As a summer feature to the blog, I am happy to introduce the "Birch Ridge Flower of the Day"; a summer replacement for the venerable snowstake of last winter.

Ever since the winter has ended, I have been looking at various alternative to display in the spot the snowstake had previously occupied. I wanted to put in the space something that would show what my partner, Mary, and I experience everyday, that others might also enjoy. While working on a website for a client, there was a requirement to create a photo gallery. I had previously created just such a gallery last year to show opening day at Killington. That gallery was implemented in a computer scripting language called php. I was not all that happy with how it worked and presented pictures to blog readers, so I looked for other alternatives. If you have been mildly following technology topics on the internet, you may have run across a technology called "AJAX", which stands for "Asynchronous Javascript and XML" (aren't you glad I brought this up). Anyway, if you have used Googlemaps, you have already used AJAX. AJAX is a dynamic means to update web pages without reloading the entire age. Perfect for a user controllable photo gallery.

After several hours of programming, I created the "Birch Ridge Inn Flower of the Day", with a full photo gallery of previous flower pictures. If you click on the picture itself, it will load a full size picture into your browser window. If you click on the link at the bottom of the picture, it will take you to a photo gallery of previously posted "Flowers of the day" so you can tour the gardens at Birch Ridge.

Mary and I will be taking new pictures of flowers every day. It will be interesting to see how well this works as the summer progresses.