Quirino Bridge in Ilocos Sur

We took a weekend trip to Vigan, Ilocos Sur back in July 2009.  As we approached Vigan, we were rewarded with wonderful scenic coastal views.  You can see the photo above as we’re about to cross the Quirino Bridge.

We arrived in Vigan mid-afternoon on a beautiful Saturday and checked into the Vigan Plaza Hotel.  July being the off-season, we didn’t have any difficulty getting a room without a reservation.

We stayed in the Ancestral Suite.  It was a nice, large room with two beds, air conditioning, and a good bathroom.  There was some noise from a bar downstairs at night, but it wasn’t too objectionable.

It’s conveniently located right next to Calle Crisologo, sort of the main attraction in Vigan.

Horse and Buggy vs. Motorbike

Right across from the Vigan Plaza Hotel, we hired a horse and buggy (Calesa) to take us around Vigan.

Calesa (Horse & Buggy)

Here’s a picture of the horse and buggy we rode in.

Since we got a late start, we weren’t able to make all of the usual stops, but we got in quite a bit.

Quirino President

The first stop was the Syquia Mansion, the home of President Quirino, and now a museum. A nice older gentlemen who had lived at the mansion for many years, and still lives there today, took us around and told us all the various stories. We gave him a donation.

Cafe Uno Vigan

We had a pleasant ride around town. Here we passed by Cafe Uno. I hear this is a neat place to eat. We didn’t have time to stop in, but I’d like to if we ever make it back in the future.

Bell Tower in Bantay, Ilocos Sur

We also passed by Bantay to see the Bell Tower. This is a really lovely area. The grounds were neat and well maintained. It’s a great spot for taking pictures.

Vigan Pottery

We stopped at small bunch of shops where there were potters at work, and got to watch them. It’s amazing how quickly they can fashion a perfectly formed piece of pottery. I remember making pottery in school many years ago, and it took me quite a bit longer and the result was not so perfect! But they make it look easy.

Hidden Garden

Hidden Garden is an interesting and beautiful place. We strolled around an amazing garden. It’s also a nursery you can buy plants from, and they’ve got a coffee shop you can get snacks at. I was thinking there might be a restaurant there, but there isn’t, really. It is a lovely place to stroll around and relax.

Baluarte Zoo

Next stop, the Baluarte Zoo. It was beginning to get dark by this time, so we only stopped long enough to peek inside and take a few photos. The huge dinosaur replicas were a unique touch.

Calle Crisologo in Vigan at Night III

By the time we made it back to Calle Crisologo the sun had set, and we were greeted by the wonderful soft glow of the warm street lamps and horse & buggies making their way up and down the cobblestone street.

The ambiance here at night is magical, and it made the trip really worthwhile. We ate dinner outside at Max’s, which was excellent, and headed back to our hotel room.

Max’s Restaurant in Vigan

The next morning we had a nice breakfast at the hotel, and walked over to Calle Crisologo to check out the shops during the day. Here’s a shot of Max’s Restaurant in the daylight.

Horse and Buggy in Vigan

While my wife shopped, I stood around outside taking photos of the horses and buggies.

Vigan Street Scene

It was a beautiful, sunny morning.

Lucy’s Antique Shop

There was lots of neat woodwork for sale.

After our morning walk, we went back to the hotel to pack up, and headed home.

Ilocos Sur Coastline

We were treated to the lovely view along the coast on our drive home.

Next time I’d like to make it farther north and spend some time in Laoag, Ilocos Norte. Maybe another stop in Vigan along the way would be in order.

If I were to visit a second time, I think I’d like to make it to Cafe Uno, and spend a little extra time at my favorite stops; the Bell Tower and Hidden Garden. And a night time stroll along Calle Crisologo.

You can see more photos at my photoblog, voxph photos. Here’s a link to all the Vigan and Ilocos Sur photos.

Have you been to Vigan? What were your favorite spots?

I really enjoy and appreciate photoblogs and think they’re underrepresented on the internet. So I’ve started a new project to help photoblog owners promote their photoblogs.

Photoblog Collection

It’s a free way to give your photoblog a little more exposure.  Submissions are manually reviewed to prevent spam.  Having other websites link to your photoblog is a good thing.  Search engines like to see that, and with enough links they start to give your photoblog more exposure when people search for places and things you’ve photographed.

Another place to promote your photoblog that I really like, is VFXY Photoblogs.  It aggregates photoblog feeds, so you can check out new photos from many photoblogs.  I enjoy finding new photoblogs there, and recommend it.

It’s also good to be listed on DMOZ. Check the various categories, and don’t overlook non-photoblog categories that fit the theme of your photoblog.  It may be easier to get listed in some categories than others.  What I’ve found, is that once you’re listed in DMOZ, many other sites copy the directory (including Google Directory), so it really increases the number of sites linking to your photoblog.

