It's hard to believe that it's been almost a decade since I began working on the current version of this web site! Visually, nothing much has changed: I'm still using the same basic layout with the brown header, the dark yellow index on the left side, and the body pages with the pale yellow background. I am still using the same style sheet, the same navigation, and the same sections (though I've added one in February of 2011, Rants, for Opinions, convictions, biases, beliefs...). In the last few months, however, I have been forced to make a couple of changes that have been rather time-consuming to implement:

• Relocation of my alternate web site
  Apple announced that web hosting on MobileMe would be discontinued in June of 2012. This meant that I had to find another home for my alternate web site. Originally, the sole purpose of that site was to play around with iWeb, but later the site became the home of my blog with its 380 entries, and I did not want to lose these.
   
• Providing a new home for my web galleries
  It turns out that Apple's decision to discontinue web hosting also meant the demise of my gallery pages. It thus became necessary to find a new home for those. Galleries are a quick way to share a large number of photos in an environment tailored to that purpose, that is optimized for showing off images (including slide shows) and videos.
   

1. Alternate Web Site

For the alternate web site, I chose to host it myself. It is now located at http://www.kiechle.com/alternate/. The many links on this site that pointed to the alternate site were all updated, and hopefully none were missed. The most difficult page (with some 400 links that needed updating) was the one about the Blog itself, but there were many others. Hosting the alternate site in my own web space definitely keeps it safe and should be transparent to any visitor. Be aware, however, that any old bookmarks that you may have created will have to be changed. Here is a quick list of the main links:

• Welcome Page/
• Cruise/
• Photos/
• Movies/
• Monster/
• Blog/

Sadly, some features of the alternate site will not work in the new environment. For example, the search function in the Blog is no longer available, and it is no longer possible to subscribe to be notified of content changes. This is not really a big deal as the alternate site will evolve minimally at best.

2. Galleries

The galleries, which I have named "Third Eye Captures" are now located at ahttp://photos.kiechle.com (note that there is no "www" in this URL!). It is also possible to type "Third Eye Captures" into a Google search field and the galleries should come out on top, or at least near the top of the results. By default, accessing the main URL produces a slide show of a subset of all photos (choose an option from the main menu to exit the slide show), but it is possible to navigate directly to individual sections:

• Entry Page (shows a slide show of selected images)
• Main Page (shows all galleries and collections)
• Videos (a collection of video clips)
• Older galleries (migrated fron the old gallery pages)
• 200 Northern Capitals Cruise photos
• Older and newer iPhone Photos/

The new gallery pages are actually quite a bit more sophisticated than the older ones in that they allow the creation of collections (i.e., groups of images culled from several galleries) and groups (i.e., containers, or folders, that can accommodate multiple galleries). A nifty feature available throughout the pages allows viewing the contents of any gallery or collection as a slide show. I typically upload images in high resolution (up to 3600 x 2400 pixels); they are automatically scaled down to the current display size so that the presentation should be optimal.

I have not moved every single gallery; some of them will thus disappear. If someone complains loud enough about a missing gallery, I'll recreate it (I obviously have all the photos). Navigating the galleries should not present any particular problem; indeed, it should be a great deal more convenient now.

3. Other changes

Ten years ago, I was very much concerned with minimizing the size of these pages; this translated into just a few relatively small thumbnails per page and medium-sized, heavily compressed images. These days, dial-up is practically a thing of the past, and so the pages have been getting much larger. At the time of writing (January 2012), typical thumbnails are 390 x 260 pixels, images 1500 x 1000 pixels, and the quality setting (which determines the compression rate) a nine or even ten. The difference is especially telling when viewing some of our older pages.

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This page was last modified on January 20, 2012
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