I’ve not tinkered with the site for some time – I think the last time was messing about with the Flickr widget in the sidebar almost a year ago while I was meant to be revising for my finals – so I thought I’d have a little play around and produce an actual logo for socialphoto. It was pretty simple to do in Gimp, even considering my otherwise complete lack of skills. (The only thing that annoys me about Gimp is that it opens in X11.)

Of course, adding it into the header and removing the previous stuff in the header should have been completely easy. Except, of course, it ended up not being quite so simple, after a few minor CSS quibbles I had. I think it’s pretty much sorted now, although in Firefox and IE the logo has a noticeable white frame, which doesn’t appear in Safari and Chrome. Why that happens, I’m not entirely sure – it’ll get ironed out in time, I hope.

Anyway, I have a few more plans for the site to get done in the next couple of months: firstly to move it to a blog.socialphoto.co.uk subdomain (which given wordpress and all the plugins I have may not be entirely easy), and to make myself a nice little front page with bells and whistles to boot. I can’t promise it’ll be done soon, but hopefully it will be done at some point.

It’s been a while since I fiddled with this blog, but you may have noticed a few minor aesthetic changes recently:

1. Post images now have a black border, instead of silver. Where these images function as links, they have a small inner border that is normally black but silver on hover. Why? I think photos look better framed in black than silver. Nuff said.
2. I’ve also resized these images to fit better with the new borders. This may result in a short delay for some visitors as the software generates a new image on some posts, but once it’s cached it’ll be speedier.
3. I added a new widget – Quick Flickr widget in this case. Some fiddling with CSS was required to display my latest Flickr images satisfactorily; big thanks to mgdm for also having a poke through all the PHP and fixing me up with a way to discern between landscape/portrait/square aspects.
4. The Twitter widget is gone. I don’t tweet as @socialphoto very often. To be honest, I only got the account to reserve the name once I bought this domain. If you do want to follow me on Twitter, I’m @jkblacker.

There are more changes I want to make, some smaller than others. I’ve got two more exams this week, and then I’m done and free to make some stuff happen on here.

Oh, and I also removed a link from the ‘Sites I like’ because of HDR related crimes against photography.

Update, 19/5 – Following something of a spike in traffic, I’ve finally found a decent related posts plugin that works with YAPB. The previous one was for some reason duplicating YAPB images, so I didn’t use it. In a twist, it was called YAPRPP or something like that – yet another ‘yet another’ plugin. But I digress. I’m now using Contextual Related Posts, which seems to be doing the job pretty danged well.