Rethinking the Photo Gallery on Ocellated

Believe me or not, one of the hardest things about running a website (or more specifically in my case a multi-faceted blog / photo gallery) is not learning how to use the software that creates the content but rather deciding how to organize that content.

The blog has taken care of itself. Wordpress is a sufficiently awesome tool to organize everything into categories. I was feeling a bit stifled however by the photo gallery. It wasn’t the software’s fault though, I just needed a place to put increasingly different types of pictures, and I wanted to better highlight certain pictures without having them buried deep within an album.

So, I’ve now taken to organizing content into the following main albums.

• Trips — a place to put up albums for trips (near or far) that I take. This album is essentially just how the whole gallery was working before. All the old albums with their pictures have been placed into here.
• The Scrapbook — This is a place to put up individual, good quality pictures that I’ve taken recently, which are worth sharing. I’ll be putting up a few good shots here and there on the blog, and every time I do, I’ll throw them in the Scrapbook. I’m also going to share more pictures when I’m too busy to blog.
• Nature — This album is further broken up into three subalbums — Birds, Butterflies, and Dragonflies. The idea here is to put up a photographic list of all the birds, butterflies, or dragonfly species I’ve managed to get shots of. A few of these pictures are good, most are simply decent, and I’m sure a few are wretched. Birds in particular have a number of species but too many poor quality shots. My old camera wasn’t really meant for bird photography… I will be swapping out pictures with better ones as I get them, and I’ll add pictures as I get shots of new species. I simply wanted a place to showcase some of the diversity of life, in the groups that I’m interested in. In the future, if I get enough material, I might even add other groups.
• The Bruce — I’m sure this needs little explanation. It’s an album to put pictures of the world’s coolest cat, all in one convenient place. When Friday cat blogging occurs, Bruce’s pictures will get included in this album.
• Some of my best — This album will showcase some of my favorite pictures, period. Currently the album contains a group of shots that I put up when I originally created the photo gallery. I will be removing some of these pictures and adding others. As the list grows, I aim to keep it around 100 pictures, and things may come and go as I get better shots or change my mind.

Finally, because of its design, the photo album can hold pictures that are slightly wider than the blog. So any time you see a picture I’ve taken on the blog, you can click on it and get taken through to the album to see a bigger version. (The only exception would be portrait pictures, which may sometimes appear in the same size in both the blog and the album).

I hope you enjoy these changes. You can definitely expect to see a few more pictures on Ocellated.