Making Emily's Website
Step 1 - Building the slideshow
Figuring that the slideshow, requiring fade-in/out will might be a little squirelly with javascript, I decided to start on that, and after a few tries with clunky transitions, poor caching or pre-loading, various YUI implementations, I finally found a sweet setup from Steve at http://slayeroffice.com/code/imageCrossFade/index.html.
After getting it all running with straight-up html/js/css files, I tackled how to get it into a Drupal page. First step was to just toss all of the html/js/css code into the body, get the hard-coded references pointing to the image files. Next, figure out drupal_add_js and druipal_add_css - it was such a snap I wondered why I had stuffed it all into a single file to start with.
After I get the gallery built, I'll come back and remove the hard-coded image file names and add cool admin settings like how long to pause on each image, the order of presentation, which images will show in the slideshow, etc.