I am very happy to be able to present this new home for my photos, thoughts and writings!

After my former web host went bankrupt just before Christmas, I have been working on creating this new site – and I must say I am quite pleased with the result. It has some new functionality that I hope you’ll appreciate. On the photo pages you can now see little thumbnail images and select which one to see in large format, without having to scroll up and down. Captions show up together with each individual photo – a feature I was really missing on my old site (www.msmediaservice.com). There’s now an image search function that will show thumbnails of search results matching your keywords! And of course the layout is completely new, quite an improvement I think.

Also ‘behind the scenes’, there’s a few improvements. I’m using Gallery2 which gives me batch uploading capability with import of IPTC titles and captions + functionality to custom arrange the order photos are displayed in. I’ve also enabled a function to prevent ‘right-clicking’ my photos(!) – should stop some illegal use.

And for this new blog I’m using WordPress, which I’ve really come to love after designing the Gaia site. There’s a nice sidebar with my ‘twitters’ (twit-ter: to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird!) and (to come) a display of random photos from my galleries. Also, over on blogger I couldn’t post images larger that 400 pixels wide, that’s now changed!

There’s a lot of other functionalities available in Gallery2, including slideshows and nice ‘fade background and popup image’-features - but I’ve disabled them to keep it simple for now. I might implement some of them in the future, there’s surely some changes to be made. I skipped over some of the nice details for now, just to get the site online. But whenever I get a chance I’ll make some longer stories to go along with the brief captions. And of course, upload a lot more photos. I’ve just uploaded a couple of stories for now. Would also be nice to get rid of all the conditional sentences in the Gallery2 code, it will speed things up for viewers, but that’s a larger project I’ll put on indefinite hold for now.

I still need to update some links here and there around on the web, so Google will point new visitors to my site. I also expect to see some improvements in the number of Google-visitors showing up here. With one separate page per photo, containing descriptive title and URL etc, think Google will love it!

Well, I’m quite happy about it all. I’ll sort out the little issues in the coming days and also upload more photos, so stay tuned. Let’s see how it all plays out in 2009. Think it will be a revolutionizing year!