Wednesday, February 25, 2009

New day on the blog

Early morning flight

I'm testing out a new template for Points of Light. For a while now I've not been happy with the way that Blogger displays photographs - too small and at too much of a loss of detail. I've tried to reconfigure my old template to no avail. I've just now upgraded to a newer and larger template and am trying to find the sweet spot between what looks great on my computer screen and what a fair number of visitors would see when they come here.

I'm staying with Blogger because I've invested almost four years into this blog and built up a lot of link love, a decent Google page rank and a goodly amount of search-friendliness. So I'm using the larger template space and linking directly to my photos on Flickr, hopefully to get the best of both worlds.

I've got some fixin' to do on my sidebar stuff, much of which disappeared in the switchover. Fortunately my feathers are numbered for just such an emergency. Do let me know if you spot anything funky on your browser.

Onward and forward.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

11 comments:

DYB said...

Bigger, more detail, me likey...

Anonymous said...

This looks great, and is good for your pictures. And this shot, is really spectacular.

Wanda said...

This is a really cool picture.... love the birds.

Dave said...

I prefer the new layout. Thanks

Joan Elizabeth said...

I glad you've increased the size of your photos. They are so good and worth seeing in more detail.

engloy said...

Nice new layout James... although on my widescreen Mac, the space expands a little too wide for comfortable viewing when the browser window is maximised to the entire screen width. Resizing the browser window on my side helps though.

Anonymous said...

love the new template, it certainly makes your photos pop more, before I thought the colored background was too confining, anyway, looks great!

Anonymous said...

You've redecorated! I like it.

James said...

Yeah, moved the furniture around, painted here and there. It was way past due. Thanks, everyone!

Erik said...

James,

Where did you find a larger blogger template? I have the same complaint with my current blogger setup.

James said...

Hi Erik,
I started with Blogger's Minima Stretch (I had to upgrade my layout first, which wipes out most of the sidebar stuff - save a copy of the HTML before you convert if you haven't already - it makes it easier to rebuild).

Then I fiddled with the numbers in the template's html code to make the columns a size that I liked. The photos are linked from Flickr at 660 pixels wide, because even with the wider template, Blogger still posts them at a puny 400 pixels or so.