I Re-thought My Galleries

6FPS V4#5 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
May 9, 2022

 

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Last month I spent a chunk of my non-work time redoing my online photography areas, and I talk about that below.

I’m also trying to spend a few hours a week out in the shop, continuing to get it up and running. I do have it to the point where it’s usable — the miter saw is set up and I’ve used it for a project (more mobile storage) and I have the table saw set up, but not yet aligned or really ready to use. Both are connected to dust collection, and yes, the DeWalt miter saw dust collection is as poor as people say it is, but it’s a start.

I’ve ordered the band saw, and I know what drill press I need, and I’ll have to head out and pick up the saw when it arrives at the depot later this week, and once those are in place, I think that’s the end of adding things to the shop until it’s better organized. I do still need to get a lathe, but I haven’t decided which, and I want to have the rest of the shop further along before I do that.

The shop is at an interesting point, in that I can do things in it, but there’s still a lot of stuff without a home and the organization is chaotic. It’s usable, but not quite functional. Some of that is figuring out where stuff should live, and part of that is I haven’t built (or bought) storage for putting stuff in yet.

I’d be curious how interested you folks are in shop notes, it’s a bit of a departure, and is that something you want me to talk about or leave on the sidelines? Drop me a note and let me know. I do expect to talk about projects when that makes sense, but shop organization neepery? I’m not sure how interesting that’ll be.

I’ve gotten the garage office pretty well set up. It’s going to be a design area for workshop projects, and also where I organize my photo gear, and I have a place I can use for desktop photography, something I always struggled to do in my old office. I’m currently in “when I’m not busy it’s raining” mode in going out to shoot, but I have a couple of spots I want to go explore soon.

I bought a new truck

Probably the most unexpected thing to mention this issue is that since last issue, I traded in the Honda Pilot, and I’m now driving a Honda Ridgeline pickup. The Pilot was a great car, except for hauling big things like sheets of plywood, which had me wondering if I should replace it with a truck. The Pilot was due for service, so I took it into the local dealer, and then out of the blue they sent me an email noting that the car might be worth a much larger number than I would have expected, and so while the car was in for service, we talked. And to my surprise, when they gave me a formal quote for the pilot, it was within $200 of that not-so-inflated number, and so a few hours of thinking and discussing and the normal dealer “chatting” later, I had a Ridgeline.

The Ridgeline is basically a Honda Pilot chopped off at the third seat with a truck bed attached instead, but from the front seat forward, it feels and acts like a Pilot. One of the better reviews I read of it (Motor Trend) called it a really good truck for people who don’t really need a truck. the suspension’s a bit stiffer than the Pilot, but otherwise, there’s not a lot of difference between my old car and this new beast, other than a much improved ability to haul stuff. There’s a surprising amount of storage, too, so all the gear I tended to keep in the pilot fit easily into the new beast, and even the camp chair I carry was able to go in locked storage and out of view.

I’m looking forward to driving it — and hauling sheets of plywood. So far, we’ve gone out a couple of times to putter around, but I am only a hundred or so miles into the new journey.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

I Re-thought My Galleries

Well, last issue I talked about how I was thinking of re-doing my online photo galleries. And after sending out that issue of 6FPS, I did that.

I ended up killing off the old galleries site, and completely revamping my photography page. Along the way I decided whoever (ahem) designed those pages a couple of years ago wasn’t really proud of the images, and I felt my photography page didn’t really show off or celebrate them well. It also complicated things in various ways and required more clicks to get to any specific thing than I liked.

So, about ten days of evenings and off hours later, I pushed out a new photography page, and all of the content attached to it. I simplified things a lot — instead of having a separate section for the Best of the Year pages, and another for Bodies of Work, and yet another for the Gallery pages, and then the portfolio pages, there are now Portfolios, which I consider my best work, and Collections, which are groups of images about something. The best of years are now a sub-area of collections, but I’m fine with that setup — but otherwise, it’s now a simpler, flat setup, with more and bigger images right there for people to see.

These changes, of course, caused other things to need to be updated. I was losing how I shared the wallpapers I give away, and so I had to do that a different way. The way I came up with is simpler, and there’s now a page where you can click and download collections of images. the secret wallpapers for 6fps subscribers has a similar system now as well.

That caused me to realize I could use the same setup to distribute the e-books, and do away with all that shopping cart complexity, and so I did. I ended up rewriting parts of the 6FPS pages and how I encourage people to subscribe (still no nasty popup dialogs!).

funny thing is that when I took a fresh look at the e-book page, I decided whoever (ahem) designed it wasn’t too proud of the content, and so I rewrote most of it and I think it’s a lot cleaner and, at least, more enthusiastic.

Actually, in all seriousness for a second, when I DID write up the ebook page and content, it was for my first book and I wasn’t at all sure whether it was any good and whether I was going to continue this. As I’ve published more books, I think I’ve gotten a lot better at producing them, and I am actually much happier with the end result (but they’ll still get better as I continue to work on new ones), and I think, in retrospect, I set low expectations that now I’m happy to rewrite into the sunset.

About half my site ended up being refreshed. I think I’m going to redo a few other pages down the road, but I’m happy with the results now.

This actually made me also make some other changes, mostly visible only to me, that ended up involving shutting down one other site (my hockey wordpress site), and taking a bunch of obsolete content offline, and moving the rest to a new hosting system (using Linode instead of Dreampress) — which is only there until I get around to making that content HTML instead of text and ready to shift onto the Squarespace site directly.

So a couple of weeks of work, and I now have a lot fewer moving parts, and for the first time in over a decade no active wordpress sites; and while I love Wordpress, I’m happy to not have to worry about the admin parts. Squarespace has been a nice system to work on, and I’m not spending my writing time figuring out why some random piece broke randomly (again) now. Well worth it.

This meant shutting down my account at Dreampress, which I’ve used for over a decade. I had a VPS setup there where I could run multiple Wordpress and other virtual servers, and I used to use it a lot for testing things in a temporary server. With the closing of galleries, that was now serious overkill, so I set up a small server on Linode for hosting the few things I still need a dedicated web server for. The only reason I did this on Linode was that it was easier for me to start fresh than try to re-arrange what I had to a new, lower cost setup, and Linode was also somewhat cheaper for a small bare metal debian server. I really appreciated how Dreampress was mostly painless, and when I did have a problem needing support, they were always timely and did a good job of walking me out of whatever problem I’d created for myself….

I want to note that I re-mastered all of the images on the site, and also all of the wallpapers, using my current workflow that has much improved sharpening and noise reduction, and I think the new versions of those images are much better, so if you’ve downloaded wallpapers in the past, please go and grab new copies. I think you’ll appreciate the improvements.

I’d love to know what you think about the changes, what what you like and don’t like about it, and suggestions for other things I can do to improve things around here for you.

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 I’d like to recommend Knotwords, a new IOS game from designer Zach Gage. He’s created a number of my favorite IOS games over the years, including Good Sudoku, which I still play every day. Knotwords is sort of a crossword puzzle, but where letters are put together in blocks across the words, and you have to figure out which letters go where within those regions. It’s fun, and devilishly tough at times, and it sometimes just kicks my butt, but it’s a nice game to sit and think through and ponder how weak your vocabulary is….

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.

Chuq (chuqvr@gmail.com)

 

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.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

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