USATODAY.com just put up a new photo gallery presentation, which I think is absolutely great. I didn't have anything to do with the project, but I will be able to take advantage of the plumbing behind it for other efforts.

Everything about the gallery is database-driven which makes it easy to get at specific slides or galleries from the back end. All the slides are tagged and categorized as well, which makes finding what you need much easier. I plan to have in-context mini-players all over the place, each pulling in related photos based on tag or category. We've already started this on our Topics Pages (example here), although we're using Daylife to supply the photos in this case.

I'm also working on moving our first effort at Reporter Index pages and site taxonomy-based index pages over to the Topics Pages infrastructure. There won't be a huge benefit to the readers from this, but the internal benefits will be many in terms of maintainability and flexibility of the presentation and underlying data architecture. The original work on the existing Reporter Index pages was done in 2006 with about 2 days of effort (and it shows). Nobody even asked for this, I just realized one day that I could produce these pages based on what I already stored in the database, so I just did it. Now this needs to be revisited and refactored.

Very cool. One of my West Point classmates, Tim Kopra, is aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and is tweeting his experiences and daily activities. I don't understand most of what he's talking about, but it's fun to read. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/astro_tim/. There's also a page on the Army website at http://goarmy.com/space that's worth checking out.