Time to Rethink My Galleries (Whee!)

6FPS V4#4 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
April 11, 2022

 

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Spring has arrived in the Pacific Northwest, and with it, the Robins have returned to our place, and we’re now seeing Rufous Hummingbirds, which are migrating through and thanking everyone who keeps out feeders. The bears are also awake, as we found out the other night when a sow with two second year cubs came by, knocked down both of our hummingbird feeders and happily slurped up the nectar; we bring the seed feeders in at night because of them, but now, we’re bringing the nectar as well.

I’ve put up the first two bird nests on the property, one outside my office where I can watch it, and one over on the path in the other parcel, just to see if anyone uses it. I also have a few others, including an owl box and a purple martin house, I’m in process of putting up, and we’ll see if I get any birds to take advantage of the,. It’s a first step in improving this property as a bird habitat

We have finally, now that the heating season is slowing down, gotten the third of our stoves functional (thank you, supply chain), and I must admit, it’s nice to be able to come downstairs to the office, punch the on button, and have the lower floor nice and toasty in an hour or so. We’re using the upstairs one a lot in the evening as well, and boy, was this worth doing.

All three stoves we installed are pellet stoves (for those interested, the two main stoves are Regency GF55, and the garage stove is a GF40). You fill them with processed wood pellets; the ones we have are 100% fir and made from waste wood, so it’s a good and sustainable wood source. The pellet stove will feed a stream of pellets into the burn area as long as it’s on, and I get get up to 45,000 BTUs of heat out of a device that takes about the same electricity as a small room heater. When the upstairs one is on, the furnace shuts down as un-needed, and it’s a much more efficient way to heat the part of the house we’re in.

The pellets come in 40 pound bags, cost about $4 a bag, and I can buy them by the pallet for about $200 and have them delivered by Lowes or Home Depot. When we bought this place, we bought the remaining supply from the former owners, and I still have 50 bags to use up before I need to do that. And it’s just nice to be able to sit down in the evening in front of a nice fire and relax, warm and cozy.

I’m really happy I chose pellet over wood stoves, because they don’t require any tending while on, and not a lot of maintenance, other than the occasional cleaning and keeping the hopper filled. All the advantages of wood fires without the puttering and chopping and etc. And since we typically seem to use 5-10 pounds of pellets a night at the most, we have plenty of fuel to keep us warm when the zombie apocalypse hits.

And while it took three visits by the techs to really fix it, the emergency generator is, in fact, fixed and working, as we found out this last week when a late winter storm rolled through with some crazy winds and scattered power outages through the greater region; that included us, as we lost power a bit after midnight. The generator kicked on and gave us power to key parts of the house (lighting in most rooms, the well pump, and microwaves and refrigerators in both kitchens), plus power to both pellet stoves, which we didn’t need to use. It doesn’t power the furnace, but if it’s cold enough, we have the option. the generator is fired by propane, and it used up about 10% of the tank while running.

Which was less than I expected, because we were offline for about 15 hours. Watching the PSE outage map, at one point there were over 250 active outages being tracked, so it was a lousy day for the line workers trying to put it all back together, and I have nothing by thanks for them dealing with the problems as fast as they could in cold and blustery weather. I have put in a request to get the propane tank re-filled, and I know now that we have up to a week of emergency power available if it comes to that, although it was suggested to me not to run the generator endlessly in an extended outage.

Our outage was small, 15 houses affected, and the reality is, those aren’t going to be the high priorities early in this kind of storm problem, so I’m happy we have the generator, and it works, and things are well thought out in the design of the house — which is pretty much what I’ve found about this house overall.

It’s one of those small but important things to keep in mind when you choose to live in the boonies: you need some level of self-sufficiency because when something does break, like the electricity, or snow making things impassable for a week, that you need to have on hand supplies to make the wait livable.

I have, for the first time since the move, packed my camera bag, and it’s ready to go out and explore. I also had to delay those first visits out and about for a week because I tweaked my back and had to really limit my moving around until it settled down. And with better weather here, I’m more than ready to start going and figuring out this new region I live in and where the interesting bits are.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

Time to Rethink My Galleries

I spent a fun Saturday trying to figure out why my publishing setup between Lightroom and my Gallery site broke. Ultimately, it kind of fixed itself, as it tends to do, and since there’s basically no logging data I can easily grab, I sort of have to hope I push the right buttons to make it start working again when this happens. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it can be really frustrating.

But while working on it, I found myself looking at the galleries and thinking… I really need to rethink these.

I do that. The current gallery site is now a bit over two years old, and designed for a specific set of concepts. It’s now today, and I’ve moved to Washington, and some of those design needs are gone, and to be honest, it feels a bit dated and clunky and cluttered.

