Over the past few days, as part of my on-going site refresh, I thought that it was about time that I finally sat down and sorted out the state of my online photography, and how it’s all organised.

Back in 2007, I had one single Flickr account to host all my photos, but I then decided to create a second account to be the home of all my event photography, while my original would remain the home of my ‘normal’ photography (places, objects, people etc, etc). It also worked quite well for my website so there could be two sections of photography. (As my photography section is powered by Flickr, which hosts the image files and then allows me to display them on my site).

But after a couple of years, I slowly came to the conclusion that this arrangement wasn’t working as well as I had originally planned for a number of reasons;

• I was paying for two separate ‘pro’ accounts on Flickr
• One account (namely the events account) inevitably ended up taking precedence, and my original account was hardly ever updated
• There wasn’t one single location for people to go on Flickr to see my photography, and so was splitting my audience up and potentially harming the amount of people who would see all of my work, and find out more about me.
• It was a pain keeping track of two accounts, their individual stats and notifications, more hassle than it was worth.

So, the solution I ended up coming up with and implementing the other day was to merge accounts and delete one, sadly at the expense of losing all my comments, favourites and view counts from the account which would be deleted. So, for a few days I’ve been moving all my event photography over to my main account, and after a couple days it was complete, and it was time to delete the events account.

To mark this change, my photography section of my site has undergone a couple changes, most noticeably larger album images, but a new url structure which I may blog about in the future at some stage.

Feel free to explore my gallery, either on my site, or on Flickr, now at its centralised location!

Flickr Account
or
Portfolio Gallery

You may have noticed that over the past few days the design of the site has been tweaked in a few areas. The main reasons for this is to simply freshen up the image of the site, as well as moving content around so its easier for you, the visitor, to find and give the site more focus; mainly on the most recent pieces of work which I’ve done, and any latest news – all while protecting legacy content which you may also be interested in.

The refresh will be managed in three stages, and stage one is already well under way. Stage one has concetrated on reworking the homepage, navigation and top header images. Stage two will focus on refreshing the photography and web design areas, creating them more into a ‘hub’ for their corresponding content areas. Finally, stage three will concentrate on bringing the blog in line with any changes.

Lets get up to speed.

So, a run down of the changes so far.

The Homepage -This section has seen quite a few changes, mainly with content being shifted around to better positions, such as latest blog posts now has a better, more prominant position, whereas redundant information such as RSS feed links have been removed.

Top headers – With the exception of the homepage, main banner images have been removed to bring in a fresh clean feel to the site, and replaced with a short, snappy headline which corresponds with each page.

Navigation -The old ‘tabbed’ style navigation is gone, and in it’s way is a clean fresh navigation.

When this will all happen

If you’re wondering when this will all be finished, well there’s no real date I’m working towards, especially as my university final year project website which is currently halfway through being built has higher priority, so all I can say is keep watching and I’ll blog every so often when big milestones are met! Hopefully it won’t be too long down the line!

You may have noticed a strange new login box appear on the homepage over the past couple weeks, and if you’ve been wondering what it’s all about, then hopefully this will put those thoughts to rest!

Currently only a couple of features exist once you login, even though the plan is to increase these and make the site a whole lot more user orientated. It’s fine for anyone to sign up, snoop around and everything else, but you’ll have to bear in mind it’s still in beta – probably alpha is the better term! – and so its quite bare bones, and some stuff ultimately wont work the way it’s meant to!

Keep an eye out on the site to hopefully see more updates over the next few weeks!…

I’m not sure if this is comparable to Myles‘ Kingston University network outage incident of 2006, but it must come close…

Last night while investigating my databases within my site’s admin area, I happened to click on a button entitled ‘Check DB’, expecting to find some sort of lovely report about the health / condition of my database. However, this was not the case, and found my site broken… as it would have seemed I corrupted my databases…

…after making a support request the issue was thankfully resolved after a few hours, however I later found out my faux pas was more wide spread than previously thought, and I had actually taken down everyone’s databases and emails on my entire server, which I’m guessing is quite a few…

Last night I added a newly updated photography section to the site. Previously, each photo and each album had to be created manually, and was a time consuming task. Due to me also uploading photos I take to my Flickr account, dealing with the same photos twice was repetative and to an extent a waste.

So, the new section now allows photos I upload to Flickr show on my website, in their own albums, with comments and camera settings data automatically. As well as being more efficient for me to manage my photos online, it will also make my photography section more up to date, as I reguarly use Flickr for my photography, and will add additional features to the site, such as photo commenting.

Photography Section: www.lloydengland.com/photography or click the Photography link in the navigation bar at the top of every page.