Community @ The Turning Gate

So, I went ahead and actually bought Backlight.

I've now bumped around and am fully baffled.

I can't for the life of me work out what I have actually done, so my preferred way forward is to back out and start again. So, now let's imagine I am starting from scratch.

There is a great tutorial about migrating from a subdomain test site, but it's less obvious to me what to do to get the test site up and running. When I read "Getting Started" I infer from the "The First Tour" that there should be s tub of a site already.

Let's imagine that I do this:

1) make a subdomain called "galleries" in my existing domain

Right now this just looks like a link to me, but somehow executed in the DNS table. By default it just connects to the main site.

2) make a folder that reflects my new subdomain and connect the subdomain to it; let's say it's /Galleries for want of a better name

3) connect the subdomain to my folder

At this stage, since all I have is an empty folder, I display a blank page when I connect to the sub-domain.

4) make a folder *in there* called backlight and upload the installer into it

So far, so good. I upload the installer, I go it via my browser, it runs, I enter information. I install with apparent success.

5) go to galleries.domain.com, where according to "The First Tour":

I don't. When I go to my webspace, I see precisely what I expected to see - a folder called Galleries, a folder called Galleries/backlight, containing various things. But no Home, Galleries, About, Contact or anything like that in either the Galleries/backlight folder or the Galleries folder.

Where should I be looking, or what other error have I made?

Thanks in advance,

Damian

O Learned Denizens,

I humbly prostrate myself before your collective wisdom.

Short Version: I want to get started but I don't have a clean slate. Nor do I want to clean my slate before I start. Looking for hints.

Longer Version: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I downloaded TTG Slimbox and customised it to look like I wanted in Lightroom 2. I also downloaded a web site template from Andreas Viklund in Jokkmokk and customised that how I wanted, too. An accomplished shell script programmer from a former life with many flavours of unix workstations, I knocked up a tool to stream edit an ever-growing index gallery and to upload updated content. When command-line ftp went away from OSX, I learned about scp and now use that instead. The bottom line is that my website (www.damianharty.com, thanks for asking) looked like I wanted, behaved how I wanted and was easy to maintain using the export-and-publish paradigm.

This was in approximately 2007. I've got older, I've updated operating systems, laptops, cameras, and Lightroom. All went well until I went to move on from LR5.7, at which point the TTG galleries disappeared from Lightroom - for reasons that aren't either obvious or that important.

Right now, I will just keep using 5.7, but I do have an ambition to catch up and use Classic CC. It seems pretty clear to me I need to move to Backlight - which looks great.

However, it's clear to me that I need to play some kind of game of chess. Right now, I just want to be able to export a web gallery in one of the new styles - let's say the grid style, because that feels comfortingly similar to what I had before. I don't want to mulch my entire site, imperfect as it is, and start again. Not yet, anyway.

I can readily imagine customising a web galleries to get the look I want, but what's not clear to me is whether there are any yawning pitfalls that will cause me to unknowingly lose stuff. Because I back up nightly, if I know I've lost something it's OK, but if it's gone more than 24 hours then the backup is overwritten too. Of course I can always pull it down again from my hosting site, I guess.

But anyway, any hints on jumping in at the middle instead of the start?

Thanks in advance,

Damian