Punderings

Lucas, our beloved 17 year old Siamese, and the nicest cat you’ll probably ever meet, had a seizure last night, and now needs both more medications and a even more special diet – and now, no dry food anymore.

Since we have two other lady cats who do need to eat dry food, we need to switch them from self-feeding dry food to having scheduled feedings. We’ve always had good luck with self-feeding dry food (with scheduled wet food on occasion) in the past, so it’s been a while since we’ve taken all the food away and only brought it out on a schedule.

Any tips on switching the ladies to only scheduled dry food feedings? I think they’ll both adapt eventually, since they are very social cats and are used to following us around, but I’m concerned about how best to make the switch without upsetting everyone anymore than our recent vet trips have done.

I want to put a gallery of family photos up on my 1and1 hosted website.  Gallery program suggestions? There are a million out there, and a thousand of them seem to have good reviews, so I need advice from people I trust (IBM’ers).

I have MySQL, PHP4, PHP5, Perl, and cgi access available on a shared linux hosting box.  It’s important to have good security (i.e. I only want family and friends to see these), and it would be nice to have commenting and such, but not really important.  I like XML and RDF stuff, as long as it doesn’t take too much extra maintenance.  I definitely want the presentation to include a filmstrip-like feature, or at least a last/next thumbnail, so it’s not just the “one picture and forward/back buttons” that some galleries use.

I already have some cat photos on flickr, but want to host these myself for security and ease-of-use reasons.  I.e. my grandmother can barely use the web, and certainly doesn’t know how to login to flickr so I can give her access that way…

What do you use to self-host photos?  An online gallery that does the work, or a local site generator where you just push a chunk of static files up to the server?