I found another secret stash of photos that I had totally forgotten about! There are over 100, and half are already edited and ready to add to the gallery. This will save me a lot of time. And, of course, I've been trotting out to the local Master Gardener's Idea Garden and taking photos of their beautiful plants. We probably have at least six or seven updates' worth altogether.

This week's photos are, again, just an eclectic mix of images. Before every update I query the database to see which plants people are viewing and try to shore up the genera that are more popular. For example, the top three for the last month are Acer (5389 views), Viburnum (4990 views), and Hosta (3744 views). This is why I've pushed out so many Hosta images lately and I clearly need to take more maple photos this fall.

It's also interesting to see the trends. Abies has moved up in the rankings (now at #9, up two from #11), while Hydrangea has dropped (now at #11, down two to #9). Tulips are now on the scene whereas last month there was very little interest at all.

I'm still working on the database restructuring, but progress is being made! My first trial pass failed miserably and showed me all kinds of other things that needed to be done. I ended up buying a second hard drive for my laptop, so now I can work on hort.net from pretty much anywhere — in fact, I did just that while on a bus this weekend.

I've also been working on the page redesign and have a working proof-of-concept, but I need to mess around with it some more. It's very cool. 😃 If anyone is interested in testing the new layout, please let me know! I'd also like to hear if the photos look too washed out on your system. I did all of the image editing on one computer (where they looked perfect), but when I look on the Mac they're too bright. I might need to redo some of these!

Christopher Lindsey, gallery maintainer

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    http://www.hort.net/gallery/date/2009-08-10/#ml