i’m in the process of re-working both this blog and my photo site. for the photo site i’ve switched from zenphoto to jalbum — zenphoto didn’t really offer any decent support for displaying geo-tagged pictures, had at the point in time of switching too many security issues for my taste, and didn’t have such a slick looking theme as jalbum’s turtle skin.

for a couple of sub-albums i wanted to make use of the background music feature offered by the turtle skin. naturally, just shoving in one of the thousands of MP3 that we have on our music players wouldn’t do as the license for those tracks didn’t allow that. a couple of google searches for “free music” later, i ended up on the fantastic freemusicarchive.org page which has an interesting range of music licensed under one or the other creative commons licenses.

browsing through their stuff, i quickly found two albums that i wanted to use: “the four seasons (vivaldi)” album by john harrison with the wichita state university chamber players and “the cup of tea” by sláinte. adding both to jalbum was easy — download and drag-and-drop to the folders —, adding the license information was a bit more involving. adding a caption to the MP3s caused the turtle skin music playback to ignore the MP3s. i ended up adding conditional footer code via turtle’s header and footer tab:

    <ja:if exists="musicLicense">
        <p>music © ${musicYear} <a href="${musicArtistURL}">${musicArtist}</a>, 
           album <a href="${musicAlbumURL}">${musicAlbum}</a> licensed under a 
           <a href="${musicLicenseURL}">${musicLicense}</a></p>
    </ja:if>

what this does is that if the user variable musicLicense is set, it then will include a music attribution in the footer of the sub-album page. you add user variable for a sub-album/folder in jalbum via the edit button for that and then selecting the user variable tab on the right hand side.

here are the variable that i’m using:

musicLicense name of the music license; for example, CreativeCommons-ByAttribution-ShareAlike musicLicenseURL URL for the license musicArtist name of the artist(s) musicArtistURL URL for the artist page musicAlbum name of the album musicAlbumURL URL for the album page musicYear copyright year

the resulting footer then looks like this: