Day 1467: Iquique, Chile. Getting my blog to a halfway presentable state….

I have spent a dozen hour over the last week messing about with my blog and finally feel I have it how I like it. I found a new theme that I like, the Modularity Lite theme which lets you use custom menus at the top, solving my problem linking to my spot location. It’s also nice and wide, giving me lot of space for yummy photos. These should be flowing regularly now and giving me some love from facebook too. I have a plugin called ‘Add link to facebook’ which automatically posts a link to facebook whenever I post a new item, directing people towards my site rather than giving facebook all my unshown pictures. I have another plugin called PhotoQ which pulls all my pictures from an ftp location and queues them up in a nice randomly order list. I have a thing called a ‘cron job’ which is a command that runs on my hosts server and sends a message to my website in an interval I choose (currently every 6 hours) to publish another photograph. These stay in the order I shot them on the site….

I have a lot of processed photos and I think it’s nice that people finally see what I’ve been up to this year. My only other change in workflow is that now I type in captions for each of the pictures with a quick description. That was something I needed to do anyway, and then I export them as jpgs and upload them via ftp. Everything else is automatic. Easy as pie.

My edditing list is starting to accumulate again so I think I need another day just picking out more best shots and writing some more captions. I have 60 new pics ready to go and should ideally keep a months worth at least, but describing 180 more photos isn’t such a big deal. I’m able to add the location information automatically with my GPS and then the only thing to do is keyword tagging…. but that can wait until after Lonely Planet Images say yes.

Up in Arica I mean Jeanne, a photographer who gets paid to shoot :p and she advised me to only send my 500 strongest images in my application. I’m still not sure if I should do that or hit them with the 2,000 its looking like at the moment. Suggestions on a postcards please.

I will be heading back north on Friday now, but I found someone to come with me, Carlos, a friend of Isabel, whose hostel I am staying in at the moment. He also is a photographer and knows the area so hopefully we should be able to find some awesome shots together.

September 21, 2011 | Categories: South America 2011 | Tags: blog, Day, facebook, gps, Iquique, Modularity Lite, photographer, photos, week, worth | Leave A Comment »