If you visit here frequently, first, thanks a lot, and second, you may notice some changes.

Following various comments and a lot of procrastination, I have completely rebuilt the back end of this website to prepare for it being adaptive to different devices.  The actual full adaptation will be Phase 2, but already the strict fixed width design is gone.  I’ve also tried to fix, streamline and improve various other things, including the comment system. That was also the subject of some criticism, so I removed the old Disqus implementation a while back.  Of course having done that my already meagre comment stream dried up altogether.  My spam count however went through the roof.  So, I have tried to tune the native Expression Engine comment system a bit, but it does have limitations.  It’s on the list for future improvements.  There are probably still quite a lot of glitches here, and there are a few areas where things are not quite finished, but I decided to push it out there as-is and fix stuff on the fly.

I actually started all this nearly a year ago, with a trial shift to Squarespace. That really didn’t work out. Squarespace is probably ideal for most people, especially if you’re starting out, but it doesn’t really lend itself to any kind of complexity or true customisation. And it really is very expensive. So I had to roll my sleeves up, get into old dog / new tricks mode, and modernise my CSS and backend code. Hopefully I’ve now got a solid base for the future, and I can get back t spending my meagre spare time on adding hopefully interesting content.

I’d be delighted to get any feedback, positive or negative. Via the comments system, of course.

Just a short note to whoever might be interested: this website runs on a CMS called Expression Engine. Way back when I first built it, it seemed like a good idea, and there was considerable synergy between my working life and my real life. More than 10 years ago I was creating and maintaining sites and services running not only on Expression Engine, but also Movable Type, Wordpress, and, Lord help me, Facebook.

Those days are gone.

Expression Engine is quite complex, and my tired, lazy old brain has quite a job keeping up with it. On top of that, as far as the actual front end is concerned, it is fully DIY, which means I need to keep up with HTML, Javascript (or whatever it is called these days), CSS and the latest Kool frameworks. Adding in my chronic inability to keep things simple, it just becomes too much. There are plenty of rough edges and outright defects in the current version, and of course not even a hint of a mobile-friendly version. And apart from that, maintaining my own virtual server is a pain.

And I just can’t be bothered with all this anymore. I want to spend what time I’ve got on content.

So, I’m experimenting with a completely new implementation on Squarespace, where most of the plumbing is handled behind the scenes, and mobile versions are created automatically. Of course this gives hand in hand with a certain loss of freedom, but that in turn might help to keep me on the rails.

It’s not going to happen straightaway, in fact I haven’t even decided if it will happen at all, but it is more likely than not.  If it does, much of the 18 years of blog archive will go away. I can’t transfer it automatically, so just some selected posts, including probably the last 2 years or so, will get copied over.

One decision I have made, following feedback and general evolution, is to pull the plug on Disqus Comments.  Sadly, since the EE-Disqus synchronisation plugin stopped working some time back, this means that comments made between around April 2019 and now have vanished. I will to see if I can copy them over, but since I don’t actually own other people’s comments, that might be a bit tricky.

On the upside, I have reinstated native comments, including anonymous comments. So feel free to give that a try. Hopefully spam protection works better with EE v6 than it did with EE v2…

As frequent readers of this blog will know, I’ve been undergoing an existential struggle trying to figure out what the actual purpose of all this is. Partly due to feeling that the blog part of the website is effectively just me shouting at clouds, I had reached the conclusion that I should stop blogging.  But there are still things that I want to write about. On the whole I enjoy writing these, so it shouldn’t matter too much if nobody reads them. But giving a lot of visual priority on the home page to writing, as opposed to photography, kind of amplified the negative feelings I was getting from the perception of no audience engagement.

I’m also on a bit of an upswing on the photography side, having taken stock, and got a better feeling of what I want to do with it. One thing is to be a tiny bit more self-publicising, hence a return to a (restricted) presence on facebook (because that’s where all the photographers I’m interested in hang out), and another is to give most of the upfront real estate here to photos. And finally, to curate a bit more which photos can appear in the random-selection featured spot. So, here we are. Snowhenge dot net v5.5 or something.

snowhenge dot net, before (left) and after

I’ve tidied up a few other things along the way.

I’m much happier with the new look, I may finally have got close to what I always wanted. Hopefully a few other people will like it too.

Well this has taken a while. I started working on a redesign of this website around about May 2016. The basic idea has survived, and is pretty much what I’m releasing now, finally, nearly 2 years later. The basic concept was quite straightforward: I wanted to shift the focus a little more towards my photography, to reduce clutter, and to refresh the design a bit. The execution was anything but simple. First of all, I had to sort out the underlying technology, and apply various updates. That broke stuff, in all sorts of ways, mainly badly written code that wouldn’t work anymore. So I had to go through my rats nest of templates and scripts and clean them out. Actually this led to an interim update about a year ago, when I put the cleaned up version of the old design online. Of course there was no outward benefit to this.

The home page earlier this week, and the home page today.

But then I could start working on shifting to the new design. I spent ages faffing around with stuff like web fonts, and even on a completely new concept using Koken. I had decided to completely rework the photo gallery part, and in particular revisit the contents from scratch. Just selecting and preparing the photos was an endless task. I had decided to add a new “Photo Diary” section, which is basically a blog with pictures and very few words, but of course I needed content for that too. And tellingly, the actual dates on the first two entries are really from Autumn 2016. I could maybe have stopped there, but no, I then decided to add this “Destinations” concept, which provides another way to discover and explore content. I’m quite pleased with that, in fact.

And so on and so forth. All this wasn’t helped by having very little time to work on this, usually just a few minutes here and there every week, which didn’t help with continuity, or remembering what I was meaning to do next. Finally I’ve arrived at a point where it seems complete and stable enough to throw it out there to sink or swim. There are still a few enhancements I’d like to add, mainly to do with the visibility of visitor feedback. I also need to make some further technical upgrades, but hopefully it will be relatively painless this time.

I don’t think I’ll be putting myself through this again. If I ever do another major upgrade, I’ll use some cookie cutter thing like Squarespace. Following this DIY approach has the benefit of allowing me to present everything exactly in the way I want it, albeit constrained by my abilities, rather than to fit in with some generic concept. And since I’m largely doing this for myself, that still makes sense, but only up until the point where it becomes unsustainable, and that point is quite near.

I’m sure there are bugs, glitches and gotchas all over the place, but I can’t procrastinate forever. Either it works well enough, or it will be time to call it quits. Hopefully the objective of providing a better platform for my photography has been met at least in part. Then it will have all been worth it.

It's time for another clear out. Actually, I was in two minds about selling everything, as I need both a mental and a physical clearout. My photography is becoming more and more internalised, almost to the extent that it is actually rather pointless, since if I'm the only audience, it becomes rather questionable if seeing something is not sufficient. I don't actually need to photograph stuff, I'm still seeing the world in the same way. But possibly that is a little too drastic a step for now. But I am weighed down by clutter, by too many options, by gear I can't really use for diverse reasons. So out it all goes.

The stuff I'm offering for sale is listed in two separate posts, for Olympus & Sigma. All of the items were bought new by me and used only by me. Most have travelled many, many thousands of kilometres, but they're all in pretty good shape, if unabashedly used, and in full original packaging. Hopefully I'm offering them at realistic prices. If not, I guess nobody will buy them.

Sigma stuff on sale is here.

And Olympus stuff is here.