I hope you enjoy it!

I have managed, however, to get things mostly working again. The galleries are back and all the photos are available once again. After doing a quick test, the only thing that I can see that needs work is the search functionality. What’s strange is that the search functionality off the blog pages works great – it’s only when you search from inside the galleries that things don’t work correctly. Weird.

So, there is some maintenance yet to do, but we’re moving forward and things are looking up for the health of this site.

If all goes well, you shouldn’t notice much difference except perhaps slight increases in awesomeness.

Looks like I have to re-learn a few things about WordPress…

If only technology didn’t change so quickly!

Once home, however, I won’t be staying long. After days after returning to my current home, I will be visiting my former home, Calgary. From May 24th to June 1st, I’ll be doing some catching up with friends and family and maybe even relaxing a little bit. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to both trips.

With these trips in mind, if you are interested in licensing any images from me, responses will be slower than usual and I expect I won’t be able to deliver digital files until I’m back in Manchester. If your project is on a tight deadline, you can find a large amount of my images through Alamy.

I hope your month of May looks as promising as mine!

A couple files got modified, but I’ve tracked down the bugs and things seem to be running smoothly once more. Now, when I say ‘a couple files got modified,’ I’m specifically not saying ‘I modified a couple files,’ because, well, I didn’t. The forces of chaos in the universe just simply decided my evening should be spent trying to figure out why certain files were now filled with gibberish or were cut off in inexplicable places. Thanks to the back gods for watching over me though.

All this reminds me of why I got out of web design – too many things just go wrong for no apparent reason! I think I’ll stick with photography.

Please have a look and feel free to let me know what you think.

What I quickly realized upon making additions was that the core framework the site was insufficient for my needs. The thing was held together with duct tape and no more tape was going to make it solid. My attempts to improve upon what I had made this clear – I need some solid bolts or welding to underpin this thing, not tape.

I started to tinker with an alternative content management system: WordPress. It was like settling into a comfortable chair. It was so relieving to have my CMS work predictably. I told it to do something; it did it. Fancy that.

I started to develop a new, friendlier version of my site using WordPress as the engine. I was planning on developing it behind the scenes while my current site remained in place for any viewers who happened to come my why during development. A couple days later, that plan went down the tube when I learned that all the images on my site were no longer accessible due to who knows what error.

I couldn’t have people trying to find my work and ending up receiving only errors, so I took down the site and started to rebuild in earnest.

A short while later and I am counting down to launch. The site may look mostly the same to you, but to me, the difference is like riding a high-end, custom-built mountain bike with good shocks versus a rusty shopping bike with no seat.

And with that, let me welcome you to the new and improved dsphotographic.com. Please feel free to let me know what you think. I’m especially eager to hear from Windows users since I haven’t had much opportunity to test the site on a PC.

I now intend to use the brand-spankin’ new backend to deliver more content to this lovely little blog. When I’m not travelling, I hope I can be a good source of travel photography (and related) news. (With, of course, the occasional bit of unrelated, fun news thrown in just because.)

While travelling, it will be business as usual with my posts. Updates will come as time permits, but I always prefer being behind the lens and shooting marvelous locations to sitting behind a computer if I’m given the choice.

I hope all that’s not too confusing and I hope you’ll follow along.

The problem is that pesky Gallery software. I think I could leave it as a standalone, but I would have to do some serious changes to the CSS files. That’s not really a big deal at first glance, but really, without being able to see it in IE, I’m bound to be in for a few surprises considering it’s so bloody hard to get that script to do what you want.

That’s all fine and good. I know how I could do that. One tricky thing though would be to try to get a search block for the images working on the non-gallery pages. Right now I can do that through Mambo (which, by the way, was a total fluke of coding and I still don’t really know what I did). I really don’t think I would have such good luck with WordPress. I really want people to be able to search my images from anywhere on my site, but I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.