Gallery restored: back on the air!
My web gallery is back up and on the air again! I can't begin to express how happy - and relieved! - to finally get it back up again after an extended hiatus off-line.
The last time I was able to update it was early in August 2014, a few days after I left my British employer. My website lived on work's webhosting platform - as a free staff perk - so I suspect it was eventually taken down while I was on my epic backpacking trip (it was certainly down by the time I arrived in Singapore in mid-November 2014). So, it's been just over two years since it was last up.
As well as hosting my website for the years I worked for them, my British employer also gave me a free domain name - my vanity domain lordstorm.net - which naturally I didn't think to transfer over into my own name before I left Great Britain. It took at least a year trying to chase down their hostmaster after I'd arrived back in Australia just to unlock the domain name and be able to transfer it back into my own hands, but I finally regained it halfway through this year.
Considering I most of 2015 trying to find a job and then struggling to keep my head above water re-establishing myself in Australia again, my travel photos barely got a look until the beginning of this year, where I slowly was able to sort through the truly staggering amount of photos I'd taken (well into the thousands) and slowly start to index them into my gallery. Another 13 countries' worth of photos slowly appeared on my local copy stored on my home server as the first half of the year progressed.
Once that was done - roughly about the time I'd regained my vanity domain - and I started to consider how to put it all back online, I realised the site itself, while now complete with all my travel photos from the rest of 2014 - wasn't exactly up to date: photo descriptions stretched back 10 years without consideration for the history that had occurred since then (especially so in countries affected by the Arab Spring, Libya and Syria in particular). Also, the site itself had started off as an unofficial project to keep my HTML coding up-to-date back in 2006, written for a screen resolution of 1024x768. Screen resolutions had naturally increased since then, and the proportions and dimensions of my pictures and thumbnails looked awkwardly smaller than they should. I had also noticed shameless nicking of my pictures - something I didn't mind that much when the site was a lot smaller, and my photography skills weren't that stellar - was increasing, as I noticed my own photos appearing on other sites without acknowledgement. So, I spent the next 4 months doing a deep-clean of the entire gallery in my spare time after work: updating descriptions, correcting spelling mistakes and checking/confirming translations or transliteration of names or words; a complete re-code of over 5,000 pages of plain-text code by hand to increase visible resolution and update coding tags; and finally learning how to create watermarks in Photoshop and then needing to brand over 5,000 individual photos, while generating larger-resolution thumbnails and images at the same time. It took a lot of time and effort, but I finally managed to complete all of it just before Xmas this year.
And in the quiet-time at work before the New Year, I finally found a decent hosting service to put this re-constituted part of my soul back on the internet. It was good to be able to finally type my domain name into a browser and see my site finally reappear talking to the internet in general, instead of directly to the local off-line copy living on my home server. It's also nice to see all my photos embedded in my journal over the years magically re-appear again too. *smile*
Even with all that work and effort, I wanted everything to be back online by the end of the year. And as there's barely a day or two before 2016 ends, that counts! I made my deadline....just barely.
So, for the first time two years I can say this again: the photos from my epic trip leaving Europe to return to Australia are finally up! I've finally sorted, pared down, translated, coded in, titled, and have now uploaded my photos from the Netherlands, the Trans-Mongolian trip through Russia and Mongolia, the rail-trip through China (including Hong Kong and Macau), the Indochinese loop through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, and finally along the south-east Asian bridge through Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia.
Naturally, the entire gallery is (once again) available at the usual place.
This entry was originally posted at http://mnemonia.dreamwidth.org/346594.html. Comments may be left on either entry.
The last time I was able to update it was early in August 2014, a few days after I left my British employer. My website lived on work's webhosting platform - as a free staff perk - so I suspect it was eventually taken down while I was on my epic backpacking trip (it was certainly down by the time I arrived in Singapore in mid-November 2014). So, it's been just over two years since it was last up.
As well as hosting my website for the years I worked for them, my British employer also gave me a free domain name - my vanity domain lordstorm.net - which naturally I didn't think to transfer over into my own name before I left Great Britain. It took at least a year trying to chase down their hostmaster after I'd arrived back in Australia just to unlock the domain name and be able to transfer it back into my own hands, but I finally regained it halfway through this year.
Considering I most of 2015 trying to find a job and then struggling to keep my head above water re-establishing myself in Australia again, my travel photos barely got a look until the beginning of this year, where I slowly was able to sort through the truly staggering amount of photos I'd taken (well into the thousands) and slowly start to index them into my gallery. Another 13 countries' worth of photos slowly appeared on my local copy stored on my home server as the first half of the year progressed.
Once that was done - roughly about the time I'd regained my vanity domain - and I started to consider how to put it all back online, I realised the site itself, while now complete with all my travel photos from the rest of 2014 - wasn't exactly up to date: photo descriptions stretched back 10 years without consideration for the history that had occurred since then (especially so in countries affected by the Arab Spring, Libya and Syria in particular). Also, the site itself had started off as an unofficial project to keep my HTML coding up-to-date back in 2006, written for a screen resolution of 1024x768. Screen resolutions had naturally increased since then, and the proportions and dimensions of my pictures and thumbnails looked awkwardly smaller than they should. I had also noticed shameless nicking of my pictures - something I didn't mind that much when the site was a lot smaller, and my photography skills weren't that stellar - was increasing, as I noticed my own photos appearing on other sites without acknowledgement. So, I spent the next 4 months doing a deep-clean of the entire gallery in my spare time after work: updating descriptions, correcting spelling mistakes and checking/confirming translations or transliteration of names or words; a complete re-code of over 5,000 pages of plain-text code by hand to increase visible resolution and update coding tags; and finally learning how to create watermarks in Photoshop and then needing to brand over 5,000 individual photos, while generating larger-resolution thumbnails and images at the same time. It took a lot of time and effort, but I finally managed to complete all of it just before Xmas this year.
And in the quiet-time at work before the New Year, I finally found a decent hosting service to put this re-constituted part of my soul back on the internet. It was good to be able to finally type my domain name into a browser and see my site finally reappear talking to the internet in general, instead of directly to the local off-line copy living on my home server. It's also nice to see all my photos embedded in my journal over the years magically re-appear again too. *smile*
Even with all that work and effort, I wanted everything to be back online by the end of the year. And as there's barely a day or two before 2016 ends, that counts! I made my deadline....just barely.
So, for the first time two years I can say this again: the photos from my epic trip leaving Europe to return to Australia are finally up! I've finally sorted, pared down, translated, coded in, titled, and have now uploaded my photos from the Netherlands, the Trans-Mongolian trip through Russia and Mongolia, the rail-trip through China (including Hong Kong and Macau), the Indochinese loop through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, and finally along the south-east Asian bridge through Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia.
Naturally, the entire gallery is (once again) available at the usual place.
This entry was originally posted at http://mnemonia.dreamwidth.org/346594.html. Comments may be left on either entry.