Those visitors who come to KeptLight.com with some regularity might have noticed the stylistic changes. I have also implemented more structural and substantive changes to make your visit more pleasant (I hope) and informative. Here are the changes in a list:

1. A new theme that is open, clean, and easy to maintain (the last one more important to me)
2. Use of Web Fonts for better typography control
3. A home page that displays a featured gallery in a slide show and the last five posts identified with their thumbnail images in the middle of the home page
4. Simple and unobtrusive menu, infrequently used options being placed in sub-menus
5. Family photographs are separated to a sub menu under “About”, few posts may fit both family and other photography categories and they appear under both groups of posts
6. A better structured gallery page that presents cohesive collections with its own layout
7. An exhibitions page, designed similar to the galleries, that presents exhibit information along with all the photographs in each exhibit. There may be some overlap in the presented photographs but that is due to an effort to keep the exhibit collections complete
8. A modest store where published magazines, folios, and soon photographs, can be purchased
9. Higher quality video files for slide shows, most can be viewed in HD format and quality. Look for the blue HD on the player control bar and click on it after the video starts
10. Special back-end technologies to speed up site performance

Let me know what you think, please share your thoughts by posting a comment.

I have been using WordPress.com Stats plugin on my site, along with other sites that I install and manage. Lately, I have noticed sluggish page loads and tried to find the source of it. The FireBug add-on to Firefox has facilities to show what loads and how fast. Among the scripts that load was one from quantserve.com and I knew I had removed the Quantcast script with which I experimented for a while. By trial and error, turning the plugins off and on, I was able to trace the source to WordPress.com Stats. I could not find a reasonable answer by thinking about it, so I posted a forum question on WordPress.org about the matter. In several days no answer came from any source. Then I decided to do a more careful search on the WordPress forum and, sure enough, I found the answer. In a forum thread Matt Mullenweg confirmed that they have been collaborating with Quantcast and some undisclosed features would be coming soon. [Read more...]

I use NextGEN Gallery in combination with HighSlide to present a group of images. In between the two is the useful plugin WS-Highslide which embeds the HS code on every page automatically on the fly.

On some occasions, especially on sites that I build for others, I want to add a title to the displayed image for added information. This stumped me for a while as there are no check-boxes or other configuration options in either NGG or HS. A little investigation and reading lead me to the solution of adding the following lines to the HighSlide code into the WS-Higslide configuration script:

hs.show_caption=”y”;
hs.captionEval = “this.thumb.title”;  (this will display the contents of the “Title” field in NGG)

or:
hs.captionEval = “this.a.title”;  (this will display the contents of the “Caption” field in NGG)

I hope this helps others who may be trying to do the same.