You ever do one of those projects big enough that there’s no real “Done!” feeling? You know, there are enough details to miss, enough functions to check, that you’re never sure you got them all, and there’s no real point when you’re completely confident that you’ve finished? That’s how I feel about website updates.
And yet, I will still come in here and say, “Okay, check it out!” and simply deal with any issues as they’re found. So, feel free to go peruse the updated image galleries in the main part of the site – I’m not even sure how many I’ve added, to be honest, but nearly all galleries have been expanded; the exceptions are The River gallery, because I haven’t been back to the Indian River Lagoon in Florida since 2005, the Sets gallery, and the In The Tank gallery, because the one addition I would have made to that went into Insects & Macro instead, which got very expanded to reflect the increased amount of efforts I’ve been concentrating in that direction. Even the Tips & Tricks gallery got that new page on cropping images (with video because, hey, you know me – always ready to broaden my horizons. Or something. It might be my vocabulary of expletives.)
Okay, I just counted, because I wanted to know myself: 56 new pages, 57 if you count the cropping page which went up a couple of weeks ago, and even more photos than that because a few of those pages had multiples. But that was more than I imagined. The image seen here, by the way, was one of quite a few that I passed on – this one mostly because I already have enough mantis photos, and the ones that I added this time around were stronger. There’s a surprising amount of thought that goes into such a project: which ones are strongest, which seem too much like the others, how do they balance in the galleries, is there a good variety, is there too much of one color, and on and on. This is on top of the writeups I do for each page, not to mention all of the tags, links, and meta-data that has to be included. Suffice to say I’ve been working on this, off and on, for months.
And there were a few of the old pages pulled down too, ones that no longer passed muster. Sometimes I look at photos from years past and, not really cringe, but definitely find them lacking in appeal anymore. There’s this faint underlying aura of embarrassment, kind of a, “Why is this even on the site?” thing – not too strong, but I’m definitely happy to replace them. Yet, I think that’s the kind of thing that anyone should be feeling if they’re progressing in their skills and efforts; it’s a mark of improvement, isn’t it? Dog only knows what I’ll feel if I start tearing into the slide files with the same thing in mind – they could probably stand it.
But anyway, that’s one major project down, by far the biggest. I’ve still got several more on the burners, though I’m not sure any of them will be reflected here in any way. I may be able to get back into more regular posting now.