It’s been a month now since I came back from New York. Things have been rather quiet; I’ve been working a lot since New York left me broke. I also worked a bit on a new design for the website and on post-processing the photo’s I made in the US. I am pleased to say that both are now finished, I’m switching the design and uploading the photo’s tonight. I hope everybody likes it all!
On a sidenote, this site is best viewed with Firefox or any other modern browser. It’s using K2 on WordPress 3.0 and the gallery is now served by NextGENGallery which offers much better integration with WordPress.
You may or may not have noticed it (probably not), but I’ve done some maintanence recently. I’ve updated all the software. This really doesn’t mean anything for you, but I had to write something since it’s been almost three months. I had really hoped to upgrade the gallery to make this site look even cooler than it already is but I’m afraid it didn’t work out.
The only thing you may notice now is that the commercial ads are now no longer in the sidebar but at the bottom of every page. They’ll show on the gallery as well now, wich is a huuuuge advantage seeing how nobody clicks them anyway no matter where they are located 
The thing is, they actually are pretty relevant 3 out of 10 times so you may wanna click them every once in a while. Keeps me going you know, being a poor student and all
I’ve done some site maintenance over the last few days, the biggest single upgrade being that of the gallery. This shouldn’t affect you as a user too much (except for the use of tags, more on that later) but it increases security and flexibility. I’m now also using a spam filter to counter commentspam, as this was getting out of hand. And last but not least, I’m working on bilingual support so all posts will be available in Dutch as well as English, but this isn’t ready yet.
Now, about the tags. These will allow you to browse through my photo’s in an entirely different way. Tags are like keywords or labels that apply to individual images in the gallery. You’ll see these listed along with the photo’s if you visit the gallery now. Clicking on any of these tags will show you all images with that tag from the entire gallery. For instance, you’re browsing through “Rome, Summer 2006″ and you see a photo of the Colosseum. This will have, you guessed it, “Colosseum” written below it. Clicking on “Colosseum” will then show you all photo’s of the Colosseum, from “Rome, Summer 2006″, as well as from “Rome, Autum 2006″, etc. How nifty. That’s not all though. There’s a new link in the navigation bar that says “Tag Cloud”. The tag cloud is a collection all (or the most popular, if there are too many) tags. The bigger a tag is printed in the tag cloud, the more images it has. Again, clicking on a tag will show you all images with that tag.
I’ve decided not to assign every imaginable tag to my photo’s. That means that if there’s a photo of a tree, it will not be tagged ‘Tree’. It will simply remain untagged. This is because there would be so many photo’s that could have the tag ‘Tree’, that more relevant tags (like ‘Colosseum’) would be snowed under and the Tag Cloud would become useless. As for different names in different languages, I’ve chosen the way mapmakers have used for decades, if not centuries. Things are tagged with their original name (St. Peter will be tagged with ‘San Pietro’) unless the English name is significantly different from the original name (Not everyone will know or understand that the Italian’s call Florence Firenze, so it will be tagged ‘Florence’).
Woops, there have been a few changes. To signup to the mailinglist, just enter your email address in the box below. Click on the confirmation link you’ll receive in your email inbox, and from then on, you’ll receive notifications when I post something. Be sure to check your spamfolder though, it might end up in there. Mark it as being not spam, and future mails should end up in your inbox.
I’ve added the ability to subscribe yourself to a mailinglist. It’s a bit unrefined because I don’t have the tools available here I would have if I had done this at home. Anyway, if you sign up, you will receive an email everytime I write something on this site. Watch your spamfolder though: if you’re spamfilter is set to tight, mails will end up there! Be sure to mark it as normal mail if this happens so future mails will end up in your inbox!
To subscribe, click here. Enter your name and e-mail address and click “Subscribe”. You will receive a confirmation email. Click the link in that email to confirm your subscription or you will still not receive any mails! Again, check your spamfolder if you don’t see it in your inbox.
A lot faster than I had thought, the serverswitch is already complete. It seems the DNS update didn’t take that long after all, it was all done by 10 o’clock this morning. Anyway, it means that the photo’s from Italy are now online!
There are 38 images from this trip in the gallery. Not exactly a large number if you consider I was there for eight days, but I’m a little more selective about what I upload and what I don’t upload then I was before, and aside from that I don’t have much time to post-process the photo’s anymore, so I spend my time on the best. Also, I’m almost done with the photo’s from Schiermonnikoog, you’ll have them tomorrow.
You might have noticed it, you might have not, but there have been some glitches with the site the last few days. Yesterday you might have experienced very long load times, today you could have encountered various error messages. It all has to do with switching servers – I’ve been hosting this site myself, but that is no longer an option because I’ll be in New Zealand for half a year. Speaking of which, in 5 days I’ll be up in the air, halfway between Amsterdam and Hong Kong.
Aside from that, I almost have the photo’s from Italy ready. You’ll have to wait for them until the site transfer is fully complete though (24-48hrs). I’ve also made a blitzvisit to Schiermonnikoog this week, you’ll get those photo’s before wednesday as well, I hope.
