Up until recently, I’ve been using Facebook for my professional online content and porting it over here to my website. With all the news of the way Facebook has been used in the political debate and the ensuing realities, I’ve decided it was time to leave.
So here I am. Over time I’ll move my previous content here to the website.
I’ve finally opened my Etsy online store to sell some of my images. Be sure to stop by and take a look and leave me a comment and tell me what you think. I’ll be adding more images and in different sizes over time so be sure to come back often to see what else is available. Right now everything is large and everything is a gallery wrap. Speaking of which, you have to see the quality of these gallery wraps. Very nice. Good tight corners, finished backs and pre-installed hardware for hanging… all ready to go up on a wall when they arrive. You won’t be disappointed!
I’ve long wanted a slideshow to showcase some of my work on the front page here. I’ve tried quite a few things and nothing was very easy or worked the way I wanted. As you might be aware, I use WordPress to run this site, and I’m quite happy with that. I wanted something that would play nicely with the WordPress back end. Several plug ins required uploading all new media but I wanted something that could use the existing photos that I’d already uploaded. After much searching and a bit of trial and error, I found Photo Galleria. I’ve been running it here on the splash page for a few days now and it’s worked pretty well.
It was easy to set up. If you’re familiar with WordPress then this will be old hat… I was able to do the install completely through the WP interface, then I set up a photo gallery and got the slideshow running in Preview mode. I’m using the “Twenty Twelve” WordPress theme. I think it’s clean and simple and I like the way it looks. I added a couple lines to the CSS file for this theme, both listed in the FAQ for the Photo Galleria plugin, to change the background color and to center the thumbnails. WordPress has made CSS changes easy to do in recent updates, you just go to Dashboard>Appearance>Editor and you can access the file to make changes. If you’re not familiar with CSS or HTML I would suggest you be careful here, it’s easy to make a mess. I always back up the complete WordPress install and my content before I start tinkering.
When I was finished with the messing about, and I was happy with the way things looked and worked, I published the page I made for the slideshow. I then set that to be my front page here on the site. I set up a second page as the default for the blog and created a link in the menu for that so the blog could still be found. Again, if you’re familiar with WordPress, this is all pretty easy to do. All in all, once I’d settled on the Photo Galleria plugin, everything else was easy to get the way I wanted…
“Tis the Season” and all that, folks… I wish each of you a Merry Christmas and a prosperous Happy New Year!
I’ve added an edited series of photography-related posts going back a few years to this site from my old blog over at www.see-dream.com… you’ll find them in the archives.