Spare Some Change?!
Notice anything new around here? Oh no, the same inane ramblings by me are still here, just in a shiny new layout. This complete redesign of the site was totally unexpected and was all done yesterday afternoon/evening. I really just sat down to try to tweak a few things on the site and then the next thing I know I have what you are currently looking at up and running. If you follow my Twitter feed (don’t worry, nobody does) then you probably noticed that I plan on using Flickr as my central database for photos. I am sick of uploading images to several locations (this blog, Facebook,etc) and it dawned on me that I could host them all on Flickr and just pull them from there to all those other places. Ya, ya… I thought I would have figured this out sooner as well. In addition, with the iPhone Flickr app, this also means that I will always have my photos with me to share wherever I am.
Now, how is this at all related to all the changes here on the site? Well, if you would just let me type then I will tell you! I was trying to add the Flickr integration to the old design and was running into problems because of the stupid slider that was at the top of the page showing different posts. The slider was cool at first but really wasn’t necessary for a place like this, and it wasn’t just some Flickr plugins that it caused problems with. The thing was becoming a huge pain in the ass and was causing more grief than I needed. Then add to the fact that I was constantly having to go in and manually code a lot of the CSS and PHP files to get them to look the way I wanted and suddenly my easy-to-maintain, plug-and-play site was no longer that. And voila, you are looking at the new layout that resulted! This one is much more plug-and-play for all the same apps that I had before, meaning less work for me to get everything working and setup. I just had to go in and fool around with a couple of core files to get it exactly how I wanted, but most of it really is just plugins now. I also like the cleaner look and feel of the site with less text on the main page – seems like my site keeps getting better and more sophisticated with each reiteration.
Now all that remains is to get all my photos transferred over to Flickr, which is not going to be an overnight process. In order to not have monthly upload limits or image sizes I am going to have to get a Pro account for $25/year, but it will be worth it. In the meantime I am going through my catalog and tidying up my photo collection and slowly getting some sent to Flickr.
