Outdoor Discoveries

A continuing evolution

Over the past few weeks, I have been engaging in a spot of website tuning from time to time. There has been the occasional tweak to appearances but it’s mainly been about tweaking things behind the scenes. There is always plenty of that to be done but, sometimes, a complete redesign can be an unavoidable and, if you’re doing it yourself like I would be, time consuming operation. The last one was a few years ago and there’s plenty of life in what I have so I’ll continue to tweak and improve it as long as I can.

If you are a regular visitor, you may have noticed that the masthead image of the site has changed. Travelling on ferries like I did last month meant that a trap was set for me: ending up with photos of slivers of land dividing land from sea. Even with my alleged (D)SLR-wielding sophistication, such is the beauty of sunlit green land juxtaposed against blue sky and sea that it can happen to me too. Photos like those do have their uses though and they are perfect for creating masthead images like what you see above. A spot of cropping in Photoshop Elements followed by some tweaking of levels, curves and colours is just what’s needed to get the required results.

Speaking of processing photos, it’s probably a good time to look at my photo gallery and freshen it up with some new images and do a spot of pruning too. I am always finding things to add to the blog so it’s too easy to neglect the site’s initial raison d’être. I have some ideas in mind for bigger changes to the photo gallery but I’ll let them develop before anything happens.

Update, 2008-09-29: That evolution remains ongoing and users of Firefox, Safari and Chrome should notice that most corners are now rounded. Visitors with Internet Explorer and Opera will not see any rounding because this is an aspect of CSS3 that is only partially implemented for now. It’d be very nice if it gained more widespread implementation but graceful degradation will do for now. Any other tweaks should be seen by all.