Photography section added
I have added a new section to the site to share some the photographs that I have been taking. If your interested then hop on over to http://carl-topham.com/portfolio/photography/ and have a look.
News
Site redesign
The site redesign has been launched. As with any redesign, things change. Some you may like, and other you may not, but I assure you that I have put a lot of thought behind each change I have made. Let me know what you think of the changes. Since the site was also rebuilt from the ground up some of the things you may see may be things that are buggy or broken so please let me know asap.
Google +
Another day, and another social network spring up for us all to join. This time it's from google (again). They have had a few attempts in the past, which have eventually been shut down. It's been up and running by invite only for a week or so now and it seems, so far at least, that this one could be their one.
It's design has been well though out and the privacy has so far been really well handled. There are a few quirks, and things to get used to, but the google+ team are on the ball and changes and updates are being handled in a really up front and timely manor. These guys have really set out to make this work just right.
At the moment the vast majority of people are Programmers, developers and designers with the general creatives falling in 4th. It seems to be somewhere in the middle of being facebook & twitter, with the better bits of both, so hopefully it can drag people off both of them and on to it.
Hopefully I will find some time to do a more in depth article on the in's and out's of it, and some of the beautiful features that Google has given us to play with.
P.S. You may also notice I now have +1 buttons on the blog posts, so share away!
Site growth dictates a redesign
Due to a few things I have been working on and a range of different projects I have been focusing on there are now many more things I can add to the site and many more streams of information that I can feed into it. The site wants to grow so I am going to make it grow as well as it can.
Currently the redesign is just starting in the UI/UX design and look and feel stages and it has raised a few questions about what people actually want to see in any site?
Personally I love to look at peoples projects and illustrations, designs and photographs. I like to read there blog and see what makes them tick, and I like to learn a few things as I go along. I like a site that has what I will call 'multi-focus'. Where you go for one thing, perhaps your were looking for a snippet of code, and you end up staying for something else. Something else that isn't just one thing but also another core part of the site. When I find what I like I want to share it with everyone else easily.
That's what I like in a site, but I am just one person. So more importantly what you want to see in my site?
I am designing the site with visitors in mind, so what are you looking at? what are you struggling to find and what would you like to see? Do you want to tweet and like articles and photos, any pages as all or just blog posts? Let me know by leaving a comment or sending me a tweet @Designer023
There's a place for everything
The more and more photography projects I start creating and taking part in, the more different streams of information I am having to cope with and find a decent way of sharing each of them in their own way with out overwhelming any of the other streams.
I have already been using Flickr to post my main photographs, but for whatever reasons I have decided that the smaller notes and documentation don't fit in this blog as they are a little too off the cuff and a bit more random, and they don't fit in with the idea of my more professional Flickr stream. I feel that videos also don't fit in either.
With that in mind I have created a Tumblr account and a Vimeo account for the two new streams of data. So I now welcome you to take a look at:
photographicadventures.carl-topham.com/ - For the notes on projects and trips
vimeo.com/designer023/videos - For the Videos
And the original Flickr account - For the Photos
I'm not sure how everyone else organises the whole range of projects that can spread through the different forms of media, but for now this is a direction I have decided on. If anyone has a better or different way I would love to know it and know why?
As a side note, I decided not to use YouTube for videos and go with Vimeo as I feel that YouTube is more for videos of people messing about and Vimeo is more like a creative's network.
Latest Updates
Recently I haven't found much time to post, so I decided to give a quick heads up and reason. It's not for a lack of things to share, it's down to a rather big (secret) project I am working on at the moment. Suffice to say the project will be going live in the near future so once that happens there should be many more posts coming your way.
While I have been busy on this project I have found out many things that I will be sharing which should help everyone else out too. Hopefully as the project also draws into it's final stages, I will be able to share some more information on what it is.*
*Whisper - "It has something to do with iOS..."
Moving to a new server - Done!
Over the weekend I finally moved the site to a new server. Hopefully while all the action was going on you saw nothing.
Why did I need a new server?
As much as I like mediatemple, they decided to discontinue one of the products I was using (Django Grid Container), so I took the plunge and got my own server... Well a VPS (Virtual Private Server) anyway, but it's still mine!
They key reason I had to change so quickly was because my main sites, and a few up coming ones, use Django.
As a bonus, that means I can be much more targeted in my web development and taylor the server to each project individually. Since it's no longer running as a shared server, the speeds should be faster too.
Migration to Django... Complete
I have finally finished the migration to Django. By finished I mean that I have replicated the old structure of the site and am no longer getting 404 or 500 errors, for missing pages and missing content.
I now have the long hard task of extending the backend functionality and creating a full website template that can be easily deployed to cover the following bases
- Content pages that can be created and amended via a console.
- A blog/ News section
- Photo uploads
- A Google map with pins and the ability to upload GPX files.
- embedding of feeds from other sites (Flickr, Twitter etc)
I have come across a few Django options, such as Django CMS, that already have some of these features but each one is not quite right for what I need.
Migration
I have rewritten the backend of the site. It is now running on Django, rather than the old PHP. That also means that the blog had to move over to Django. While I move the old posts over there may be some missing links or some odd blips.
Normal service will resume!
Host Migration
Over the weekend you may have noticed my site being down, then up, then down again and now finally back up. There was a hosting issue with my old hosts that was thankfully resolved by moving to the wonderful Media Temple. I have been using Media Temple for a few other sites for a while now and I was planning on moving this site over in the next month or two but the hosting issues forced my hand. Apart from being really flexible & customisable, they also offer more features than my last hosts so it’s all good. If you are interested in having your hosting with Media Temple then please check them out via my referral link http://www.mediatemple.net/go/order/?refdom=thehipshooter.com The referral site thehipshooter.com, is a photography site I am in the process of designing and building between other work. Watch this space for more info.Links:http://www.mediatemple.net/go/order/?refdom=thehipshooter.com