Effective as of two days ago. Thank you all and goodnight. I feel that the effort preparing, uploading and managing images on this blog has been inordinate compared to the return, so I am moving my photoblogging efforts to a new, Misadventures at 720nm (the URL is interim). It is being powered by dedicated photo-CMS called Pixelpost and has a strong prime focus on both my 365 days effort and my digital infrared photography.
(New) World Photography isn’t going away though, not by any means. I’ve invested almost four years of time in the information which this site represents. I’m a fickle man, I will return here eventually. In the meanwhile I invite any and all readers of this site to update their bookmarks to move to Misadventures at 720nm.
I apologize if anybody has reached newworldphotos.net in the last 72 hours and instead discovering the expected photo-y goodness were instead greeted by a nefarious 404 error. I was busily engaged in moving the domain and associated content from its old home at 1&1 in the U.S.A. to its new one at Digiweb in the Republic of Ireland. I guess you could say that my site has followed me home. :) During the transition period I took the time to update the back-end file structure of my images and their related posts. While I’ve tried to spot check the results my coverage hasn’t been 100%. If you should happen to spot anything please do not hesitate to email me.
Beyond the quiet implications of the change in legal jurisdiction, I now have a hosting and domain space that is wholly mine to play with. With my spring-cleaning finished I plan to enact some small photo changes to the blog and then launch into several new real-world photo projects.
I’m always endeavouring to improve our service and our connectivity. I add ‘follow me’ buttons, I advertise us…everywhere, and now I’m very pleased to offer toll-free calling to (New) World Photography via the magic of VOIP and Google Voice. Click on the widget and Google will connect you to us – for free.
Yes, dear gods, yes. I’m using a tweaked version of the Silhouette Two-Column theme by Brian Gardner. He has some really great themes and you all should go and try them out.
Next on my list are my website’s photo galleries, which are all incredibly broken at this point in time. It’s being investigated, I swear.
I’m constantly tinkering with my website and adding new functions, or removing unused functions, as needed. My newest addition is Shadowbox, which is replacing Lightbox.
A shocking change, I know.
The upswing of the change is that Shadowbox scales the image to fit the browser windows, which gives me the ability to Display Images as God Intended, which is a feature that Lightbox lacked. Behold:
I hereby declare bhalash.com 2.0 live after two weeks of hacking themes and galleries together. I was entirely inspired to reimage bhalash.com by Eric Scouten’s excellent website, although in the end I decided to stick with a Wordpress base instead of Drupal.
I combined two existing Wordpress themes, Hello 2007 by Fen and Simple La Bob by Bob, to create the new look, which I call (unsurprisingly) Dark Days, although I have heavily modified every aspect of each. After I update some of the other content on bhalash.com I will begin to work on making the entire code of the site portable for release under the Creative Commons because I’m fairly sure a photographer or two out there will enjoy a photo-friendly theme.
The other big element of my site was Simple Viewer, an embeddable flash gallery. The gallery was the hard part, as I was trying to marry together two separate programs that weren’t supposed to go together.
It was interesting, I learned a alot, and I hope to put it into practice more in future. For the sake of it, the tools and programs I used were:
Wordpress
Airtight Simple Viewer
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Photoshop
Mozilla Firefox (with FireFTP)
NcFTP
Vim
TextDrive TextMate
Fabian’s iTerm
Microsoft Wordpad
I’m giving gallery2 another try out, so I’ve uploaded a few recent photos of Killer (nothing you won’t find on Flickr) to have something at least to try out.
It’s nice, and this time around the netpbm module works (lets you resize/create thumbnails). So that’s a small huzzah at least. But honestly and on the whole, it really can’t match Flickr for ease of use. The interface is convulted and assy and first and third party batch edit tools seem thin on the ground, as do upload options – I would love it if Gallery could take a photo and constrain it to a given size on upload, or at least only display up to a given size.
Etc, etc, and so on. I want to start selling prints at some point and it would be one less thing to worry about if I didn’t have to upload and then resize the photos.
