Recently in Website News Category

Several updates after upgrading to Movable Type 4.1.

While I am looking into translating existing sites to the new template system, I took a chance to organize my flickr gallery, simplify my main gallery on Linfa.net, several bibliographic references to my resume, clean up the design of koumako.com and catch up with content updates to the Elder Scrolls Trekker.

I also took this occasion to bring the sites under the umbrella of Google Adsense and Google Analytics.

Cheers to our new Google overlords.

My first batch of MOO cards arrived today.

That was fast. About 5 business days total - far below the announced 10. I guess they are giving themselves a marging of operation when they come up with these time estimates.

Quality of the cards is nice. They do feel more like business cards than just printed pieces of paper.

The finish is matte and lack contrast on some images. I will have to remember to compensate for that in the future.

They are quite smaller than regular business cards - hopefully, they will be noticed for that and not get lost too easily.

The refresh of this site is mostly complete. All I need now is the final version of Movable Type 4 to incorporate more dynamic features in a fresh new design. At the rate updates are going on the MT4 website, it will be probably sometimes in the Fall.

In the meantime, I recreated my gallery pages using JAlbum and Simpleviewer. I will look into using more of that great little flash viewer across the site when the updates are complete. 

I took that occasion to update my personal photostream, organise pictures into (flickr) sets and even place some photographs on a photo map. Updating the gallery made me rediscover my flickr account and the capabilities for self publishing I completely ignored since I signed up two years ago.

Since Siggraph 2007 is fast approaching, I tested some of these services : 

MOO | MiniCards - for sleek, colorful contact cards. They look cute but the company is based in the UK and the service not particularly quick (5 to 10 business days to receive an order).

QOOP business cards - to compare the speed and print quality with a company based in the US. They had more choices of templates and customization available but their format is more traditional.

Zazzle - to print out joint flyers with Crealab (follow the link for a web version of the flyers). They will be printed on the inside of notecards and folded to show both sides at the same time. I am curious to see the result of that project .. especially since they pride themselves with their superior speed (only two business days ?!). They also have a marketplace and a selection of products similar to Cafepress.

Blurb - with their nice desktop tool to compose books, their large selection of templates and their marketplace, they look like an interesting alternative to Photoworks for producing books. I stared working on a first book to test the print quality. It will take a few weeks to finish the content, so there is no rush on that one.

The orders are in... I will update my comments when I receive the final products. 

After almost a year without any update, I decided to break the routine and start with a clean up of the site. On the menu : new style, new portfolio page and various tweaks across the site.

This is in prevision of the upgrade to Movable Type 4 in a few months ... or whenever  the final version becomes available.

I had to take down the gallery before of high CPU activity on the server it is running on.

Update - I traced the issue to over zealous robots and other spiders, from Google to Majestic 12. It will take a while before they all receive new instructions to stay away from my images via the usual 'robots'txt' file. Until then, the gallery will remain protected by password.

You can still view part of the content of the gallery using the links to offsite images from the gallery main page. 

I created the Games album for shots taken while traveling through some of my favorite games. Not only they can be as intense as movies or books at times, but some of these games are so visually engaging that taking pictures while playing becomes very similar to taking shots during your latest vacation.

I also created an album for some of my favorite pictures of Masks and updated the Statues section with shots of mortuary art.