James Bylett July 1st, 2009
Not a very interesting update really and not related to photography at all (unless you’re particularly interested in website design you’ll probably want to stop reading about now!), but I’m feeling quite pleased with the improvements I’ve made to the site at the moment and I haven’t written many blog posts in a while so thought I’d write about it anyway.
My site has changed it’s layout a few times since I created it, mainly due to expanding content, but a problem I’ve long suffered with was that, when it came to galleries with multiple pages, the way I was doing it was, frankly, a bit of a mess. I used to have to create seperate pages for each part and then hide the automaticly created links, create manual hyperlinks where I wanted them between the pages and sub pages etc. in order to get it all linked together properly while still keeping the site looking neat and tidy to visitors. While this looked fine on the surface, it has been starting to get pretty tedious as it meant a lot of manual work every time I added a page to an existing gallery set, meant I had multiple pages named the same in my page list (which made my navigation of pages for editting purposes very confusing at times!), and the sheer number of pages I had to wade through was starting to get a bit silly given how many galleries I have!
I’ve trid to solve this problem in the past with plugins but never managed to find one that would achieve what I really wanted, sets of pages joined together with links between them created automatically to save me so much manual work. I’ve finally managed to achieve this, not with a plugin, but with a feature that I hadn’t even realised was built in to wordpress all along, a simple tag to split a page into multiple pages (<!–nextpage–> in case anybody reading this has had similar issues with a site to me). OK it wasn’t quite that simple, I also had to look up a bit of code that needed inserting into my page templates in order to display the page navigation links, plus figuring out where to put it was interesting (bit of a trial and error job, I’m an amateur coder at best so the majority of my code customisations over the years have been a similar routine!) but after getting over that hurdle the rest was plain sailing.
In many ways it’s highly annoying knowing that the feature was there all along staring me in the face and I just never found it, but equally I’m extremely pleased now I’ve implemented it that I’ve managed to kill dozens of pages from the site by compiling them all into single split pages with all the links created autmatically for me (well, all apart from the links between the photo and slideshow pages but that’s a product of the way I’ve designed that and it’s no effort to maintain), making for a much better organised back end to the site and a much easier job for me to make future updates to it!
Anyway, geeky post over, I’ll try to make the next one more photography related and a bit less boring 
James Bylett June 30th, 2009
Well the problem mentioned in my last post was short lived, I have managed rather quicker than anticipated to find a plugin to give me a workaround for my sidebar’s display, albeit it’s going to require a bit of a mass edit on my existing pages now…
(Update)
Apparently the original problem which I thought was down to one of my plugins not working properly…turned out to be a simple case of it having been too long since I made a notable gallery update on the site and I’d forgotten how I had some of my plugins and layout customisations configured and therefore missed updating a vital component (*smacks self on head repeatedly!*), all rectified properly now and noted for next time!
James Bylett June 30th, 2009
2 new galleries online today, after return trips to both the Wildlife Heritage Foundation and Santago Rare Leopard Project with Photographers on Safari. Santago is sadly going to be closing this year so I was lucky to be able to have this last opportunity to get some shots of the cats there. Unfortunately I seem to be having a few issues with the page listings on the site at the minute though, links that should be hidden are displaying and making my sidebar look a bit of a mess so that will require further investigation!
James Bylett April 4th, 2009
Finally, after much procrastonating and a subsequent lack of time to get things sorted out, I have gotten around to adding a new gallery of photos I took at the Wildlife Heritage Foundation in August last year with Photographers on Safari, I have a follow up trip to both there and Santago booked for June now so with any luck following those I will be able to get some new galleries online without a 7 odd month delay this time!
James Bylett August 8th, 2008
A double whammy of new galleries today due to me being a bit slow this week in getting photos processed and ready for upload. Firstly I made a return visit to Eriador Cats last Sunday to take some more up to date photos of some of the cats we didn’t have time to do last time and some of the kittens that I photographed previously who are now noticably older, I have added a second page to the Eriador Cats Bengals gallery page with some of the results. Secondly, I visited Wildwood Wildlife Park with Photographers on Safari this week and predictably enough returned with masses of nice photos (if I do say so myself 
) and some of my best from the day have a new gallery all to themselves. I also have another photography workshop lined up towards the end of the month at a big cat sanctuary which funnily enough is not far down the road from Wildwood so watch this space in a couple of weeks time for another update.
James Bylett July 29th, 2008
Two posts in one evening, this is a first! Following on from my earlier post, I decided to get on with adding slideshows for all the galleries and while it proved to be something of a laborious process, it didn’t actually take me as long as I’d feared and as a result, slideshows are now online and can be accessed from the individual gallery pages. To my knowledge the slideshows and associated links are all present and correct but given that it’s quite late and I have had a cider this evening it’s not out of the realms of possibility for me to have made a mistake so please let me know if you spot anything awry!
James Bylett July 29th, 2008
The number of galleries on the site has been steadily expanding since it first went online and with it the gallery list down the side has been getting a little out of control, that and the fact that I’ve never been quite satisfied with the way I had the large galleries with multiple pages organised has led me to have a bit of a re-organisation on a few of the pages for the larger galleries, much for the better if I do say so myself, anybody who has seen the old structure will I’m sure agree that things look a bit neater now! I’m also looking to add something I feel has been a bit lacking from my galleries, slideshow views, but that is going to require a bit more leg work so watch this space!
James Bylett July 9th, 2008
Another new gallery is now online, photos taken on another photography day with Photographers on Safari at the Cat Survival Trust in Welwyn, we had to dodge a few showers (a few of them heavy) but all in all we were very lucky with the weather given what it’s been like the rest of the week so the day was still a great success
