theme – Just thoughts

Anyone who visits this blog will know that I have another one – “Moments like these …” which is a website I’ve produced to showcase some of the images I’ve taken and processed, as well as show some quirky images often taken with my iPhone in a blog which have a commentary attached to them – hence the title of the site.

Just recently, the site has had a major make-over and I’ve been meaning to “tell the story” of that make-over – what I did, the new tools I’ve employed and some of the processes and workflows employed “behind the scenes”.

After the image has been imported into Lightroom [I have an Adobe Photography Creative Cloud subscription] on the desktop [I’ve written about this previously] I process the images as and if necessary and by labelling them with a colour-coding system, create Smart Collections which I will use for a number of purposes. In this post I introduced the fact that I was using a Lightroom Plugin to send images to Dropbox to enable the creation of an offline Portfolio on my iPad. Nothing has changed here. This plugin works really well and I’ve extended it’s use so that the Dropbox folder(s) are now used both as the source of screensaver images on my Mac, but also on my AppleTV. It works really well to create slideshows of my images on my devices.

The real change/addition at the Lightroom end has been the adoption of an amazing plugin to export images from Lightroom to a WordPress blog. This plugin – WP/LR Sync – also has a WordPress plugin which you need to install as well. When you’ve done that, any changes you make to the WP/LR Sync Publish folder in Lightroom will cause the change to be mirrored in the WordPress Media Folder – automaticlly. This is so neat!

In addition, the author – Jordy Meow – has produced a WP Media Folder plugin that allows you to organise your images into virtual folders in your WordPress Media Folder, as well as a plugin to link your uploaded images to the NextGen gallery plugin which has a load of neat transitions and effects for galleries and slideshows. This is when the fun started!

Up until just before Christmas I’d relied on using free themes for the WordPress blog and was generally very happy with what I’d achieved using the TwentyFourteen theme. However there were some security concerns about the Extended version I had been using so I thought it was about time to change, plus I’d been getting some hassle from smartphone users about how the site rendered on their devices.

That’s when I noticed that NextGen was now being handled by Photocrati and so I decided to take the plunge and purchase the Photocrati set of themes. They are magic. So customisable and, since the latest upgrade, fully integrated with NextGen.

The nuts and bolts I’ll not describe, they’re relatively straightforward. I now have a photo website with a blog all on the same platform and behaving responsively on smart devices. It’s quick as well through the optimisation applied in both the theme options, gallery plugin options and by using Cloudflare on the hosting site – 5quidhost.

I’ve mentioned this hosting company a few times before, and I will do so again. When I was having some problems getting WP/LR Sync to work due to some XML/RPC issues as the images were being uploaded, the team in Edinburgh (or St Andrews) really went the extra mile to get me the solution I required. They were excellent. I have written a review of this experience here.

A long overdue post on the way I go about blogging. It would be too grandiose to call it a strategy, but actually that’s a reasonable way of describing what I’ve been trying to work out in my mind.

The first thing (as ever with blogging) is context and identity. This “problem” has led me to create different blogs for different purposes. This in itself has caused me problems of identity and of course the targeting of posts to different audiences. [At least in my mind, if not in practice.] This led to a proliferation of blogs on different platforms and a sparsity of posts on nearly all of them :-(. This had to stop!

Some of these issues were also resolved to a large extent by using Google+ and Circles. However the one insurmountable issue appeared to be the spamming of Circles with Public posts – I have come to the realisation that I can’t solve that one without going down the separate identities again, and I’ve come to the conclusion I just can’t do that. I want simplicity, not complexity – so “spamming” it would appear is unavoidable! Actually, it’s not so much spamming as a challenge to me to get people learning a different way of looking at posts :-).

If you think of it, using Google+ is akin to reading a newspaper and absolutely no one reads a whole newspaper from cover to cover … do they? So, I’ll just be sending an explanatory message to my Google+ Circles requesting tolerance and suggesting they just ignore anything that has the word Public after my name :-).

The second issue is where to blog – what platform to use and how to integrate them with social media. For a long time I’ve used Blogger as well as WordPress. That had to stop. The latter is so much a better platform than the former, even if Blogger did integrate so much better with the other Google services. However, WordPress gets better all the time, and in its hosted form the flexibility it offers, and the integration you get by using the Jetpack plugin, creates a platform that is a joy to use. So I decided that my Private (mainly family) blog(s) would remain on Blogger, and so gain from the close integration with Google+, but that my two remaining Public-facing blogs would move to a hosted WordPress platform.

Here I must put in a plug for 5quidhost who (as well as being a UK-based hosting company, which I appreciate and would wish to support in any case) are also incredibly good in their email support and account administration and whose response time for readers in the UK is very good. They have an easily understandable approach to hosting which allows a try-before-you-buy free hosting account before you decide on the scale of hosting you want.

I also would highly recommend DomainMonster for domain registration. Again their dashboard is the easiest to understand of any hosting organisation I’ve seen or used. I moved a number of domains to them from another domain registry a couple of years ago and this went remarkably smoothly. They’ve got a very satisfied customer too!

So, I now have two Public-facing blogs – this one, and one – “Moments like these …” to focus on my photography hobby. They both integrate seamlessly with my social media accounts and I believe now that I’ll be able to keep both reasonably active.

Issues? Well … yes! I thought I’d like to share with you what I’ve learnt from my self-hosting experience. I’ve found that it’s absolutely a time-saver to have a development platform with loads of space that I can have a number of blogs hosted on – as I do authoring and design work for others as well. Using this platform led me to realise a number of things which I wanted to share.

Firstly, store your images off your blog – use flickr, Google+ photos, whatever, and link to them in your posts. This reduces the space used by your blog and therefore the cost of the hosting at very little decrease in the speed of loading a page.

Secondly, be absolutely ruthless in your choice of widgets and plugins. Only use ones that do not impact on the speed of loading a page. Then having made your choice, not only de-activate the plugin but delete it as well – the space and speed you gain by doing this for a number of plugins is remarkable.

Thirdly, only use Responsive themes. There are plenty of them available for free at WordPress.org. Doing this will make the rendering of your posts on mobile devices so much better and easier and the effect is remarkable. It’s like looking at different blogs, every time you look at a post on a different device. Choose the theme that makes your post look best on those multiple platforms.

Fourthly, don’t be scared at the thought of “messing” with your theme. There’s a huge community of wordpress bloggers who will help you create and edit your first child-theme and after that you’ll fly! In fact there’s even a widget or two to help you do the job.

And that’s about it. I hope to have the opportunity to plug (sic) the plugins I’ve found most useful – it may be of use to someone – in a later post. That’s for another day.

Tag: theme

Some new toys for the new “Moments like these …” website

On self-hosting WordPress blogs