I have located the new theme for the pro website, which will be accompanied by a minor rebuild and rebrand in places, but it’s finally the site I want.

I’m hoping to have this up and running by the end of December or early January at least, but it gives me precisely what I want and soon, you’ll be able to see it. There will be a post about why I chose the site I did soon!

As with any year, here have been both successes and failures. There have been bridges burnt, friends lost, but there have also been great things, new prospects, new people. I wouldn’t quite say things are falling into place, but they are getting there, although like any end of year, I’m preparing myself for a massive setback.

There is however, a significance in my reasoning for this post on this date. About this time last year, I had somewhat of an unfortunate meltdown, and sadly I vented a lot of it on twitter. Thus that lead to loosing a lot of people. From that however, I’ve emerged stronger, and a little more resilient.

In March I started a new job, I also got a new car, one that has been cursed since the day I got it with more problems than I would care to list, made worse by the people I brought it from (who shall remain nameless in fear of legal ramifications, your milage may vary on this one).

Despite however the new job, I’ve also been somewhat blessed by other things happening. A month or so I was honoured and surprised to find out that I had been nominated for the Wales Blog Awards for my site, apptacious, not only that but I soon found out I had made it into the shortlist, and a mere week ago, I found out that I had made runner up for the best tech blog in Wales. Who cares if I didn’t win, that was an incredible honour to have even been nominated.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to take part in some incredible photography thanks to Gabriel Strange and his film The Casimir Effect that I had been helping with. From some incredible set photography down at the then disused Mir Steel plant in Newport, to my first work doing portraiture photography. Thankfully, despite the fact it was my first ever time taking a picture of people, I think I did rather well. I also had the honour of meeting some fantastic people including Zoé Mills, John Jenner and Peter Owen-Williams. I even got to take pictures of a celebrity, Neil Rayment, an actor from the Matrix Reloaded. All of them were a pleasure to meet.

Recently, I got the opportunity to meet and shoot Gareth David-Lloyd from Torchwood. Gareth is one of the nicest guys I’ve met, and thanks to just how approachable he is, he even helped me out, giving me some great pointers and learning tips for my photography.

All of this is fantastic, it’s why I think this year has been something of a whirlwind. It has however, been made even better, as only two days ago, I found out that I am now the photographer for Wales ComicCon next year. Okay so I’ll need to start saving hard for some photography equipment, I will get to take portrait shots of some incredibly famous people like Dave Prowse (He played the physical form of Darth Vadar in Star Wars), Hugh Mitchell (Harry Potter) and incredibly, Colin Baker (From Doctor Who, one of the Original doctors!). Ok so on this one I’m still waiting for the legal stuff to come through, so it’s not 100% certain at the moment, but to even be considered is incredible enough.

A whirlwind? Luck? I have no idea what to call it. All I know is I must be doing something right.

It’s not all about photography. I’ve been steadily developing my skill set in other areas, trying to expand my personality and my prospects. At the Wales Blog Awards I got the honour of meeting some fabulous people, and got to discuss some very in depth things.

Photography has been a dream of mine for a long time, so has IT, so have many things. I have a lot of dreams, some are lucrative, some are just personal fantasies. I’d love to record a regular podcast, I would even like to write for someone.

For me a wonderful dream would be to combine writing, photography and IT together, like a newspaper column, photographing, writing about IT as well as recording a podcast about it, alas, that will probably not happen.

I even have dreams about traveling, although some of the places I would like to visit might prove controversial, but there are hidden meanings for all of it, places like Pripyat come to mind, although I would encourage everyone to read the Kid Of Speed blog by Elena Fitalova. It’s incredible emotional, and inspiring.

This brings me on to another wonderful things thats happened. I’ve been invited to do a voiceover for someone else’s podcast series called supermarket matters thanks to Mark Chatterly, honoured isn’t the word of course.

To say I am blown away with what has been literally handed to me on a plate is an understatement. I would love to say that I have personally been responsible and achieved all of this myself, but that wouldn’t be true. I am simply lucky and I owe many of these incredible experiences to people like Gabriel Strange and Mark Chatterly to name a few.

Of course the year isn’t over, and as I’ve learnt some great things can happen in only a few days let alone a few months!

However I have one thing to thank more than anything, and this may come as a surprise. I have to thank, Twitter.

This might seem stupid to many, but it really isn’t. When I joined twitter just under two years ago, I had no idea how to work it, how to understand it, and believe it or not, I was going to give it up. I would never have met these people or been provided with any of these opportunities had I not stuck it out on twitter. I wouldn’t even own apptacious if it were not for twitter and me meeting the former owners.

2010 has been a whirlwind, despite this however, I of course have regrets. I’ve lost some very dear friends thanks to my own ineptitude and stupidity, I can only hope that I can rebuild those friendships, and build new bridges.

2009 was a year of hell, I even posted about it. I begged and prayed for 2010 to be better, and although it didn’t seem it at first, it has been. I can only hope this trend continues.

So to everyone that has been there, and helped me to achieve what I have achieved so far, Thank you, and to everyone who I have lost, I can only say I am sorry.

Thank you.

The server experienced a catastrophic failure which was caused by a bad command in the system scripts. The system has now been restored with the help of the folks at linode.com and the server is performing normally. I apologise for any inconvenience anyone experienced

The biggest problem is that mcrowle-grovesphotography.com is just WAY too long to ask professional clients to contact me on. It’s also cold and soul-less.

