Bloggin Off

Hi everyone,

Yes, I'm bloggin off to WordPress ....

Here's a link to my new site ... http://mrjoelsepics.wordpress.com/

and my new name on this site is one of the pet names our girls call me
... Mr Joel or just Joel (so please would you use this one, if you leave
a comment on my new site?)

The new site is essentially a photo-blog, and it will be more bland in
terms of satirical content than this one. I'm making it bland and inoffensive,
so that I can share it with family and friends. It will be like an extension
of my Flickr site, to allow me to showcase a few of my best photos, and
comment about them / what's happening in my life at the time.

The WordPress theme is Nitisha, and it was easy to set up. A bit harder
was to find a unique name for the site (I ended up using one of my old
website names), and to customise it somewhat. Nitisha offers two photo
sizes you can use ... 1024 px and 768 px widths, and options as regards
layouts (colour, number of columns, etc). I've used 1024 px width for
the banner and 768 px for the photos below it. My self-portrait is 128 px
square ... taking this photo by myself was the hardest thing to do ... I
should have asked someone else to take it for me. :)

WordPress dot com is free to use to set up your own blogsites, and WP is
happy to let you set up more than one. WordPress dot org is more for
commercial use / more serious web design and has loads of useful add-ons
to add to your chosen theme. I'm using the dot org version to set up a site
for my singer-songwriter niece (and got a lot of help from GoDaddy in
setting it up initially ... GoDaddy is hosting the site for me). This new site
is still "under wraps", but if you'd like a preview of how talented my
niece is, have a look at these YouTube videos ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neT_3TLOD8Q&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui2mKtzsY0o&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBcMSBsceeg

Enjoy.

Problem of sizing of photos in Blogger

Sorry to bore you with this topic again, but I've been trying out
uploading photos of various sizes on a New Blogger site (which
I set up for teaching purposes). I found that I've got the same
problem with my New Blogger site as with this one, in that all
my pics are set at about 300 pixels in width, regardless of the
larger widths of the originals.

Here are three versions of one of my holiday pics to show you
what's happening ...  (the widths are 1024px, 800px & 450px)

None of these look very good (especially the smallest one), until you
click on the photos to enlarge them.

In New Blogger, you can manually scroll through the enlarged images,
if you so wish. The new layout reminds me of Picasa Viewer, which I
think Google is using in New Blogger.

As I've said before, I think the new layout of photos in Blogger is very
poor. I wish to showcase my photos for you ... I don't wish to show
you poor quality miniatures. So in the next few months, I will abandon
Blogger and will switch to using WordPress or perhaps Tumblr.

One of my favourite WordPress sites is Donncha's photo-blog.
Here's more info about Tumblr ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr