to go through all those photos. 🙂
Stay tuned.
