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I’ve been meaning to revamp the photography section of this site for a while now; this weekend, I finally found the time to do it. I registered a new domain, straylightphotography.com, and put together a portfolio consisting of my 20 favorite shots (<shamelessPlug>many of which are currently on display at Interzone through February 28th!</shamelessPlug>). I’m hoping to quickly expand the site with themed portfolios (portraits, urban decay, etc.), but… first things first.

Also, the new portfolio has been an excuse to play with CSS3 and jQuery 1.4.  Visitors using Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera should see a site that behaves like it was created with Adobe Flash, but is fully accessible and doesn’t require the proprietary Flash plug-in.  Visitors using Internet Explorer… well… it at least degrades cleanly.  Mostly.

Hurray, I finally finished updating this site to use a modified version of the Elegant Grunge WordPress theme.  I hacked in support for threaded comments, so now you should be able to directly respond to one another.  There are still a few visual issues, especially with image borders, but everything seems to be functional.  Please let me know if you notice any problems with the site.

This post is just to claim my blog on Technorati.

Technorati Profile

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.7 and everything seems to be working smoothly so far.  I found a small bug in the comments system, where I kept getting an enqueue_comment_hotkeys_js(); is undefined error every time I tried to edit comments in the administration panel, but commenting out that line in edit-comments.php seems to have fixed everything up.  Please let me know if anything on the site isn’t working properly after the upgrade

Thanks to a comment from Dave, I’ve discovered Gravatar.com.  They offer the ability to use a custom avatar on any Gravatar-enabled site.  It seems the recent versions of WordPress are already setup to use this feature, which explains how Dave had a custom icon next to his comment, even though I’d disabled user registration on this blog.  Very cool!  I want to keep this site simple, so requiring user registration before people could post comments was something I wanted to avoid.  Without registration, however, I hadn’t found a way to allow people to have custom icons (if they want them).  Now they can!  Of course, default Wavatar icons are still automatically generated for everyone else, so I think everybody wins!

So after making some good progress on the camera-ready version of our IUI’09 paper, I took the time to turn a picture of Henri into an favicon for this site.  Yay for kitty icons!  Also, hurray for the Telegraphics Windows ICO export plugin, without which Photoshop can’t actually create icon files.  Seriously Adobe… $999 and no .ico export?  Telegraphics has been making this plugin for Photoshop versions all the way back to 3.0 and you’ve never thought to just buy it from them and bundle it?  Of course, none of this would really be a problem if Microsoft would just make Internet Explorer support PNG icons, like every other modern web browser.  I thought IE7 at least would be able to handle it, but from Googling around, it seems that no, if you want IE users to see your favicon, you still need to be using the icon format from Windows 3.1.  Stunning.

Today I finished working out the kinks in my new photo album workflow.  The result: all of my photo sets since I moved to Corvallis are now available on the site’s Photography section.  I’m keeping the Flickr site for my best photography, but I’ve had all of these images sitting in Lightroom that I suspect friends would love copies of, so now they’re available.

For the curious, I do all of my photo editing in Adobe Lightroom (and occasionally Photoshop).  Using a heavily-modified version of the TTG Shadowbox Gallery Template, I export each album and upload the static HTML and image files to my server.  Nothing terribly exciting there, but now it gets interesting.  I wanted to have an index page that automatically shows all of my galleries, displaying the most recent first.  TTG supplies an XML AutoIndex module that does nearly everything I want, so I integrated that as my index page and hacked the PHP scripts to include better date and description information.  Finally, I wanted to provide an RSS feed of my photo albums, so people won’t need to constantly visit my website if they’re looking for new photos.  A quick modification to the XML AutoIndex script did the trick, so now you can subscribe to an Atom feed of my photo albums!

Everything seems to be working fine for my on Firefox and Safari.  If anyone notices problems with the photo albums or feed, please let me know.

It’s Sunday afternoon. I spent the entire morning migrating my old website to a WordPress-based framework, something I’ve been telling myself I’d do for a couple of years. My follow-through is a bit less than ideal, but this project is actually turning out rather well. I’ve imported all of my old software projects, and now I’m working on integrating Flickr so that my photos are available in the Photography section. Yay!  At some point I hope to get some of my music up here as well, but life as a graduate student hasn’t left me with much time to pursue recording.  My old journal is still available, but it’s been so long since that was updated that I feel a fresh start is in order.  OK, back to hacking on this WordPress template.