shakeelnaim » blogging

An Update

SuperShaka — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:21:25 +0000

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.

Juggle, juggle, juggle

SuperShaka — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:50:13 +0000

It’s been so hectic the past few weeks that my plan to have the blog structure and style finished by this weekend have slipped considerably.
I have so many balls in the air at the moment that I’m struggling to get anything done in time. Therefore I am declaring the status of the blog as BETA until further notice.
My interest in Lightroom 2.0 was invigorated after taking some nice photos at the recent London trip. This led to the desire of wanting to learn Photoshop again, something I’ve been attempting to do, on and off, for over a year. So I’m trying to read Scott Kelby’s The Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers book again. At the same time, I’m trying to catch up with about 5 back issues of my subscribed Digital Photo magazines. On top of this, I have discovered a couple of fantastic websites offering some really nice Photoshop tutorials, Web Designer Wall and Photoshop Lady, and I constantly find myself spending what little free time I have, browsing the tutorials.
If this wasn’t enough, I am also desperate to learn Cocoa programming so I can start developing for the Mac and iPhone. I already have the Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book, which is supposed to be one of the best available on the market. I have also just ordered Programming in Objective-C 2.0, which has recently been published and is getting good recommendations.
I have no idea how I’m going to get all this done. I guess it will be a case of do a little at a time instead of trying to do everything in one go. So I am going to try and create a study schedule to cover all these subjects and will do my best to stick to it.

A new year, a new blog

SuperShaka — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:00:55 +0000

Well, after a couple of years since giving up my previous blog, I have decided to start a new one.

During this period a lot has changed – I find less and less time to play computer games; I have taken up amateur photography and my interest in photo editing and graphic design has grown immensely. This is probably the main reason that I have started this blog as I’d like to have an elegant online portfolio to display some of work, with a simple blog front-end.

The blog is using the ever popular Wordpress. Thanks go to Ian for letting me exploit his vast blogging experience to help with the set up.
The photo blog is using PixelPost app and will be populated over the next few days.

I’m very excited about this project and hope that I can produce something that will encourage me to learn more about photography and digital imaging and also provide a personalised online digital portfolio to present my work.

Happy New Year.