It was almost a year and a half ago now when my hosting company upgraded a few things on the backend of my server.  One of their upgrades was to force a new version of Wordpress (the blogging software I use here) which broke a lot of the customizations I had made to the old version.  It was largely my own fault as I was making changes to the core of the program and not the templating system that they’d intended users to modify.

The most annoying (and difficult) things that broke was the fact that the site menu structure (the red bar on the right there) had disappeared from the gallery making navigation a pain in that area.  This site uses a combination of the aforementioned Wordpress for the framework and Gallery 2 for the photo gallery (and a plug-in called WPG2 to glue the two together).  Using a standard Wordpress template will nicely integrate the gallery into Wordpress, but not the other way around so I had to do some tinkering to get the Wordpress menus to show up correctly while browsing the gallery.

Long story short, the Wordpress menu is now available throughout the site and I’m rather pleased about that.  Also, Wordpress upgrades should no longer break anything.  I hope.

I haven’t posted many fencing photos in quite a while, but I’m still taking a lot.  They’re now being posted over at my clubs website in the gallery there.

I’m up most mornings to see the sunrise these days, but due to the usual English weather (overcast) and my flats orientation (South West) I don’t get too excited about it.  And as a general rule, I also try to avoid overly complex things at 6am as I often find enough challenge in mundane tasks like opening the milk or heaven forbid, working the kettle.  Bringing my camera out during these sub-human hours is a daunting task, but every now and then I think it’s worth it.

Exhibit A

Just the one today, but the Miscellaneous album for 2010 is open now so I’ve got a place to file all of my disjointed shots at least.

Just testing some social site integration.  In theory, this will post a note to my facebook page as well as my wildly under used and under followed twitter account.

Maybe one day I’ll incorporate my sad, barren flickr account into the site as well, but for now it remains shunned.  Ok, that’s not entirely true.  I still use it as my dumping ground for roller derby photos.  Like this one:

But honestly, I like having all of my photos in one place on my own server.  Even if it means I never get a “Super Cool Way Awesome” sparkling animated .gif award from a total stranger for one of my images.

No, I haven’t misspelled the old practice of map making.  I’ve been in a photographic slump for quite a while now; nothing seems to spark my interest or make me want to haul out my equipment and search for inspiration.  Maybe it’s the cold, wet weather we’ve been having?  But then, that’s the reason I bought my light tent so many months ago and it’s hardly been out of it’s case.

Maybe it’s something else.

Regardless of what it is, I’ve decided that it’s time to fix it.  Last night the boys were on the receiving end of my new found vigilance.  I’d say they were unhappy about it, but the only way to get a cat to stay in one place is to bribe them with treats.  A couple of Temptations and a few pinces of cat nip and it was time to pose.

There’s a couple more, including a set up shot in the gallery.

ps: after almost a year, my Week 4 photos from Tibet are online now.

I’m just in the process of importing all of the albums from my old website (http://www.kevinleitch.com) into the gallery here on evilkitchen.ca.

I’m mainly doing so to consolidate all of my photos into one gallery and also to free up my other domain for other persuits. There isn’t much in the way of exciting photos from the older gallery, they’re simply snapshots from that time of my life (predominantly while living in the Caribbean).

Things should be cleaned up soon, and hopefully nothing has broken in the process.

[edit] – Ok, it’s all finished and imported. I think everything rolled over quite smoothly, though I’m sure it helps that both sites are on the same web server.

I’ve also fixed a few style problems that have been plaguing the site for ages, which makes me feel a little better about things.