The giant trees are bending Their bare boughs weighed with snow; The storm is fast descending, And yet I cannot go. EMILY BRONTË Share this:TweetEmailPrintMoreRedditShare on TumblrLike this:Like Loading... Related 46
Love this photo, Dev. Also loved your reflections, in our recent comment thread, about the usefulness of a blog — being a “hub” and a trial board. I think of it as a kind of warehouse.If something is on my blog, I can post it from there to any or all of various social media, linking back to the source. Or if I’ve posted something to social media first, I can embed it on the blog. Either way, it becomes a kind of “information central” and a repository for the important stuff. (And lots more uses!)
Speaking of WordPress being a “pain”, I’d like to suggest a couple of tweaks: You currently have a “subscribe to blog” widget in the right-hand column. For ease of navigation, why not add a widget listing recent posts, and also recent comments? (There are other functions you could add there, too — WordPress offers a bunch of them, and it’s just a matter of dragging them from the admin interface to the position where you want them.)
Also — it would be great if you could have highly visible forward-and-back arrows allowing the reader to skip from one post to the next, in either direction. You currently have these arrows, but they are way down at the bottom, after the comments section, and my guess is that few people notice them. Ideally you could have these at the top and<?i? the bottom, and conspicuous — maybe in a contrasting color, or something?
I realize that changes of this latter sort are theme-dependent. If your theme doesn’t offer a setting for that, then you’d have to write custom HTML to change the theme behavior. The Jetpack plugin (official WordPress) allows this, as do many other plugins — and some themes explicitly provide for it as well. Plus, there’s the “child theme” approach, which is another “officially supported” WordPress technique. But these all can get pretty tedious unless it’s something you do all day, every day, professionally. (At least I find it hair-pulling! Your mileage may vary.)
P.S.: I always check the box that says “Notify me of new comments via email.” For some reason, this has recently stopped working for me. I’m not getting these notices. I check my spam list and they aren’t there either.
Thank you Gary. That’s very kind of you. This particular film I used here, Rolleiflex Retro 400S, is a new film to me and while I knew it was a relatively high contrast film (well compared to many other B&W films available), I didn’t know how it would fare in an already high contrast scene with white snow and dark tree trunks and branches. But after seeing the results I was super happy. Printing it in a darkroom will be quite difficult I think due to that high contrast but that’s why we have digital tech.
About your italic error, I was going to fix it, but your next comment addresses that, so I will leave it as it is. Just like verbal conversation, once it’s out you can’t undo it. But, as you know, I would like to introduce an edit button… just haven’t figured out how to, yet.
I would absolutely like to introduce bigger “back” and “next” arrows/buttons, but also haven’t figured out how to yet. I do know about the widgets like the one I have on the right. I think at some point I may have had a recent/related posts there too. But it started to look too cluttered so I put it at the bottom, but may be time to rethink that.
Not sure why the notification isn’t working. There was a time (20 yrs ago perhaps) when I would have taken up these technical challenges and solved them overnight. Custom HTML? Not a problem either. No plugin available? Let me write a whole new one. But it was 20 yrs ago. I do not want to return to that again. Even a few years back, as recent as 2012-13 actually, I was tinkering with Android phones, though nothing to do with coding though, more like an advanced user perspective, changing the operating system, messing with the file system etc. But now even that sounds too complicated. Instead, I have decided to learn about exposure, film development… and more recently book/magazine design using InDesign. I find it far more satisfying because with all these endeavors I am not simply solving a problem but there is also a creative, artistic side to it. A more left brain – right brain balance.
Also, since in the above comment I messed up an HTML symbol, I wrote most of it in italic — not the plan! This is one place where an “edit comment” feature would be nice. (Like the one I added at your behest to my own blog!) ≧◔◡◔≦
About the comment editing: Just search the WordPress plugin collection for “Simple Comment Editing” and install it. That’s the one by Ronald Huereca. It provides a five-minute window for the person leaving a comment. He explains how to increase this window with custom PHP coding, but I’ve been too lazy to work on that. instead, I decided I liked your reasoning as to the immediacy and utility of having a short window. (Which probably is why Huereca chose that in the first place.)
It’s amazing how alike our journeys have been. I was wading deep into coding about the same time you were, and feeling fairly good at it. But like you, I recently decided my creative energies are better utilized in book design and similar publishing tech. At one time, book typesetting was my livelihood (back in the heyday of Quark Express and WordPerfect — two programs hardly anyone remembers anymore). When I recently plunged back into that fray, everything had changed. I haven’t used InDesign. One resource that has amazed me is a lean-and-mean software package called the Atlantis Word Processor. Just $35, and worth many times that. It can handle complex book layouts, spitting out both a print-ready PDF and an ebook electronic version from the same master file. Fantastic Unicode support, which is important to me. So much to learn, so little time!
Thanks for the tip. I’ll find that plugin.
Never heard of Atlantis, I’ll have to check it out. I use InDesign mostly for laying out photobooks, so it’s a bit of overkill. But then again, it’s better to have more capability and not need it than need it and not have it.
I’m pretty sure that Atlantis would be unsuitable for laying out photo books, or magazines, or anything similarly complex. But I’m finding it eerily competent at laying out “normal” text-based books, including those with occasional illustrations. For any medium-to-long work of nonfiction, it’s great that it can generate an index, table of contents, internal hyperlinks, and the like. Way better than freeware like OpenOffice and LibreOffice. For the value, there’s no beating the $35 price.