Nick Taylors blog

As I’m planning on embedding images and videos into the blog, I need to remember that the optimal size using my customized grid-focus theme is 700px wide, and around 525px high (though it’s ok to +/- by a hundred px or so).

I recently spent some time in the The Maze District of Canyonlands National Park. Here’s the slideshow from that trip.
I used animoto to put together a video slideshow, with music (700×389px):

A Trip to The Maze from Nick Taylor on Vimeo

I use flickr to host my images, so it makes sense to use their flash-based slideshow, if for nothing else other than ease of use (700×525px).

Finally, here’s a static image embedded from flickr, resized to 700×466px (a good size for landscape oriented shots, remember to embed the large via the flickr photo album plugin and resize down in the HTML).

Hopefully this looks ok and I’ll use these defaults in the future. Of course, over at blog.exerro.com, the defaults are 950px wide, and slideshow photos should be 425px high. I’d love a way to do this without using Flash, any suggestions?

Today was a day for new Wordpress templates! As I upgraded blog.http://nickt.com to the grid-focus theme, I was in the mood to continue and upgrade our travel blogs theme. I wanted a different look and feel from this blog, and one that would exhibit photographs well on the front page. I found the theme I was looking for with “Modularity” from Graphpaper Press. I kept a copy of the instructions available.

See it in action for yourself over at blog.exerro.com!

I’ve been happy with the Hemingway-based Ninja-Monkeys theme, and I still use it over at my professional blog. Here’s what it looked like:

As you can see, it’s a little bland, but perfect for text-heavy sites. Also, on the front/index page, there were problems with embedded elements and graphics spilling-over into the next column – it looked ugly. 

Lately, I’ve been wanting to add more, larger photos in-line in blog posts and I’m embedding more video.

So I hunted around for a new theme. I liked the prophoto themes, but thought they were expensive. Graphpaper Press has some wonderful themes, and in fact I may use one of theme over at our travel blog, but they are also a paid-for commercial product (they are however, exactly what I’m looking for when we travel).

I was happy when I found Derek Punsalan’s site over at 5thirtyone.com. He has a couple of free themes, including the highly visual unstandard theme, and the one I settled on, grid-focus. 

Grid-focus enables me to have large graphics and embeds in the post, up to 700px across (I edited the .css file to get more width here at the expense of deleting the third column). This shows off graphics well and eliminates the the problem of overlap between posts. 

I think it looks great, don’t you?