Monday, June 23, 2008

Layout Change

Sorry for the somewhat ugly change to this blog.

I'm experimenting with a new blogging tool (Ecto) that makes it a bit easier and faster for me to upload photos.  The one drawback (from my point of view) is it requires I use Flickr for hosting the pictures. It's not that I dislike Flickr or think it's a bad photo hosting service.  It's just that Flickr automatically creates several image sizes for the uploaded photos, and the closest blog-friendly size is 500 pixels wide.  All the Blogger templates assume a photo width of 400 pixels. If I use a 500 pixel image with my old layout, the photos run out of the box and it looks even uglier than what you are looking at now.

As a quick fix I tried to find a fairly simple Blogger template and just hack it a bit so it was resized to be friendly to 500 pixel wide images.  That's what you are looking at right now. Eventually, when time permits, I'll try to clean it up a bit more, or maybe, if I feel motivated enough, I'll try to make my own system for auto-sizing images.

So, the good news (assuming more is better) is that using this new Ecto tool, I should be making more frequent posts - at least the random photos with a brief description. I'll also continue to have the more wordy posts about things on my mind, but the photos should be a lot more frequent - hopefully daily. I have taken more than 10,000 photos over the past several years, so there should be a few decent pictures in the bunch worth sharing.