Ok, so I’ve finally launched my photographic portfolio site. So what’s so different about the new site then the one you’re reading now? Well, first off, this was always meant to be my blog, a journal of sorts, to record the daily events of my life. I like photos with writing that firmly plants the photos in context. I host my images on Flickr and participate in the Flickrverse. My modus operandi has always been to tell a story, photos don’t necessarily need to be technically good in the classic sense as long as they help move the story along. In contrast, my portfolio site was created to display just the very best of my photos. In a simple, easy to use interface. no links, no blog roll, no widgets, no fuss. Sometimes you just gotta go with less. So edfladung.com is a more minimalist jawn. Just the best of the best.
Technically, it runs on wordpress and uses slideshowpro/director to run the photo slideshows. I spent about 2 weeks trying to get slideshowpro to work nicely with flickr using Brian Sweeting’s flickrssp. It seemed like a great idea and after some serious code finagling I got the mashup to work, but not in the way I had wanted. So, I scrapped flickrssp and chose to use slideshowpro director. This created a small problem in that I have to upload images twice, once to flickr and second to the new site, but it was a small sacrifice to be able to present the photos as I have intended.
Underneath the hood, is a fully functional wordpress blog with the comments turned off and all meta data hidden. There are no archive pages (category, date, etc…). Everything else is essentially the same. The latest gallery shows up on the home page. Using All in One SEO plugin, I add keywords to each gallery that then show up as meta keywords in the html header. This allows me to describe the content of each slideshow for search engines and crawlers. Each gallery has an excerpt that describes the content of the photos (with screenshot), that shows up in the rss feed.
Oh and this is my one-thousandth post! Dig it!
Looks awesome! You’ve got some great stuff in there.