and so it goes... » design

new duds for the new year…

JR — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:15:04 +0000

Oh baby – I am kinda excited. See – I am in love with my website again! I have finally found a WP theme that showcases my photography the way I want – and yet is simple, clean, and pretty much fully customizable. There are a few little kinks that I need to work out – mainly dealing with how this new theme structure handles media – but man oh man – I am doing the dance.

Here is a quick shot from the lunchtime photowalk I did today with Doug. Our theme was “abstract”.

ADD

JR — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:17:25 +0000

yea – I switched back – call it ADD. The last theme I was using was okay – but there were some page layouts that I didn’t quite like. I like having the option to not have a sidebar on some pages (like my photography page or about page) and I didn’t like how you had to click on the title of the new post to then be taken to a post specific page before you could comment.

Little things.

I want to work on some web 2.0 icons for facebook and flickr etc too – I wish I could just find some that were free that would save me the time (and money) but even the ones that you have to pay for don’t quite grab my attention. Oh well, I will muddle around until I find something I like.

I also need to find some good cookie cutter gallery type layouts in html for CrookedFenceAlpacas.com I have a bunch of photos for the animals I need to get up – with the ability to do a bio / stats page as well – and I don’t want to turn it over to someone else for fear I will lose control of the overall feeling of the website. Too many sites in that industry look like garbage – I don’t want this one to fall into that same category.

Ah work work…

behind the crooked fence

JR — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:03:41 +0000

I have some pretty amazing in-laws. My wife’s family has an alpaca farm down in Mona and I have been helping them with photography and designing their website – Crooked Fence Alpacas and Mill – let me say it has been an education. Alpacas are amazing animals – and their fleece is absolutely incredible! The new website is up – but I am still ironing out all the issues and working on content. I would love any feedback on the design, layout and ease of navigation etc. I wanted to keep it simple and clean, and mainly focus on their three services – the animals, the mill, the country comfys dry goods.

MarsEdit

JR — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:14:09 +0000

Wow… how have I not found this before?

I must say special thanks to Trent Nelson, the most excellent SL Tribune photog that was gracious enough to enlighten me about this gem. At first glance it appears to make blogging a snap. I am sure there will be a few kinks to iron out from a setup standpoint, but I really like the interface, and I love the integration with the wonderful Mac OS.

Diving into the features.

This post is my first attempt at “remote publishing” other than simple notifications by email, so lets just see where this takes us in terms of content and layout.

Wonderful photo integration!

One of the first things I wanted to test out was the media integration and I must say I am pleased. I am able to call up my flickr account without actually logging into the site itself and simply select the photo I want, the size and the alignment and MarsEdit does the rest. So very cool!

So now whether I am blogging about the unusual dirty needle swap-out I witnessed in Prague,

or shooting up misc pics from my iPhone – it is as instantaneous as the shutter speed at f3.5 on a bright sunny day!

These features will no doubt save me time, and actually allow me to get in a few more blog posts per week – up until now I have just been way too busy and the posting process way too time consuming.

So lets hit publish and then go see what it looks like in real life!

(dis)&(re) covery

admin — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:27:24 +0000

I am slowly recovering from my late night foray into the wonderful world of .php and css… I curled up into the fetal position at about 3:30am, feeling violated and spent. Here it is just after noon and I am still at it – diving through caves and tunnels of code, being led by the dim light of a firebug – a very useful firefox plugin that allows code-impaired folks like me a small glimpse into the inner workings of the universe that is CSS.