I know it’s easy to get discouraged if you’ve got a new photoblog.  So please take this as encouragement to stick with it, and keep sharing your photos!

Photoblogging with style

Now you can have the Mimbo style for your photoblog. Do you want to integrate an advanced photoblog into a WordPress site? By running both Cheesecake and WordPress, you can move between both and maintain a consistent style and design. Think of the possibilities:

• Run a dedicated Mimbocake/Cheesecake photoblog
• Add a photoblog to your magazine-style Mimbo/WordPress site
• Add a WordPress blog to your photoblog
• Use WordPress to host videos for your photoblog

You can visit my photoblog to see a sample of MimboCake.

http://www.voxph.com/

It uses Cheesecake and MimboCake for the photos, and WordPress and a modified version of Mimbo for a videos section in a subdirectory. It could just as easily be the other way around, with Cheesecake in a subdirectory for a WordPress site.

Download

Download MimboCake theme v1.0

Change Log

v1.0 3/15/2008 Initial Release (for Cheesecake v1.6 Beta 3)

Installation

If you’re not already running Cheesecake, you’ll want to get Cheesecake installed and running properly before proceeding. You can download Cheesecake Photoblog and get more information about it at:

http://cheesecake-photoblog.org/

The theme needs to be installed in the cheesecake /app/ directory. If you’ve placed the mimbocake file in the /app/ directory, you can unzip it using a command similar to this:

unzip mimbocake10.zip

This will create a new Mimbocake directory under /app/views/ and /app/webroot/. The /app/views/Mimbocake/ directory contains the bulk of the theme files, with the stylesheet, theme images, and javascript under /app/webroot/Mimbocake/.

After installing the files, activate the theme by logging into Cheesecake and selecting Mimbocake as the theme in the Admin Settings.

Settings

Under Admin/Addons the variSizer setting for the Normal size should be 760 proportional and selected as the Default size.

Under Admin/Settings the Maximum size of thumbnail in pixels should be 75 and the Total number of photos in filmstrip should be 5.

Customization

Like the Mimbo theme for WordPress, MimboCake requires some customization to get it setup. You should feel comfortable editing files to make the necessary changes for your site.

Custom logo

The theme installs a blank logo image by default. You can replace this with your own logo. Upload your new logo image to /app/webroot/Mimbocake/img/logo.png. To work without stylesheet changes, it should be a 605px x 70px png image. If you want to change the image type or size, you can do so by updating the stylesheet at /app/webroot/Mimbocake/css/style.css.

Look for this section:

h4 {
	text-indent:-9999px;
	background:url(/Mimbocake/img/logo.png) no-repeat;
	width:605px;
	height:70px;
	}

You can change the image filename in the background setting, and the width and height as necessary. There are some Status messages displayed to the right of the logo in Mimbocake, and a search bar to the right of the logo in Mimbo, so making the image too wide may interfere with those.

Image file location

There are several image files referenced in the stylesheet. If you’re installing Mimbocake in a subdirectory, you may need to adjust the URLs for the images. If you’ve uploaded a logo and it’s not displaying, this is likely the cause. Just search the style.css file for “url”. The URLs that begin with /Mimbocake/ are the ones to modify with the path appropriate for your site.

About page

The about page can also be customized by editing the /app/views/Mimbocake/pages/about.thtml file. Just edit the html as desired. There is a blank about.jpg image displayed by default. You can upload a new about.jpg image to /app/webroot/Mimbocake/img/about.jpg. If you delete this about.thtml file for Mimbocake, Cheesecake will use the default about.thtml file under /app/views/pages/about.thtml.

Most Viewed / Last Viewed changes

There are a few modifications to Cheesecake system files you may want to make for best results. The most important one involves the hitstats plugin for the Most Viewed and Last Viewed browsing options. There are Hover Box images that pop up as you hover over the thumbnails that interfere with the drop down menus. To disable the Hover box functionality, you can replace the /app/plugins/hitstats/views/mostviewed.thtml system file with this one:

Download mostviewed.thtml for MimboCake theme

You can unzip the file after downloading it like this:

unzip mostviewed.thtml.zip

It’s a good idea to make a copy of the original file first, in case you need to change it back sometime.

Tag List

The second system file change fixes some spacing inconsistencies when you’re browsing tags and click on “Show all tags.” It would be good to make this change, but it’s not required if the spacing doesn’t bother you. To make the change, you can replace the /app/views/tags/ajax_index.thtml system file with this one:

Download ajax_index.thtml for MimboCake theme

You can unzip the file after downloading it like this:

unzip ajax_index.thtml.zip

It’s a good idea to make a copy of the original file first, in case you need to change it back sometime.