This weekend of fun happened while I was listening to a couple of podcasts:

  • Deep Natter 39: Do Websites Still Matter?

  • Deep Natter 40: You Have To Sift

Deep Natter is an ongoing discussion between podcaster and artist Jeffery Saddoris and Youtuber photographer Sean Tucker, which goes on about a lot of topics, more or less circling around the process and frustrations of making. These two episodes were an interesting chat about their thoughts around whether a personal web site still makes sense. Saddoris between the two episodes went in and redid his setup to a much simpler page, which in some ways is nice, but also made it impossible for me to easily link to the episodes above, so he didn’t seem to consider the possible utility of sharability. I’m sure he’ll tweak this stuff over time as these issues surface.

Their discussions were part of what got me thinking about how I have my galleries set up, but to be honest, I’m not sure I agree with some of their takes on web sites and I don’t think the direction they’re taking theirs is for me.

But while I’m not sure I want to put in the time to revamp the galleries — and doing so opens up the hood on various other projects that hit the “as long as I’m….” list with it, I also know that now that this bug has hit my brain, it’ll get in the way of other things until I solve it.

There’s a lot I don’t know right now, starting with “so what should its replacement look like and do?” — but I’m starting to explore that. It won’t simply be a design skin change, but a more fundamental re-think of what I’m trying to accomplish. I’ve decided it won’t be in Wordpress, and my plan right now is to move everything onto the main site in Squarespace. I took a look at Adobe’s stuff, and I just wasn’t convinced it worked for me, plus, reducing the number of sites/systems/platforms fits in with one of my themes for the year: simplify.

The first thing I’m going to tackle is how the free wallpapers (and secret wallpapers for you subscribers) are packaged and downloaded, and I think they will end up in bundles in my store like my ebooks are. I expect some folks won’t love that, but it simplifies a lot of things for me in how I handle stuff. In return, I’m going to repackage everything and reprocess all of those images which should improve them a bit and also really improve the sharpening, so they’ll look nicer. It’ll all still be free, of course.

The galleries themselves will be built from scratch, not a copy of what’s currently out there. I may even choose to take the old gallery site down once the first few new galleries are up — to be honest, it gets few pageviews these days, because it’s kind of out there on its own and not heavily promoted, so a new approach that’s consolidated seems to make sense from an SEO standpoint.

This also means the end of my offering unlimited licenses to organizations, but there’s been little interest in that so I don’t think it’ll impact anyone, and again, it’ll simplify my life. The old gallery site contained basically every image I have I considered usable; one thing I do know is the new setup will be more curated, but exactly what that means I don’t know yet. Smaller numbers of images but more findable and with better focus, I think.

Expect the new wallpaper setup by next issue, and at least the first new galleries showing up next time.

Photo Wednesday/Feathery Friday

These are the images I posted since last issue to the blog for Photo Wednesday and Feathery Friday. To see all of these images at full size and read the stories behind their creation, you can visit:

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

This month, a new book I’ve just finished. I’ve long been a fan of John Scalzi’s work, and he’s one of the few authors I can say I’ve ready pretty much every book he’s published. His new one is The Kaiju Preservation Society, and it’s a rip-roaring nose-snorting page turner. It’s told from the point of view of a tech worker laid off at the beginning of the epidemic and surviving by delivering food for an Uber competitor. He’s given an opportunity to join an NGO doing conservation work called KJS, and it isn’t until he’s on site at the working camp that he realizes that the K in that name is Kaiju, that they are real — albeit in an alternate universe — and their job ts to study and protect them, and prevent them from crossing into our earth, as has happened a few times in the past.

The science behind all this is super hand-wavy in a really fun and “don’t think about it too hard” way, and Scalzi builds both an interesting world to teach us in and a fun adventure story that culminates in some real crazy time adventure/action that I just absolutely loved.

It’s a fast read, although in fact I listened to the audio version, read by Wil Wheaton, and I swear Scalzi wrote it for him to perform here — highly recommended if you do audio books. It moves fast, but under the surface, Scalzi had a lot of things to get you thinking, but not in ways of getting in the way of telling a fast paced and fun story. It’s got some good, well-created characters to tell the story with, a truly preposterous premise that would be perfectly at home in a Japanese Kaiju movie, and it was an absolute hoot to have read to me by Wheaton. Great, fun book. Not Hugo/Nebula material, but it isn’t pretending to be. It reminds me most, in fact, of some of the classic Retief books by Keith Laumer (which if you haven’t discovered those, they’re wroth a read as well).

See you soon!

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

 

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

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