Inspired by A Daily Dose of Imagery, a site I’ve followed for a couple of years, and also by Hal Bergman, who I just discovered recently, and also motivated by my brand new awareness of photoblogs.org, I decided to create a new blog. luminosity is a photoblog, and that means the emphasis will be on the posting of photographic images, with not too much in the way of writing.
Another motivation was that I wanted a place to post larger images. Despite going back and forth, I currently do link to my Flickr images from this site. It’s easy, really. I like to share my images using Flickr and they are resized automatically for me, so when the choice is to make a post or process 3-20 pictures and then post, I usually end up just linking back to Flickr.
I recently went through a design exercise (subject of at least 2 draft posts) in making the site work for smaller monitor resolutions. Around 15% of my visitors use a screen size of 800×600, and previously, this site didn’t work well for them. In particular, images were cut off. Given the number of photos I post here, that wasn’t good. So, after a few hours of tinkering with the CSS file for the site, I’ve made it fit the smaller displays. Things may look a bit scrunched over on the menus, and there may appear to be wasted space if viewed on a larger monitor, but it seems a reasonable compromise. And besides, narrow columns are easier to read anyway; you can get tennis whiplash trying to read text on a column that’s too wide.
As a result, on this site I try not to post images any larger than 500 pixels wide. Not too coincidentally, that’s the medium Flickr size image. luminosity is designed to look good in browsers 1024 pixels wide and larger, and so the largest image I plan to use will be 750 pixels wide. That allows for the menus and a bit of border space on the sides.
Ideally, I’ll be able to post an image a day, but circumstances will sometimes dictate otherwise. I should have plenty of images to choose from given my new camera (subject of yet another unwritten post).
So head on over to luminosity, and check out the new site and the images I’m posting there.
Accommodating narrow-screen users is well worth the effort. Deciding that all your users should use a narrow screen doesn’t strike me as a good solution, however. Witness the hideous interface I get for writing this comment… aw, too fussy to post a link, I’ll email you a screen shot
Well, it wasn’t so much a decision as a side affect. This entirely too tiny box must be specified smaller than is reasonable; I’ll take a look and widen it up.
Thanks for letting me know about this! I don’t get a lot of comments, and don’t post many either. But this is really awkward, that’s for sure.
Actually, upon further review, Movabletype gets some of the, er, credit. This template is the default template for this particular style; I only made major changes to the main index; not to the individual archive template.
No matter, this box is way to small and I can probably adjust the CSS or the template and fix it right up.