Rejiggering the site (a.k.a. virtual house cleaning 101). Now that I’ve gone and changed a ton of crap on the website, go the start of an online shop going for my photos, and did it all without pulling out my hair, it is about time that I go through the hard parts of this process… Time to review all the photos I posted using some plugins and rip them out and repost them more ‘natively’ so that I can reduce the number of external codebases I use on the backend.
This should allow me to host my photos (mostly) in a single place, SmugMug, insert them here on the blog and serve them from SmugMug‘s faster servers. One less thing to fret over and will help to keep everything pointing back to my storefront, hopefully getting some traffic generated over there. The NextGen and NextGen Pro plugins have been good over the years, but are getting long in the tooth, and IMNSHO a bit bloated. This virtual house cleaning may not only make my life more organized but speed up the delivery of the site to your browser! 🙂
Keeping it Simple … Stupid
Another benefit is that NextGen is really holding me back from doing things I want to. For example, I would love to post some before and after images to walk through my workflow. Yes, I can post both the before and after images separately, but I want to do it with a slider to show/hide parts of the images, which is not doable in NextGen. Also I do like to share the EXIF data from the camera, and again NextGen is a PITA for that as well. I have to get back to my KISS roots – Keep it Simple Stupid!
Seeing as the weather up here in North Eastern Pennsylvania will probably keep me house bound this weekend, I think it will be a perfect time to pull the trigger on this. Nothing like 6-12″ of snow to force your hand!
Hopefully I get through this without too much heartburn. If not I may have a huge bruise on my forehead from banging it against the desk. 🙂
