The photoblog is up and running
Well, I’ve finally launched the photoblog and couldn’t feel more relieved. Now I can get to posting pictures again instead of worrying about how I’m going to post them.
If you build it, they will come
As I briefly mentioned here, one of the main reasons I wanted to integrate the photoblog into my CMS was so that all of my weblog readers would be forced to see my photos too (something I’ve kind of been doing here for a while). However, because I’ve decided to use a completely separate system (and won’t splice the feeds together), I have to ask you guys to follow me over there. So, if you’re at all interested (and you better be!), please add the photoblog to your aggregator (see below).
Feed address
Rather receive updates through e-mail? I’ve got you covered.
Navigating the photoblog
Surprise, it’s not complicated. As you can see, the site design is very similar to my current weblog design. It’s very uncluttered and simple — the photo is the focus. So, like most photoblogs, you’ll notice that clicking on a photo takes you to the previous photo and that hovering over the current image gives you the title of the photo and a cue to click to get to the previous photo.
The gallery is simply a thumbnail archive of all the pictures.
If you’d like to see what I’ve said, if anything, about a particular photo (e.g., where it was shot, how it was processed, etc.), you’ll want to click the comments link. This will give you a pop-up that includes both my thoughts on the picture and those of others who have viewed it. You read that right, I’m allowing comments on the photos (for the time being). So, by all means, share with me your thoughts.
Some things are still in flux
As mentioned above, I’m not sure how long the comments are going to last; as soon as they become more trouble than they’re worth (e.g., spam, immature rants, volume, etc.), I’ll likely disable them (as I’ve done on this weblog).
I’m thinking very seriously about changing the hover text so that instead of telling you just the photo’s name, it would also show you whatever I’ve said about the image (as it stands now, you can see that information only when you click on the comments link for each each picture).
There’s a good chance I’ll eventually implement some JavaScript to kind of divide each photo in half so that the left side takes you to the previous photo and the right side takes you to the next photo.
There are a few other things that need to be fleshed out more fully, but they could very well become non-issues depending on the amount of traffic I eventually get. We’ll see how it goes.
Have a look around and please let me know what you think. As usual, I’ll likely write something up discussing the hacks I made to Pixelpost and why I made them, but I wouldn’t expect this any time soon.