Whereas at least thelongmile has some soul to it, something descriptive. I actually can’t come up with the right name, but at the same time I want to keep the one I have. So this leaves me with two choices. Come up with a new name for photography site and possibly spend months dealing with it, or find a new name for the blog and pass it over. I COULD just leave it combined or even chuck the blog onto a separate site but that would mean all my regular visitors had to go to something like thelongmile.net/blog or blog.thelongmile.net or … well, whatever I choose… But do people really want that? Or do I leave this as thelongmile.net or come up with a new name for the photography and loose the fact that almost everyone knos the name thelongmile.

I need some help on this one. Suggestions, thoughts, please, let me know…

When I redesigned this site, I wanted it to be a combination of my blog, and my photography portfolio, but I find I am taking so many pictures now that I need to refocus those efforts. Not only that but people are now muttering about asking me to do photography for them or requesting certain jobs to be done, and since this is a personal site, I now need to look at having the more commercial nature of my photography, somewhere else.

As a result, thelongmile will remain my “personal” site for my blog, ranting and musings, and will keep the same design, although the image at the top might be resized or reduced. My photography on the other hand will move to another site that I will be spending a great deal of time working on.

I know that I’ve been quiet on here lately, but i’ve needed to re-evaluate the site a little, and sit down and think about what I really want from this. Plus walking up to people saying it’s “thelongmile” photography, kinda doesn’t work. So, I’m not sure how I’m going to work this, but I will.. I need templates and styles now…

As a result, on both thelongmile and CardiffTweetups a donate button from Paypal has been implanted, unobtrusively into the sidebar.

I’ve also placed a Google Adsense widget into the sidebar of CardiffTweetups and into the footer of thelongmile.

These ads are design to be unobtrusive, whilst helping to generate revenue to keep this site and my other sites going. Donations are used for me to keep the site going, and for building onto projects like CardiffTweetups which has more than exceeded initial expectations. Expansion is not only “a good idea” it’s also now a requirement.

This is all the adverts will ever be for the foreseeable future, and I will NEVER EVER put a pop-up or pop-under advert on the site. I hate them enough as it is.

So please, I ask if you are feeling generous, to donate a small amount to help support thelongmile Group, and if you have time, just click on the ad’s

Next update, is the fact that, thelongmile.net is now just “thelongmile”. You knew about this in the last site update post, but I’ve finally updated the logo to include the .com and .net domains to reflect the new site structure.

August also saw the creation of another site Cardiff Tweetups.
Cardiff Tweetups follows on from a twitter meet that happened last Saturday at Y Fwch Goch in Cardiff. I’ve simply created the website so people can post meet ideas. I’m not arranging them all the time, but I’ll post ideas that people have.

This is of course the very first additional site I have made, and now am the proud owner and administrator of two websites, and of course with that, “thelongmile” has now become a part of what I’m calling “thelongmile group”.

Any website that I set up and administer myself, will be part of “thelongmile group” until such time as I choose ether a more appropriate name, or create a parent site. So say hi to “thelongmile group”.

The final update for you all is of course the sites backend and core. The stuff you don’t see.

As of August the 2nd we are now running on the latest version of WordPress 2.8.3 allowing greater security and hopefully improved speed. I’m already seeing reports of increased user performance and the overall statistics appear to be good, and certainly improved.

Similarly the security updates that come with 2.8.3 plus the additional security software installed on the site and recoded, allow for a more secure, and far more reliable system.

The site is now largely being limited by it’s own popularity and growth. In fact a large percentage of the sites loading time is coming from BuyHTTP’s servers simply trying to respond to an incoming query and load the databases. Whilst BuyHTTP have given me excellent service over the past few years, I am now actively looking to expand and that means a move.

That’s it for now everyone. I felt it best to keep you up to date with the website itself and make sure you’re checking out the new features and new sites. Also don’t forget that I’m also on Flickr and will be adding a flickr sidebar link in the coming days.

At the moment this is simply a redirect but it’s a big thing for me since I’ve been waiting for almost five years! So, there will be a minor rebrand on the premise that this is no longer thelongmile.net but simply, thelongmile.

The next big change will be to hosting. Despite the excellent customer service I have received from BuyHTTP the market has changed somewhat since I took out my original hosting plan with them. Unfortunately BuyHTTP are not able to get even remotely close to other plans that are on offer from the likes of BlueHost or Linode, and so I am now investigating the plans available, and will being making preparations to move this site over to the new host.

This will bring a few great thing’s for you guys. It gives me a huge amount of space in comparison to what I already have. It will improve the site performance and responsiveness dramatically, and pave the way for more expansions and user communities. Yes that’s right I said user communities.

We need to start building up this, and giving you newsletters. So thats it for now! Your comments are always appreciated! So for now, toodles!

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!

Just another note – the twitter widget is broken – i cant seem to change it’s colour so its transparent for some reason, so it’s been disabled, and the gallerys still rely on flash, as I’m still working on getting Flickr integrated.

Hope you all enjoy the new template!

My Gnatt charts now tell me I am at 81% completion. In fact the entire site is 100% ready to be moved over to this one, however I want to fill out the other 19% which is of course looking at integrating flickr.

So thats on my task list for the next few days, but the time is coming very shortly for the rebranding and the brand new look site. It’s taken long enough, and the bugfixes are all done (I’m sure I’ll find more though) but brace yourselves, this could go up tomorrow night if I make enough progress!

Special shoutout to sean or @spoofscript as he’s known on twitter for keeping me sane and giving me the one last bit of code I needed to finish the site itself. Thanks man!

Thanks

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

If you don’t like the mobile view, you can flick back to the normal site by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.

The site is available from your iPhone, Android or Blackberry mobile device as well as most other web enabled handhelds with access to the internet. So keep up on the move, and leave your comments. The only limitation is at the moment you can’t look at the gallery, but, that will be changing soon.