Naff Challenge 3
The mission is, to enhance this blog, to more fully meets its' objective of entertaining and exciting my sons, the Middleburgh clan and our friends. A key stategy to achieve this, is to make more effective use of images.
This is driven by the following key considerations:
- My sons' reading habits: It is a source of wonder to me that both are university educated since their attention span can be measured in nanoseconds.
- My writing habits: verbose ; use of 3+ syllable words;creative spelling and ad nauseam revisions
- HK is photogenic - it would be a sin not to take advantage of it
- Visits:For reasons which elude me (certainly not my photographic skills) I do get a lot of drop in traffic from image search engines
I have experimented with different approaches, testing their fit to mission. I simply could not pass up on implementing a
photo gallery based on
Stu Nicholl's excellent CSS demos - very classy - in fact the "smegging
bees knees"!!. I am pleased to announce the launch of a dedicated
photo blog, a sibling to this miserable offering.
Toys for the Boys
Although other approaches did not excite me as much, those listed below have potential, and may be used hereafter subject to:
- My personal prejudices: yes - I am flawed
- Template Design: this blog's display area is "challenging"
Scrollers and SlideSows
I like scollers ; They are eye catching and you can pack lots of images into a small space. Slideshows are simply 1 picture at a time scrollers.
Simple but effective (although occasionally they need a page refresh to load.)
Flash Strips
This is a basic strip from photobucket - you can't specify the size of the generated flash but you get scroll controls and mouseover pausing. A more sophisticated alternative is FilmLoopLike flash it required a plug in to play
Slideshows
The display dimensions are fixed in the generated flash files produced by Photobucket or FlickR.Resizing in HTML simply crops the image. Bucketshows, although lacking scroll control, are more practical within this blog than
Flickr Slideshows simply because they are smaller, Flickr slide shows however can be externalized
Stamps and Badges
The Flickr Badge (top right) is more pretty and functional than the Bucketstamp (above)and although its easier to embed different stamps in posts with some fiddling you can also embed different badges in different posts (I understand this is not generally known).
Photo Galleries
Middleburgh Photos can speak for itself.
There does not seem to be any problems with Firefox unless you have a slow connections (thats life).IE occasionally appears to suffer from indigestion (if the images download fast?)Need to clear local cache since refreshing page does not work. After optimizing I tested the load times for an identical post using same images hosted respectively on flickr and photobucket. There wasn't any significant difference in load times but it was more efficient to load images into Flickr using their upload tool although SE meaningful image names were lost.
The other alternative to building and displaying a photogallery is to leverage anexternal site eg Flickr Photo sets.,
Posted at 7/30/2006 01:53:00 pm by David Middleburgh
Permalink
|