I built a photo gallery website a couple of years ago called webotography.com, and that was fine as a brief experiment. I might even revive it some time, but the thing it, the web marches on pretty fast. My webotography site used some methods for displaying photos that now seem kind of quaint, to put it kindly. Basically, the site is outdated and outmoded, especially since the advent of HTML5 and the new browser versions that support it.
So I just built another photography site called jackatwill.com/photoblog. There you can find several hundred photos I took during a trip across Colorado and southern Utah this past August. I also published most of these photos on Facebook and Flickr but you know, I'm not really thrilled by the way my display choices are so limited there. It's great that we have all these "free" social media spaces where we can publish and share things, but we should never forget that we don't own those spaces. I'll use them, but I'll continue to build my own websites as part of my core enterprise as a developer. Time-consuming, yes, but fun!
I hope you enjoy both the clean design, and the photo content on the new site.
Categories: Metadata • Personal • Photography • Websites
Ellnora | The Guitar Festival is this insane thing organized every two years by the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Three days of events include Alex De Grassi, Keb' Mo', Bill Frizell, Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, Natalia Zukerman and Erin McKeown, Richard Julian and Jim Campilongo, Ani DiFranco, and much more guitar madness and badness.
Speaking of which, kicking things off is the baddest bunch of Champaign-area guitaristas ever assembled under Krannert's roof. On Thursday, September 3rd, 2009, 5 to 8 pm, Krannert hosts the Pre-Ellnora C-U Guitar Superstars. A star lineup of artists and songwriters will each perform one or three songs of their choosing, backed by Champaign's acclaimed rock/blues/roots band The Delta Kings and an eight-piece vocal chorus lead by the Lightening Twins (Kathy Harden and Rena Day...oh my god they're good!).
Rehearsals are already too much fun. The event is free in the big lobby at Krannert, where they will be serving happy hour food and drinks. Don't be silly and miss this unprecedented event.
I started a Flickr group to share photos and video related to the Pre-Ellnora C-U Guitar Superstars, and uploaded my images of the rehearsals thus far. Feel free to join, upload, and share at http://www.flickr.com/groups/pre-ellnora-guitar-superstars/. Then play yer guitar!
You know there's this thing where large entities with money try to set the rules to get even more money? Sometimes that really pisses me off. So I've decided to do write snarky comments on a blog almost no one will ever read.
Microappleyahoogoogleplex.com will focus on the information technology sector, since it is so fascinating and fun. When I'm not battling with my Windows box to the right of my desk, I'm battling with the Mac on my left. While I love using Amazon S3 for storage, I know someday they'll harvest my left kidney. Google is the most wonderful corporation in the entire universe, and I wish to make it known to Googlebot that Google is the most wonderful corporate creation in the entire universe. (How's my Page Rank now?)
There's potential for fun with this, so please tune in to microappleyahoogoogleplex.com whenever!
Categories: Blogging • Personal • Politics • Technology • Websites
I've lost count of how many times I've lost count of my photos. I have so many freakin' photos it's impossible to imagine anymore how many I have. Time to do something about that!
The answer came to me in a flash one night as I should have been sleeping (or organizing my photos): I'll put them on my website! But which one? I sort of started a gallery here on openwebworks, but this isn't really the appropriate place for a personal photo collection. I could just put them on Flickr or Picassa, which I probably will do at some point. But I want to retain control over the server space where they will reside, and I want to play with the CSS and different ways of presenting them with cool JavaScripty things, like different slide shows and lightboxes. I want to catalog them and have fun with them in various ways.
The answer: webotography.com.
Categories: Media • Personal • Photography • Websites