life as a dog…

Now that it’s an almost certainty that I’ll be moving to Las Vegas at the beginning of September (getting my apartment here in Arlington leased out is the wild card), I’m rethinking what to do with the blog and my webpage.

Part of me thinks maybe this is a good time to retire the blog.  It’s been alive since February 20th of 2003.  Almost 8 years.  That’s a long time, and let’s face it… it’s not like there’s much substance there.  I could just as easily use Twitter or Facebook for the same thing.  Even tumblr would accomplish the same thing.

On the other hand, moving to Las Vegas is really the beginning of a new adventure.  Part of me thinks maybe I should redouble efforts on the blog.  Kind of a record of my adventure of becoming a resident of Las Vegas.  It could be interesting, I suppose.  After all, everything is going to be new – new work location, new home, new friends.

Starting the blog about Las Vegas also gives me another option – retire the current blog and start a new one.  I would imagine that I’ll need new categories anyway.  Really, the biggest roadblock to this is figuring out how to do multiple wordpress blogs on the same URL.  Probably simple, but I’ve never looked into it.

This is going to take some time to think through.  So other than some pre-scheduled posts (photos), the blog will probably be pretty quiet.

The photo section won’t see any changes, that’s pretty much guaranteed.  As a matter of fact, it may become more active for a while, what with all the areas close to Las Vegas that I’ve never been to… ghost towns, national parks, deserts, etc.

I’m going to try and start a weekly post on my traveling.  It may not actually happen weekly… maybe just here and there.  Unlike my posts when I’m on the road, these will have to do with other aspects of my traveling.  What they’ll be about specifically, I have no idea.  I have one draft that I’ve been working on for a while that has my views of different airlines, car rental companies, hotels and the like.  I’m going to chop that up to give me a start on these posts.

I’m going to try and do these on Mondays.  So instead of the times where there may be two to three weeks between posts, there will be at least something every week.

Whether I’m successful at it or not, or whether I give up after a short amount of time… we’ll see.  I’m going to try and start this next week.

I finished reorganizing the new photo pages by location instead of by date.  But now I’ve decided to go further with it.

As of right now, I’ve got my “raws” on the mobycat domain and if you click the “portfolio” link, it takes you to flickr.  But flickr really isn’t what I would call the best photos… at least not anymore.  I’ve started the whole series of pictures of businesses that are no more and I would hardly consider that quality photos.

I’m going back over all my photos (yes, ALL of them) and rework them.  First thing, I need to edit the EXIF data for some of them – since they were scanned, they show a creation date of around 2007.  Second thing is that they will be larger.  Currently, I put my photos up at approximately 600×400.  I’m going to change that to 1000×667, or thereabouts.  Also, I am going to try and clean them up a bit – which will take a while for the non-digital scanned photos.  Cleaning up dust in Photoshop may be the biggest time suck.  I also have Lightroom, so that should help some on the exposure side of things.  I will say that, for the most part, I don’t intend on over-processing photos.

So this may take a while…there are a LOT of photos to go through.  I’ve got all my photos on my hard drive divided into three sections – digital, negatives, slides.  The negatives and slides end right around January of 2005.  That’s when I bought my D100.  I can see where it will take that long to go through those…there are far fewer than the digital folder.

I have almost completed the upload and naming of photos to the angle-of-view domain.  But the linking to it is probably going to be delayed a bit.

On the old site, I grouped everything within a location by date.  I think I’m going to dump that method (except for the “most recent” category).  Instead I’m just going to group by location.  For example, I have about 52 albums within the DC section.  That includes multiple Smithsonian albums, multiple Cathedral albums, etc.  Instead, I am going to put all pictures of the Smithsonian into one single album.  Since most of my pictures are digital, they should stay mostly in order.  The film pictures might not – I need to see if I can change the date of them.

The “most recent” category will remain as it is.  When new pictures get posted, then I will go to the location based albums.

It’s time for another website update.  Everything but the raw photos has been moved off the mobycat domain.  Well, it’s time for the photos to move.  It’s taken me a while to find something other than Coppermine that I really liked.  I don’t know how many different software packages I’ve gone through trying to find something I like.  The winner is… Gallery 2.

Gallery 2 looks a lot cleaner to me than Coppermine.  It also seems to be quite a bit more customizable (though I am still figuring out what all I can do).  Plus, I’ve seen some screen shots from Gallery 3 – it looks much better.  Gallery 3 is in Beta, however…and I really don’t want to mess with that when I’m dealing with over 3,500 photos.

It may be a little while before it’s actually up (and linked from the main page).  It’s just a matter of uploading all the files and actually naming them.

If anyone is familiar with Gallery 2, I do have one question (a problem I can’t seem to figure out).  I want comments available.  I have them checked off in the admin settings.  But I can only see/add comments when I’m in admin mode.  If I go into the site in guest mode, I can’t see or add comments.  Anyone have any idea?