The Quiet Picture

Since I had such a productive week last week, I dedicated a whole gallery to the pictures I took during my holiday in the mountains. Some of the them are already familiar from the blog, but most of them are new. It’s not possible to comment directly in the gallery, but this blog post is open for commenting…!

Just a plug for minnak.net: I’ve updated Flowers and Orchids. The Orchids gallery in particular is brimming with new flowers, most of them already seen in the blog but check out the last one - I caught the bog orchid today!

I have now updated all of the image galleries on minnak.net. Welcome for a visit!

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Now that I have set up the galleries for easy updates, all I need is some new images! Problem is… just when the flower season is starting, the snow came back. I took a look at the lily of the valley buds behind my house, and they were looking very sad indeed. So no white flowers yet, but a white lawn instead. And it just keeps on falling.

I have uploaded a new flower gallery on minnak.net. I was going to update all the galleries and make some other changes to the website, but instead I wasted my time with a minor tweak to the gallery page.

The tweak concerned the rounded corners - the right side corners now move with the gallery frame. Originally I had used a 900px wide background gif, but that doesn’t scale so the right corners disappeared if the window was too small. I’m no coding genius so it took me quite a while, but in the end I figured out a way to get scalable corners which work in Firefox and in IE and hopefully in other browsers as well. They should work anyway, it’s all done with simple CSS. When I had finally figured it out, I found out that browsers interpret the code differently - the lower left corner which looked fine in Firefox, displayed 1 pixel too high in IE, which left me a weird line in the corner. I ended up positioning the corner gif at -1px and now IE shows it correctly, and if it’s 1 pixel too low in other browsers it’s not very easy to see anyway.

So, the whole scalable corner thing, you’d think it’s easy to do and I’m just making a big deal out of it. With my (lack of) coding skills though, it’s a whole evening spent with Google and trial and error and then finally a moment of triumph when it works!

I have started to haul over the image galleries on minnak.net from manual html coded pages to automatic flash galleries as kindly provided by Lightroom. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but I haven’t updated any content on minnak.net for quite some while, there’s two major reasons for it: firstly, I publish new images every week on this blog, and secondly, simple as the code is, it’s still a boring chore to manually edit the html to create the image pages in the old galleries.

So far I’ve changed the Finland and Fauna galleries. I’m not 100% happy about the gallery template, but that’s all I can do with the settings available. It’s not even possible to change the font, but I hope there are some additional tweaks in future releases. I would also prefer another kind of layout where the text can be placed separately from the thumbnails, as they are bundled in the current version. My coding skills end with simple html and css, so I won’t even attempt to hack the Simpleviewer template!

Nags aside, the gallery does fulfill the most important function which is to display the images with the least possible effort from me. All I have to do is add an image to a Lightroom collection, make sure the required IPTC information is filled in and then upload the whole thing to my site - Lightroom can even do that! This means more frequent updates to my website so visitors don’t have to wade through my blog entries to find some random pictures.

And last but not least, the pictures will now be presented against a black background, which works much better than white with most images!

The Quiet Picture blog has now been moved from Blogger to my site minnak.net (which is what you are currently reading). I have to tried to make sure that everything is working, but if you find any bugs, please let me know!

One thing I know is a bit strange is the layout in some of the old posts. This new blog layout is wider than the old design, so some of the formatting has been lost. But the content is the same of course, and I even managed to transfer all the comments to this new site - all except one, and finding that one missing comment is like looking for the proverbial needle so I left it!

One benefit with being tv-less is that I have more time to do those things I always otherwise put off. Like updating minnak.net. I have added some new pictures now, most of them are already familiar from the blog but there are some never-before-seen images as well, for example an Ortonised version of the fern photo I posted in June. Have a look!I have also added some pictures on loosfoto.se.