About the new Photos section

You may have noticed a new section of this Web site called Photos. This section is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. I remember when I first signed up for, and uploaded to Flickr I thought I’d use that as my "photolog". Over the last 3 years and 11 days since I’ve found that my activities on Flickr are more meme or community related then they have been for sharing photos. I’ve also found myself shying away from sharing all of my photos from various vacations or events – so Flickr fills a very different "need" for me. However, I still desired to share some select photos that I’ve taken over the years and so the Photos section of this site was born from that.

Don’t let the URI fool you, this is nothing more than a fancy way of displaying the photos category for my blog. I took out a wrench, screwdriver, and a filled up a few cups of coffee and sat down with my local WordPress install and went to work. It didn’t take me as long as I thought it might, but I am definitely doing a few hacks that I’m looking forward to undoing once the next version of WordPress is released. I have a few known issues (not necessarily bugs) with the current version of Photos (which is 1.0.3 if you are interested) so I will list them here so that you’re aware.

  • The index page needs work (see below).

  • When on the archives page the main menu item does not highlight properly.

  • I need to put thumbnails on the home page.

  • The Creative Commons license icon does not line up with footer text. (Yes, I’m that picky.)

  • I need to improve the way this entire site display on the iPhone.

There are a few things that are not bugs that we might consider. One is that the "previous" and "next" photo navigation, found at both the top and bottom of each photo page, only links to the next and previous photo and not just the next post on this site while the "previous" and "next" links on posts (like this one) link also to the photos. This is completely on purpose though I’m still struggling with it a little.

If you find anything else besides the above that you think might be incorrect or could be done better, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments of this post.

About the photos

I debuted the Photos section on Wednesday and since then I’ve managed to post three times per day. I’m going to attempt to keep a schedule when posting photos but it will certainly not be every single day. On days that I do post, however, I will be posting three times. Sometimes posts will consist of more than a single photo. I’ll be posting two more photos today, but then my nine-day vacation starts (so I won’t be posting during that time).

The index page is no where near completed but I wanted to have at least a dozen posts published prior to me working on it. It will be a page showing off the title and thumbnail of the photos that have been published. Nothing too fancy but definitely a little nicer than what is currently there.

You may be wondering about the quality of the photos themselves. Let me be the first to say; I am not a good photographer. But then again I’m not good at drawing or painting but I sometimes enjoy doing that too. I enjoy taking photographs and also enjoy sharing some of them.

A note about the image quality of the photos thus far: Eliza and I "went digital" fairly early on. We’ve owned our fair share of crappy digital cameras over the years and we’re paying the price for being early adopters. Every photo that I’ve published so far was taken with a 2.1MegaPixel camera. As time goes on some of the more recent photos, which were taken with slightly better cameras, will show themselves – but please don’t be too put off by the quality. We also have plans to upgrade our current camera lineup as soon as we can – which we’re both looking forward to very much.

I hope those of you that take a look at these photos enjoy them. I’ve not turned on comments yet, and I’m not sure that I will. I think of my blog posts as the beginning of conversations (as we’ve discussed in the past) – but I think I’d like to allow the photos to speak for themselves.

Special thanks to: Jonathan Christopher and Alex Hillman for helping me test and refine the photos section. Your feedback is always spot-on.

Update October 16, 2007: I’ve turned comments on for the photos.

Update October 29, 2007: I’ve just released a new version of the entire site that addresses 22 known issues and adds 3 new ‘features’. All of the "bugs" from this post have been fixed.

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