shakeelnaim

It’s been a while since I last posted something, so felt that I needed to add an update.
Past few weeks have been very busy, with work, launch of DigitalOutbox and preparing and recording the podcasts. You might have also noticed that the website is sporting a fresh new look! After the launching DigitalOutbox, I felt the blog looked too plain and didn’t really represent my vision, so I spent some time finding a new theme and then customising it to suit my needs. It’s still not 100% the way I’d like it and I will be making tweaks here and there over the coming months.

On top of all this, I’ve been getting really frustrated by not having an elegant way for displaying my photographs. I feel I’m not good enough to have a professional looking online portfolio as I’m not a photographer by profession, but I would still like to present my photos in a professional manner, separate from this blog. I don’t have the time or the desire to build a website from scratch so the other option is to use a photoblogging tool.

I’ve been trying out Pixelpost for a few months, but not really gotten anywhere due to various reasons. It’s a nice enough tool with some really nice themes available, but I haven’t yet found a theme that impresses me overall. One option is to pick the themes that have features that I like and then create my own customised theme. This is not something I’m looking forward to doing due to lack of spare time.
Another option is to use Wordpress and use one of the numerous photoblog themes. I’m not too sure about this option as I don’t want the extra burden of adding posts, I just want to be able to upload photos and present them in a funky way with easy to use navigation.

So in the meantime I have added a Photos page and using a really cool AJAX enabled plugin, Slickr Gallery, which streams my photos from my Flickr page and displays the sets as albums. It looks pretty nice and is easy to use.
Recently I have discovered another possible option, SlideShowPro, which I’m testing out right now. At the moment it’s looking very promising and could end up being the weapon of choice. The only caveat is that it’s just a tool for displaying photos and doesn’t provide the complete solution of a website with themes and plugins, so I will have to use it in combination with Pixelpost or Wordpress.
Here’s an example of how it can be customised to suit your website design and colour scheme. This is using RSS to pull the latest photos from my Flickr page.