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I'm Back And I'm Beautiful!

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I'm on holiday this week; and since I have no $, it's a stay-at-home holiday. That's fine. It gives me time to do things. Like UPD*TING my new IPOD with all sorts of spiffy music; uploading the snaps from the latest show, housecleaning(better than the usual weekly sweep and swab) and posting road snaps on Gribblenation. Yes, friends, I'm back in the fray-the 'competition' is afoot and all that.

I had to step back from it for a bit, mostly to assess my situation: I've decided to be as active as possible in the music end of things; going to and photographing as many shows as I can.That's been working out pretty well for me: translating into tangible benefits, I just love going to shows, anyway. However, even with the addition of videos, posting show photography takes up very little time-I have like maybe a 2 day turnaround on that; even with my average of 500 photos per show.

I've been doing some editing on Open Street Map, reading and suchlike; but I've been looking at some photos I have stashed on my hard drives, and figured they needed a new online home. But I wanted to avoid the dreary page writing business and costs associated with my old website. Enter Digikam, Simpleviewer and Gribblenation.

I run SUSE Linux and have since 2004. One of the aps that come with my distro is Digikam; which is a photo organiser and a fairly powerful image editor; and integrates with flickr. I like that-it simplifies things greatly. Another feature integrated with Digikam is Simpleviewer, which generates Flash photo galleries. You can caption photos with Digikam; and use Simpleviewer to generate a gallery. Some minor modifications of the code on the resulting html page, and you have a Gribblenation-specific page in a fairly short amount of time. It's not as fast as flickr posting would be, but it beats the hell out of hours editing and watermarking photos in the GIMP, then generating/rewriting a photo gallery page. we're talking 2-3 hours vs 16-20.

Besides the time savings, the results are neat and consistent-which suits the nature of a site like Gribblenation. Fans of my old site may miss the wackiness of it; all the different backgrounds and little comics and whatnot; but that stuff takes a lot of time; and honestly, even though you'll still be able to tell one of my pages from the other contributors, I think some of the stuff I was doing was off-putting for some.

Why Gribblenation? It has a good 3 times the traffic of my old site, not to mention it's a great deal cheaper to pay part of the hosting cost than all of it. The organisation is better. You don't have to scroll forever to find a Vermont or a New York page. You go to the specific part of the site, and there's what you want. Things are pretty well set. There's no massive amount of writing, just plug in the new links, and there you go. I've actually been thinking about going over to GN for a couple of years now-it didn't seem to make sense to me have two different sites obstensibly covering the same ground, where Doug Kerr, Adam Prince and others were collaborating with me in pretty much everything else.

Comments

Georgia Road Geek said…
I was never put off by any of your stuff. In fact, you add a lot of character to our beloved roadgeeking hobby. Thanks for all your contributions. :)
10:12 AM
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