Comment display order

The third system file change is optional. By default, comments for each photo are displayed in reverse order with the newer comments first. If you’d prefer to change the display order so the first comments will be first (similar to the default in WordPress), you can edit the /app/models/photo.php system file.

Search for this line:

'order' => 'Comment.created DESC',

Remove the “DESC” at the end, so it looks like this:

'order' => 'Comment.created',

This is a personal preference, and there’s no need to change it if you’re happy with the reverse order comments the way they are.

RSS Feed images

The fourth system file change is also optional. By default, thumbnail images are used for RSS feeds. If you would like to use a larger image for the RSS feed without increasing the size of the thumbnails, you can use the “small” image set to whatever you like for the RSS feed. To do this you can edit the /app/controllers/photos_controller.php system file, under “function rss()”:

Change:

$thumbSrc = substr($this->siteUrl,0,-10). "app/webroot/img/thumbnails/" . $photo['Photo']['filename'];

To:

$thumbSrc = substr($this->siteUrl,0,-10). "app/webroot/img/photos/small_" . $photo['Photo']['filename'];

Also change:

$thumbSrc = $this->siteUrl . "img/thumbnails/" . $photo['Photo']['filename'];

To:

$thumbSrc = $this->siteUrl . "img/photos/small_" . $photo['Photo']['filename'];

This is useful if your RSS feed is picked up by VFXY Photos. I have “small” set to 130px sqaure, and it works well for this purpose (you could try proportional instead of square, if you prefer). If you’re happy with the thumbnail images for the RSS feed, there’s no need to make this change.

Custom colors

There are a few colors used in the theme you may want to change:

Blue: #186fd0
Light Blue: #dce9ff
Lighter Blue: #edf5ff

These are different from the default Mimbo theme colors. You can do a search and replace on /app/webroot/Mimbocake/css/style.css and substitute whatever colors you like.

Gravatar enabled for comments

Gravatar is enabled for comments by default. If you want to disable the gravatars, you can remove this section in /app/views/Mimbocake/photos/index.thtml:

<?php
/* Begin Gravatar Code */
$grav_url = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=".md5(strtolower($Comment['email'])).
"&amp;rating=PG&amp;size=32";
/* End Gravatar Code */
?>
<img src="<?php echo $grav_url; ?>" alt="" width="32" height="32" />

Also remove this section in /app/views/Mimbocake/comments/index.thtml (almost the same):

<?php
/* Begin Gravatar Code */
$grav_url = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=".md5(strtolower($Comment['Comment']['email'])).
"&amp;rating=PG&amp;size=32";
/* End Gravatar Code */
?>
<img src="<?php echo $grav_url; ?>" alt="" width="32" height="32" />

You can also change the PG rating in those two sections if you want it set differently.

Removing the Login menu item

If you want to remove the Login menu item, you can edit the /app/views/Mimbocake/layouts/default.thtml theme file and remove this line:

<li><?php echo ($session->read('rdAuth.admin') ? $html->link("Logout",'/users/logout/') :
 $html->link("Login",'/users/login/')); ?></li>

You can login by going to the /users/login/ page manually, and logout by going to the /users/logout/ page.

Adding new menu items

If you want to add additional menu items, you can add them to the same section in the /app/views/Mimbocake/layouts/default.thtml theme file. For example, after this section:

<li><?php echo $html->link("Comments",'/comments/'); ?></li>
</ul>
</li>

You could add a link to another area of your site. For example, to link to a videos section you could add:

<li><?php echo $html->link("Videos",'/videos/'); ?></li>

That’s assuming your videos section is in the /videos/ subdirectory (perhaps using WordPress or some other software).

Changing the footer

The footer is also found in the /app/views/Mimbocake/layouts/default.thtml theme file. The footer is at the end of the file under div id=”footer”. It adds a copyright message for your site name by default, but you can change that here:

<div id="footer">
<?php echo ' &#169; ' ?>
<?php echo $session->read('cheeseCake.siteName'); ?>

You can add additional links to other sites in this section as well. For example, if you use VFXY Photos, you could add a link similar to this:

<?php echo ' | <a href="http://photos.vfxy.com/" title="VFXY Photos">VFXY Photos</a>' ?>

That’s all.

Forum and Discussion

Cheesecake Photoblog Forum

Credits

Cheesecake Photoblog for the software and the Modern theme which was the starting point for this theme.
Darren Hoyt for his Mimbo theme for WordPress and stylesheet, and updated comment styling.
kde-look.org for the image control icons.
TwinHelix for the IE PNG Fix (fixing transparent png images for IE5.5 and IE6).
Gravatar for the PHP implementation information and sample.

This page may be updated from time to time with new or corrected information.

Last Updated: 3/29/2008