Well, it took a couple weeks, but the photos from our Spring Break trip to Long Beach, WA are finally tagged, sorted, fine-tuned, uploaded, and even mapped.
Now to start on the nearly 2,000 I took at Norwescon….
Photography
I’ve been an amateur shutterbug for a long time. This tag is primarily for posts about photography and the associated tech.
Me and Prairie, Benson Beach
Me and Prairie, Benson Beach, Cape Disappointment, Long Beach Peninsula, WA, originally uploaded by djwudi.
During our Spring Break trip to Long Beach. Photo by Prairie’s dad, Lon.
Satellite
I’ve updated djwudi.com (which I’m using to highlight my photography) to use Satellite. Since Dreamhost has a few security measures in place that needed to be worked around, I’m detailing my changes to the source code under the jump.
Prairie and Penelope
My girl and her latest friend — Penelope, a wonderfully soft, cuddly, pink bunny.
While I’ll freely admit that I’ve never been the gothiest of gothlings, I’m still at times very amused that I ended up with a girl who’s big into the pink and fluffy side of life. Just one of life’s odd little quirks, I guess.
I’m keeping my black wardrobe, though. ;)
Flickr: User Interface Overload
On the one hand, I really like the new collections organization structure that Flickr just added. It’s not perfect, but it’s nice to have more control over organizing my photos.
However, the interface is getting…well, cluttered is about the nicest way to put it. By the time I’m looking at one of my sets, I’ve got no less than five different sets of toolbar/breadcrumb buttons above the pictures!
- Line 1 (constant): The global account options.
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Line 2 (constant): The main navigation menu bar, where every option (save ‘Home’ and the search field) is a drop-down menu with more options.
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Line 3 (appears when navigating within collections): The ‘breadcrumb’ trail leading from the user’s main page to the individual set.
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Line 4 (appears when viewing your own set, not visible for other people): Set-level editing options. 3/5 of the items are dropdown menus.
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Line 5 (constant): Set-level view options, available to everyone looking at the set.
It’s getting to the point where it’s UI overload — which is doubly grating on a site that’s normally incredibly well-designed and remarkably intuitive to navigate through. By the time all five toolbars appear, not only does it push the photos (which, I believe, are supposed to be the focus of the site) pretty far down the page, but I’m starting to lose track of which options are hidden in which set of menus or links!
Additionally, while the breadcrumb navigation (Line 3) is a necessary addition now that Collections allow you to organize your sets and collections up to five levels deep, it feels kind of abandoned — just shoehorned in somewhere — and quite possibly easily missed. Since that breadcrumb line is the only indication that a set is part of a collection and might have other, related sets ‘nearby,’ it seems that it should be better and more obviously integrated into the overall design. Perhaps somewhere around the set title and Line 5? Over the title, or either under or integrated with Line 5?
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the best solution might be. This just strikes me as an area where there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Spring Forward
Did you remember to set your clocks forward today?
Sigma 200-500mm f/2.8
(Said in your best Crocodile Dundee voice) “You call that a zoom lens? Now, that’s a zoom lens!”
According to DPReview, there’s “no news on price, availability or weight yet.” Weight. Heh.
(via Carpe Icthus)
New Header Images
Two new images for the title banner have been added to the random rotation, one from each of the last two posts. The cropped versions have been added to the end of my header images roundup (which may lose a few soon — as we move into spring, I may remove the obviously wintery choices).