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 (700x389px):

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 (700x525px).

Finally, here’s a static image embedded from flickr, resized to 700x466px (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?

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

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?

It looks like just the app I’ve been needing for our live-travels blog over at exerro.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBiBJ_0EHGA]

If this works, you should be able to see what happens when I let my best friend Lee drive my 110…

Here’s a picture of one of my trucks by way of a test.

I’m going to have to remember that the pictures cannot be more than 400px wide given the two column layout in my current template. In MarsEdit, I’ll have to use the “small” size for images.

• blog.exerro.com – a blog that I’ll use when we’re traveling
• blog.nickt.com – a blog for the consulting side of life
• blog.http://nickt.com – this blog, which is a place for everything else

I’ve kept a similar look and feel across all 3, I host them all on Media Temple, which offers a great virtualized service. I’m running WordPress 2.5 with a mysql backend.

I’ve always liked Kyle Neath’s hemingway theme, but I noticed it didn’t support WordPress Widgets. It’s possible to hack the template a little to get this working, then I discovered that the NinjaMonkeys had already done this. It saved me a lot of time. Checkout Ninja Monkeys! Theme – Widgetized Hemingway for WordPress 2.2+.

I also added a few plugins:

• akismet – to cut down on comment spam
• uberdose all in one SEO pack
• flickr photo gallery – this is the nicest of the flickr plugins
• google XML sitemaps generator
• WP-OpenID – again, to cut down on comment spam
• Twitter Tools – to enable tweets on my sidebar, courtesy of Denver-based dev Alex King

As we’re off traveling again soon (follow our progress on blog.exerro.com), I’ve also started using Marsedit, to allow us both to blog offline and upload text and images whenever we can connect to a ropey internet connection!