Ria Bacon: editor & writer

Linguist with wanderlust,
From the hills of New Guinea to the halls of the Sorbonne,
From the beaches of Bassam to the fields of Friesland,
From the catacombs of Rome to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
From the heather of the Veluwe to the dust of Dakar ...

Currently resident in the Land of Sea with a small tribe of kids and Mr B.

Tweet Blender

The end of serendipity? Google knowledge graph seeks to second guess your searches: http://t.co/yRSCvu15 Is this a good thing?
2 days ago
Currently translating a manual on how to make a handpump. Background research takes ages but gives great feeling of learning something new.
2 weeks ago
@RiaBacon helloooo! i've been suffering from exactly the same problem.
2 weeks ago
@lucypepper Good to hear from you. Real life is getting in the way of my virtual self. Maybe I should outsource the overworked part.
2 weeks ago
Fat tax now! RT @AP In 20 years, some 42 percent of the U.S. population will be obese, new government report says: http://t.co/ImZK2ETt -EF
2 weeks ago

Stet in a cloud

Ria fotografia

Photo Galleries

Gallery One

Ria Galleria

Now hear dis!

FYI

Stet means "Let it stand" and is used by editors to indicate that the original text should be left untouched.

...in Arcadia ego is a pun on a painting by Poussin.

Stet is a proud member of


    expatriate

Contact

Ria[dot]Bacon[at]gmail.com

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It’s all Geek to me

It may look as if I’m not busy here, but it’s like a swan, you know? On the surface all is calm and serene, feathers barely ruffled, while below the waterline I’m paddling like crazy. OK, maybe not the best simile, but it’s an elegant excuse for the superficial but time-consuming changes to this blog, namely the tabs at the top of the page (floating too high for my liking) and, more significantly, the photo gallery spinoff of this blog: Ria Galleria.

I’d been wondering for a while how to display my photos more effectively. Gallery One was a heavy flash-based gallery generated by Photoshop, but didn’t offer easy customization and updating. I went deep into Coppermine (example) and decided to get out after a few days in the darkness. (I’m amazed by its success as a photoblog; it’s so obviously based on bulletin board design and with its album-based presentation in tables, it takes me back to the early nineties when I first went online.)

I’ve settled for Johannes Jarolim’s falsely modest Yet Another Photoblog Plugin. I like the single image presentation and the easily customizable options. On top of that, I used Mac’s moody theme, Grain. Unfortunately, this required me to upgrade WordPress to the latest version … which in turn meant that Christine Davis’ little sidebar gem, Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW), no longer worked and my tag cloud vanished. I took the opportunity to look at other tagging possibilities. Pod from Korea offered a nice looking Flash Tag Cloud, but it looks terrible in a sidebar, and in my own version, a single tag is repeated 40 times. Guido’s version at Liquidshadow looks a lot better.

I tried WordPress’s native tagging, but it lacked the personal tweaking possibilities that I’d enjoyed with UTW. Finally, with young Amaury Balmer’s Simple Tags, I got my sidebar tag cloud close to what it had been before I upgraded.

In summary, introducing new element x requires upgrading element y, as a result of which element z is disabled, which requires installation of element sub-x. (I suspect this is a model for the future.)

So you see: not being lazy at all; lots of paddling, not quite at the shore …

… getting cramp in my little toe …

Related posts:

  1. Geek rapture
  2. Photo gallery
  3. What does not kill me, makes me stronger
  4. Once more unto the intocht, dear friends
November 20th, 2007 | Tags: | Category: Metablogging