Graze

Not very photography related post, but something I feel worth sharing. I have recently discovered a company called Graze, who deliver boxes of natural healthy snacks (mainly dried fruit and nuts but several other things too) with no added artificial colours, flavours or preservatives, to your door, and in signing up I have been given a discount coupon that can grant anybody else who signs up one free and one half price box (normal price is £2.99 a box).

Check the main site if want more info on what they do and if you feel like giving it a try, use the link below to sign up and get your free box and second one half price, you can always just cancel after you get the free one if you’re not sold on the idea. You’ll even get your own discount code to forward on to anybody else you think might be interested, so what have you got to lose

http://www.graze.com/p/G8MW36Q

Florida

Another gallery online (turns out I’ve been procrastinating un-necessarily as most of the photos were pretty much ready for upload anyway!), this time for my holiday in Florida in March 2009, not many ‘proper’ photos, mostly touristy ones from Seaworld, but there’s a few half decent wildlife shots in there as well that I wanted to get online so thought I may as well chuck the lot together rather than creating a couple of albums with naff all in them!

Updates at last!

Been a while since I’ve had any updates for the site, processing and upload of various batches of photos have been on the backburner for a while but I’ve finally gotten around to starting working through them and have uploaded a couple of new galleries and updated another. The UK Wildlife British Birds and Brittish Mammals galleries has had a couple of new shots added (and one removed that I was never entirely happy with as it wasn’t very sharp but was the only half decent picture I had of a Robin until recently!) and I have added Floral and Landscapes and Scenery galleries. The former is a departure from my normal photography preferences but when I visited the Eden Project I was presented with far too many good photo opportunities to pass up. The Landscapes and Scenery one I have been meaning to add for ages but until recently (or rather until I finished processing my photos from last October’s holiday in Cornwall!) haven’t had enough passable shots to warrant a whole gallery, finally got a few together now and hopefully will have more to add over time. Still some more updates to come as and when I get round to processing some more of my backlog, hopefully sooner rather than later this time!

Improvements

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

Fixed

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!

New Galleries

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!

Finally!

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!

New Galleries

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.