At the end of last week, a friend looked at this blog and asked how it was set up.
Origins
This all started in 2011 and it started with email. I had maintained a long term stable email address with MV communications. MV had been a major ISP in southern New Hampshire and by 2010 that business was nearly gone. When they finally went under I looked at my options for keeping a stable identity on the internet.
In the end I realized that buying a domain name and getting a web hosting was likely the best way to ensure that I had a permanent address on the internet and open up options beyond that. I don’t remember doing a huge amount of research on hosting companies, but I ended up using GoDaddy and so far have been happy with their service.
I enabled the WordPress ‘JetPack’ plug-in that comes with the software (but is disabled by default) and it appears that fixes the issues I had with the built in image galleries. Unless someone finds issues with what is currently up here, I’ll stick with that.
I would like to be able to control the size and shape of the featured images at the top of each post better. I may try some other themes over the next couple of weeks to see if I can get a layout I like better.
I’m also toying with splitting off the picture galleries from the main blog as a separate wordpress instance that only hosts pictures. Feedback is welcome…there will probably be a number of adjustments here over the next bit of time as I try to make the site more friendly and useful to me.
I just created a ‘landing page’ wordpress instance. I expect to use the web server’s rewrite capability to point the main page (http://ninecrows.com) to this landing page instance and then set up the landing page as a static WordPress instance with the main page pointing to career and blog instances (and any others I may create).
I’m still considering whether I should spawn off any other instances…for the moment I’ll hold off as I’d rather not wind up with too much clutter.
While stopped at an overlook of the beach and sea (with cannons) we saw an osprey fly up and hover looking for prey. Amazing shots of it hanging there. It took me a little while to get my long lens swapped in (I have a set of not very good shots from the landscape lens I had been using) but I got more than enough frames.
A wonderful bicycle ride around Guernsey. Beautiful scenery, narrow roads, very pastoral with occasional bunkers.
Our guides were great and it was very nice to be out in the air riding bikes and not in a tour bus sitting. I carried my big camera slung on my side/back. It was a bit of a nuisance, but the pictures were worth the hassle.
We stopped at a little tea house and grabbed a snack, a very tasty slice of apple pie in my case.
Coming into the harbor and on the short bus ride to the other side of the island I grabbed some shots of the areas we passed through. Beautiful old houses and interesting building (and lots of walls).
The default gallery and light-box support in wordpress seems a bit broken. It doesn’t sequence through images very well (grabs things in the light box view that aren’t in the selected gallery) and provides few options for layout.
So far the choices I’ve seen for plug-ins are better, but every one I’ve seen has issues that I either can’t see how to resolve or might be resolved by the paid version. I’m reluctant to start buying gallery plug-ins until I find one that meets my needs. I have one that I bought (relatively inexpensive so I’m not concerned) that is close. I’m beginning so suspect I’ll need to write my own after looking at hos the other ones out there work to get an idea of what is needed.
This is just the first set containing images from the Magic looking over the harbor…more to come from the excursion.
The day started overcast with occasional patches of sun shining through the clouds. By the time we headed over for our bike ride, it was a gloriously sunny day.
We got home last night at about 10 PM. The trip back was a bit stressful, messy and unexpectedly expensive, but in the end everything worked out and we’re here in Hudson, NH with all of our stuff and relatively well rested. The economy plus makes a huge difference to the flight (given the six plus hour transit time).
I’m in the process of unpacking, checking for any last images on camera chips and such and getting the LightRoom database connected to my desktop system here with the good monitors (my current laptop stinks for viewing images). I expect to get a few interesting shots up today or tomorrow with a continuing series from throughout the trip as time permits. I’m going to try to keep putting a few up day on day if I can.
Lots to do, lots to catch up on and a bunch of technical bits that I need to dig deeper into. I was reading the OpenGL 3D documentation on the flight home and I really want to try some things with that API before Monday.
Keep in mind that the blog entries since the first were written on my phone to capture my thoughts in the moment and are a bit rough and spotty.
