mybigadventures.com

As part of the ongoing website facelift, I've made some changes to the front page and site CSS. I've currently dumped the dark grey colour previously used across the site for fonts and the header banner in favour of black. I've also made a bit more of the adventure links on the front page and restyled the image preview to use the new justified gallery plugin used throughout the album. I'm pretty pleased with it for now, but let me know in the comments if you spot any bugs.  

You might notice that I've added a new #portfolio tag for some of my favourite pictures. I wanted a way to start and pull my favourites together in a more digestible format. For now You can view them by hitting the #portfolio link here or on any of the pictures that I've tagged. I'm still deciding if I want to make more of a feature of them and am thinking about an update to the homepage but we'll see.

I've had a bit more of a tinker with the website this weekend and am hoping I've spotted all the bugs. I've added a few more icons about the place including on the home page - which I'm not too sure about. I've also tweaked the blog page to make a bit more of the tagging feature I added at Christmas. The blog is starting to come together quite nicely now I think, with blog suggestions in the top right from the archives (right now I have Happy Easter from March 2008), and the new 'more like this' section I've just finished; this displays the tags used on the current page and a few images from albums or photo's that have the same tags. I've also added album tagging now to make linking whole albums in rather than having to go through each picture.

I've also revamped the albums homepage a little, it now has a 'featured album' section which picks one of the albums from the archive and displays a preview of images along with the cover. I think it perhaps needs a bit more work but it's almost there. Finally I've got around to implementing date stamps on albums. It's one of those things that I really should have added at the beginning, but I didn't quite realise how useful it might be until just recently. When I upload old alabums, they currently display at the top as most recently added. I think I'd like this to be configurable so I can choose date order or the order in which they were added. It also means that I can link images to months and seasons etc, the possibilities are endless! OK that's probably enough of a ramble, I hope you enjoy the new features, let me know if you spot any bugs!

************ UPDATE **************

Albums are now displayed in date order including the album categories on the albums home page. I've also had a tidy and removed a few albums that I wasn't too keen on anymore. They're not totally deleted yet and may get a second chance in the members section but I guess you'll just have to wait and see.

The short bleak days are almost over and spring is on it's way. Just another week until it officially arrives and things start warming up. The weather has started to improve over the last week although it's still faily changable which is confusing the central heating. A lack of thermostat in the flat means we can be anywhere between cooked and frozen which is not entirely ideal. School are running a photography competition with a theme of spring so it prompted me to have a look back through photos I've taken this time of year over the last few years. I've included a few of my favourites below.

This blue tit was taken from the bedroom window at my mums in Sheffield. I really like the colours and brokeh in the photo. You can just see the leaves starting to unfurl on the branches

This one was taken a few years ago now, in the back garden at our old house in Leeds. I like the sharp colour of daffodil petals against the dark fence in the background.

This last one is taken at one of our favourite spots in Leeds, Roundhay Park. It's a great place for a walk all times of year and I have some great photos from all types of weather.

I hope you've enjoyed the photos. Let me know which one is your favourite.