Hello! It’s done. It took roughly a week and a whole host of boring tweaking but it’s finally here, v2.0 of my blog. I’ve designed it to fit around my Canada trip whilst still being generic enough to be used after it. So there’s a splash of Canadian red around the site which is about as Canadian as this place will get, besides the content and the images.

Speaking of Images…

I’ve finally got a reasonable width to play around with, all images will no longer be a meager 500px across, they’ll be 800! Which may only seem like an extra 300 pixels across but it’s a surface increase of 46.25% – How’s that for a bargain deal? One of the major caveats of having tiny pictures was the loss of detail in my wide angle shots. So this update will really benefit scenery images. The one thing it won’t do though, is benefit the images of people. All those lovely pimples and dimples and crinkles and grays will be nice and visible!

Nested Comments

One of the majorly annoying aspects of the old design was the comment section. Ugly and hard to follow. It didn’t really inspire discussion, and I want discussion – so it’s had a major re-design and you can now reply to comments directly which allows discussion to flow a little easier, and allows people to follow up to direct replies.

Typography Cleanup

It’s important to have consistency and I didn’t have it. So I made it! Headers are important in that they signify the start of one post and the end of it, too. The previous design didn’t do that so well, but now it does. A nice solid red breaks the content up. I also made significant use of Helvetica Neue as well as a bit of line-height and letter-spacing to make sure the typography was a little more legible. It was also important to break up the written content in each post so I created some nice Headers, i.e. the one’s I’m using right now! This is particularly important as I hope to be writing a whole lot whilst out in Canada.

Conclusion

So there you have it, the nice new photoGrant blog. The funniest part is the fact I’ve had no luck in finalising and releasing my portfolio/home section. There’s just something about that, that’s really degrading me. It’s difficult for me to commit to a design and enjoy/embrace it. Instead I tweak it till it’s changed completely and then I go ahead and change it entirely again.

Anyway, hope you all (all 2 of you) enjoy the new design as much as I do. Peace!

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So I’ve ran this version of my blog for a good few months now. I’m happy with it, for the most part. There’s a few things that I feel I need to change to help me enhance certain portions and demystify others. The biggest gripe I have with my design is the lose ends that I haven’t tied up, like the incomplete/broken 404 template page, the ugly comments sections and the nasty archives area.

The most important aspect of my site though, is the images – and at a measly 500px across I feel they don’t really stand too well here. I’ve been running Google Analytics on my site since its inception and the only screen res to jump below 1024px across is the 320px across that the iPhone uses. This basically means two things. One, I can increase the overall width of the content area and consequently increase the width of my images. Two, I need to produce an iPhone friendly version of my blog.

Surprisingly almost 20% of my visitors run their browser without Java support. I’m not against that in any way, because I, myself run NoScript to ensure browser security – but it means Java enhanced menu’s (like the one I’ve been developing for my homepage/portfolio are – doh – won’t function unless I code a non-java version. Easy enough.

Fortunately less than 6% of my visitors run no flash at all, which means my portfolio will run alright, and my flickr video’s that I am embedding can be seen by the other 94%.

So in a nut-shell here are the things I hope to be enhancing/adding/improving in the next few weeks:

• Larger Images
• Condensed Menu
• Twitter Integration
• Fully scalable typography (em instead of px)
• Improved Comment System
• Uniform Title/Post Information Headers.

This is all gearing up towards my Canada trip, which I’m unbearably excited for. Unfortunately as all my previously uploaded images were exported at 500px solely for this site, when I expand the width and start uploading 7-800px wide images, the previous ones will still be quite small. Gotta break some eggs to make an omelette though, eh!

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Hey! So you’re reading this – that’s an awesome start. I’ll start with the premise as to why I want your cash, and maybe that’ll make this seem less like I just want to steal your money.

So I’m going to Canada in July, for a couple of months. I’ll be going to Vancouver to be specific. If you’re dead interested, I’ll be updating this blog constantly whilst I’m out there, and images will be posted almost daily – so you’ll probably see a print you want before I’m even back! I’m in an overwhelmingly gifted position that I can do this, really – I am. Your money would probably be better off spent with Childrens Aid, or Amnesty International – which is why I’m hoping a little incentive will help me convince you a little donation is worth it! So here’s the deal…

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And how lovely it is to see you. Well here we are! I was sick of using someone elses design so I finished my own and threw it out. I’ll hopefully have the rest of the site up shortly, now I have the basic design down. I’ve tried to keep it as light weight as possible, coming in at 340kb. Firebug isn’t happy with my website as despite having zero errors, it’s still a good 5 seconds to download the whole page. I’ll either make it less posts per page (less scrolling, more clicking) or optimize my images more. Regardless if anyone has issues with loading times, let me know.

Photography content has dropped as of late, it’ll pick up shortly. Having a few deadlines that require thought rather than camera, and me being a complete hermit coding this design hasn’t helped – but as I say, it’ll pick up. It’ll pick up.

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