I know what you’re thinking: What? The? Fuck? Let me explain.
The old version (curse be upon it), had a space for posts and a space for a sidebar which held necessary info such as recent posts and comments. But this meant that the space available for posting photos was not as wide as I would have liked. This new version (blessed be its name) has a separate page for the blog, which means that blog posts can be wider and display bigger photos. This is a good thing.
Next up, I started a separate blog for my more technical camera articles but have become rather bored with it; and so wanted to bring these posts back into Pattaya Days. This has now been done, and from the front page you can access the latest normal Pattaya Days rubbish or the camera gear posts. Alternatively you can select “blog” from the menu and get everything.
People often ask me if they can look at my photos. This happened in 2011 and again last month. I can point them to Pattaya Days; but then thought it might be nice if I set up some galleries of some of my favourite photos. This is very much a work in progress and I have only loaded a handful of galleries, and formatting and details need some work; but it’s a start. As I add more galleries they will be highlighted on the front page, and can be accessed via the “Galleries” menu option (mouse over individual photos to see the description of the gallery and a link). Or you can go direct to my Zenfolio galleries by clicking on the appropriate icon at the top left (Hint: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Zenfolio).
So there we are. A chance to display bigger photos in posts, some differentiation of normal posts and camera gear posts, and access to galleries of photos . Plus I have a plan to make a record of all the camera gear I currently own, for no other purpose than my own amusement.
Oh, and that snazzy sliding graphic thingie at the top of the page? That’s so ladies will be impressed and will want my body (and first-time visitors will get an idea of what is on offer; but that’s not so important).
This little enterprise has taken me some time. As you may be aware, this site uses the very wonderful Wordpress software which allows the use of different “themes” to produce your personalised site. I have always used a free theme, partly because I am a tight bastard, but also because their limited options match my skill set. But for this update I actually paid out some cash for a “premium” theme and was presented with a load of choices, which are often difficult to figure out because everything has to integrate into Wordpress and you can find that each configuration you want to achieve has to be specified in four quite separate places. Or five.
It’s not quite done. Have some more work to do to make it work properly on “retina” displays; so if you are reading this on an iPad and it looks like shit, hopefully it will look better soon. Plus there are a few interesting options I am yet to play with, so it may change again, which will no doubt piss of ChristianFPC, so it won’t have been a complete waste of time.
Comments 🔗
2014-01-01| Wally saysAny chance of a darker font, the old eyesight is not as good as it was, please !
2014-01-01| Ivo saysNice new theme but I agree with Wally on the color of the font (light colored seems to be fashion now). And as I see it as a photo-blog I am missing a prominent photo of the last blog-posting. Complains … that is what you get with new things! Happy New Year also!
2014-01-01| John Rochford saysGreat new look, Spike
Happy New Year
2014-01-01| Pete saysHappy New Year to you and your blog: an interesting new look.
2014-01-01| Spike saysThanks for the comments and suggestions.
I have increased the font size of the body text, and made it darker; hope this makes it more readable?
As for the photo with last posting idea; I wanted to have the latest post with a photo, and then have the previous posts below that as currently shown, but could not arrange for the “previous posts” to exclude the latest post. Plus I am not sure that Wordpress will recognise my images as a “featured image” as they are linked from Flickr and not loaded to Wordpress. I have a separate site for testing so will have a play.
2014-01-01| Spike saysHave added in Latest post with photo. Doing same with latest three posts gives a messy result.
Thoughts?
2014-01-01| Andrew saysGood to see you up and running…and Happy New Year….I’m sure you’ll wring your money’s worth out of the theme!…my only confusion is the comment form on the main page - does that refer to the latest post or just life in general??? Looks good to me…
2014-01-01| Spike saysIt’s for people who are stuck on the front page? I don’t know, I did think about removing it; would give the front page a cleaner look. Happy new year to you too.
2014-01-01| Spike saysYou are right, it’s pointless. After a massive amount of coding (ticked a box); I have removed it.
2014-01-01| Mike N saysthe text is running off the space available … there are a couple of letters missing from some lines.
2014-01-01| Spike saysThanks for the feedback, can you tell me where this is happening? Front Page, blog listing? Single post? Also, what browser are you using?
2014-01-02| BlogDaz saysNice template Spike, I imagine you probably fed up with fiddling around, but while you are open to suggestion, what about some navigation from post to post. You see, I’m stuck here now, my only option is to go back via the browser or “home” and start again. A simple little “next post” and “last post” would make life much easier, I’m sure Wordpress must have a plugin for that.
2014-01-02| Mike N saysWhat ever the reason you seem to have fixed it, formatting looks a lot better now.
2014-01-02| Mike N saysAnd “that snazzy sliding graphic thingie at the top of the page” was not working before, but now I see it and know what you were talking about ! neat ! (oh, and it was this post, IE11)
2014-01-02| Spike saysDone. Thanks for the suggestion.
2014-01-02| Spike saysInternet Explorer…. I should have guessed!
cough Firefox cough