New Look Coming... Now

Written by Dean Neitman

Wednesday, 07 October 2009 17:53

I had been using this look for about a year now and while its clean and served its purpose, I have decided to work on a new look to keep things fresh. The new look features my Flickr photostream at the very top to replace the picture gallery. I am currently putting a lot of focus on Flickr to hande my photo sharing now. I am growing fond of Flickr despite their lack luster use of groups and communities which could use a serious revamp to make user interaction a smoother and easier by taking tips from the newer portal and forum designers. So, my thoughts are to utilize Flickr to the max and simplify my photo sharing to save time. I will be ditching my PixelPost photoblog using DarkMatters attractive theme. This was a great option for a photoblog and I recommend it to anyone who is not afraid of installing and configuring PHP software on their servers. It does have a few issues however and updates are much slower and fewer than compared to say Joomla or WordPress updates. It still can serve as a fine way to share photos. I am mostly eliminating it just to minimize places I must upload photos too and thus, save time in return. In its place, I will be using Wordpress as a new photoblog linked with Flickr. I always upload my low-res versions for public display along with hi-res versions for backup purposes to Flickr anyhow and now all I need to do is have Flickr send the photo to my WordPress blog when its posted. I had considered trying to setup an RSS feed to do this automatically or look for Flickr widget or extension to do this without my intervention but I soon realized another bonus to Flickr's "Send to Blog" function. It allowed me to add additional description for each photo. In the captions, I try best to describe the scene including location but I also try to keep it brief. So now I can add a bit more of the story or my thoughts on the shot which is kinda nice for a blog format I think. Depending on time, I may continue this or just rely on captions to do my explaining. Haven't decided yet. I just know time is of the importance for me right now. Trying to balance a full time job, job travel time, family time, friend time, freelance time and photo time is a tough chore with little to no margins for free time. I have always been a believer in the idea "work smarter not harder" and this is just a part of that plan. So, in changing my websites appearance, I am also working on saving the time as well. new look, appearance, theme, time, save, flickr, photos, photoblog Powered by ScribeFire.