After a little bit of thinking I’ve decided to go ahead and base my portfolio section on Drupal’s Book module. It has a few things going for it that I don’t feel like redoing:
I don’t like that it’s built mostly for text and feel like I will have to write at least one content module to act as an index page. I also want to add some jQuery goodness to the navigation; I don’t like to have a full page load to just view a picture, and plan to have the content updated through AJAX/JSON, and, since this site is on shared hosting with sketchy database access, I will probably want to add some caching to the AJAX callback so as to gain a little more performance.
In any case, I’m off to write a “Portfolio” module…