The biggest problem with the “pills” that help you quit smoking? Craving. Oh my lord the craving is like nothing else. Seriously, if you stop smoking, after three days of the worst cravings you’ve ever had in your life they tend to go away. But with the pills? Oh no, the craving isn’t really bad, but it’s just nagging, consistent nagging, for days, and days, and days…… I Actually think it might be worse than going cold turkey.

Anyway cigarettes sorted, it’s time to sort the weight out now…

Ok so that aside, the success of CardiffTweetups.co.uk has been phenomenal, and it’s really tweaked my interest in photography. More and more pictures are getting added to flickr and to the portfolio, and today, I took delivery of a spectacularly good Manfrotto tripod and head.

My interests have been tweaked even more by people actually telling me about the things that go on around Cardiff so that I can go take pictures. Which leads me with an interesting decision.

The blog is taking a life of it’s own, and the photography has no longer become “a story of my progression and development”. In fact it’s starting to turn into something that needs it’s own photography site, a dedicated photography site.

I was already planning on mcrowlegroves.com for my professional career etc but at the looks of it….
mcrowlegroves.com – Professional Online CV
mcrowlegrovesphotography.com – Photography portfolio and really really small mini blog purely photography based
thelongmile.com – Perosnal Blog and Site

Hmmmmmmmm….

There is now only a single gallery on the site, The Portfolio which is based on the Cooliris Piclens Suite. All you need to do is have Flash player installed.

The remaining galleries are now hosted on Flickr, and the link will take you directly to Flickr’s own Photo Gallery, giving you the option to go back to the photo stream.

I will, in time, add a widget to the sidebar to show random flickr images from my photo stream, and will eventually re-integrate the twitter widget into the sidebar as well.

I am considering moving the entire gallery over to Flickr, but need to do some further research into this. For now though, after all the suggestions, I hope you like it.

Since the revamped template launched the site has received a big increase in hits. In April the site saw 36581 hits, May saw 26810 and June saw 33066 hits. Based on the times before I wasn’t even breaking 10000. How much of that is valid I simply don’t know but the amount of data transfered seems to suggest it’s really going well. So thank you.

Anyway onto the title of this post. In a few of the comments and twitter replies i’ve had, it’s become very clear that the gallery needs a little bit of a cleanup.

I have three galleries up right now, one for Digital, one for Photography and one for my Portfolio. The Portfolio of course being the one where I showcase what I think is my best work. The rest are more of a ‘timeline’ of my progression through photography and digital art, and whilst I don’t think I’m that great at the artwork I do, I know I have progressed significantly since I first started.

As a result, and to reflect both on how far I’ve managed to come and to get rid of some of the more… dated images in my library. Starting tonight I will slowly start making my way through the images I have up here and begin deleting the images I feel are no longer necessary. Truth be told I will probably end up with only one gallery, one that will help inspire me to do more.

Don’t fear however, the old images will be added to a repository on Flickr where they will also be linked to for everyone to enjoy, in one big gallery.

If you have any thoughts or comments before I begin the cleanup feel free to express them, and of course if you have any particular favorites let me know, and soon!

I wanted to update everyone on the progress of the new site layout. I will also say, I am really glad I made the decision to develop this, as everytime I look at the current site, It just, feels like a letdown. Appropriate for a teenager, or a kid that wants things to be flashy, but it just isn’t appropriate for me.

The new theme is based on Modularity Lite by GraphPaperPress. I chose this template originally out of compromise, but now I’ve been working with it over on the testing server, I’m really pleased I chose to go for it, you guys I hope will be very pleased to also know it is not as dark as it seems in that screenshot… at least not after all the edits.

The template is licenced under the General Public Licence (GPL) which means in short, I’m allowed to make changes to it providing I note what I’ve changed and give credit to the authors, so if any of you have the misfortune to look at my sloppy code, you’ll likley see a great many changes indeed.

An example of the things we’ve changed so far, range from text colours, to sizes, to bug fixes, to implementing new features, removing others etc..

Right now there are only a few things left on the list for the template itself

Create a navigation menu
Fix a bug on the full page view that causes it to go black
Fix a bug where the read more link shows on every post rather than just the excerpts

Thats seriously all there is, so I’m very very pleased to be getting this close to changing things over. There are two reamining things that are not on the template edit list.

One of which is Flickr.

I still know, NOTHING about Flickr and the way it integrates into wordpress. So my tasks over the next few days will be to gather as much information I can about it, and decide how to do it. I would greatly appriciate anything you have for me in that respect, be it advice or links to plugins etc

Thats my first favour.

The second, is one of a more serious nature.

My last post said about doing something, that I did not originally expect to do, and that was have a logo designed for the site.

Now, I can create logos for other people. I am more than happy and capable of creating logos for other people. But when it comes to my own site, I need a little help. In fact I need so much help that I am asking you, the reader, not neccesarily to come up with a logo, but ideas for the logo itself, so that I, or a colleague can develop it.

I don’t normally reach out to my readers like this. Sure I’ve asked favours before, and I’ve asked you all for your opinion on the website to help orchestrate changes, but I have never asked for advice of this level, so I really don’t know what to expect, but I look forward to it.

The final thing I am going to be adding, if I can work out how, will be a share button. I realise not everyone wants to comment but might want to .digg or del.ico.us or stumbleupon the links or blogs I have. So I will do my very best to introduce a simple, clean button system so that you can do that.

I hope to hear from all of you soon… we’re getting so close!

Enjoy!

In the meantime, someone I know has managed to find something I did not even know this site had. Apparently the gallery has an RSS feed that I had no idea about, you can subscribe to it and get updates whenever pictures are added by clicking here

In addition to this, I have counteracted some of this site’s slow loading times by reoptimising many of the images including the background banner. Remember this is a personal site, and so the idea is to be a little more flamboyant than I would be for a professional site, hence the graphics, images etc.

Stay Tuned for more information as and when it comes