Blog Posts

There are 23 posts filed in Blog Posts (this is page 2 of 3).

On the site design

I’m always interested in how website owners arrive at the design for their site and the tools they used to get there. So I guess I should describe how I put this site together. (Jump to TLDR). I should say up front that I’m a little fixated on clean and functional design, mostly in that order. I tend to be a slightly fussy about how the pages look.

My first websites, back in the day, were plain HTML. That was a long time ago. Later I changed to Movable Type and then WordPress. Each required some work to learn, not to mention getting the hang of CSS. But it was fun.

Then sometime around 2007 I stopped blogging and until the last few months or so I was only vaguely aware of the current state of the art. So when I retired recently and decided to start a new blog I took a look around to explore what was out there. I looked at Svtbtle and Medium but I wan’t impressed. I had used Tumblr in the past and I knew it could be extensively customized but its ownership was in flux.

I was ready to just buy a hosting plan and build out a WordPress(.org) site from scratch when I stumbled on the WordPress(.com) hosted service. Out of curiosity I opened a free plan and began to look at themes and configuration options. It was not the old WordPress that I knew. It was a slick but locked-down platform. There were some limited CSS customization options but most of the code was walled off. As a challenge (and with lots of new free time) I decided to work within those constraints to see what could be done.

There were lots of themes available so that’s where I started. I needed something basic, simple and functional but reasonably configurable. Independent Publisher 2 looked like it had potential. It was clean and had the blog-like look I wanted. I added some new CSS to modify the block-quotes, link colors, font sizes, etc. All the WP cruft was removed. I fixed the header and footer to look exactly the way I wanted and came up with a sitemap structure that I could live with and voilà, …almost done.

One little thing annoyed me. The title of a page is also the name of the page in WordPress. And this theme always displays the title (if you enter one) on a page. The title styling is inherited from blog posts, left-aligned, and this looks horrible on a centered page. There’s no way (that I could find) to do a page only title customization. So no page titles. In the WP interface all my pages are named “Untitled.” It’s confusing at my end but it works visually for the end user. And it’s manageable if I keep the number of pages down.

Anyway, I think I achieved my goal of a clean site with decent looking fonts, a pleasing color palette and minimal navigation distractions, just by configuring the theme and adding some custom CSS (documented below). And the mobile rendering is just what I was looking for too. I can highly recommend Independent Publisher 2.

I hope this minimal design works for you. If anything I think it may be too clean. Discoverability for the footer links is low but if I keep the number of front page posts to five or so anyone looking for the about page will probably find it at the bottom eventually.

The photo pages took a little more thought as to how they would fit in with the rest of the site. I decided to put the galleries on pages and use URL forwarding (jjdaley.pics) to go to a photo index page (with an anchor to put the user at the correct header). So far this seems to work and the feedback I’ve received indicates that people aren’t too confused about the structure. Also, as far as galleries, I decided to upgrade to NextGen Pro and use photo tags to manage placement. The native WordPress/CoBlocks photo galleries were not great.

If you have any comments or suggestions or think navigation is problematic, I’d love to hear from you.

This is the CSS I added…
/*
THIS FORMATS THE H4 LINKS ON THE PHOTO PAGE SO THEY ARE BLACK AND NOT BLUE, THE NORMAL LINK COLOR
*/
H4 a {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: black;
}
H4 a:visited {
	color: black;
}
H4 a:hover {
	color: #dec63c;
}
/*
THIS IS THE MAIN LINK COLOR CODE
*/
a {
	
	text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
	color: #dec63c;
}
/*
THIS CENTERS THE FOOTER WIDGET
*/
.widget-area .widget, .comment {
	word-wrap: break-word;
	text-align: center;
}
/*
THIS FORMATS THE BLOCK QUOTE SO THE LEFT BORDER IS WITHIN THE CONTENT FRAME ALSO COLOR, ETC
*/
blockquote {
	border-left: 3px solid #edebeb;
	margin: 1.5em 10px;
	padding: .5em 10px;
	quotes: "\201C""\201D""\2018""\2019";
}
blockquote p {
	display: inline;
}
/*
THIS IS FORMATTING FOR THE MAIN LOGO AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE
*/
.site-title a {
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #c8dec8;
	font-size: 50px;
}
.site-title a:hover {
	color: #379928;
}
/*
THIS IS FORMATTING FOR THE  BLOG ENTRY TITLE HYPERLINK COLORS AND FONTS
*/
.entry-title a {
	color: black;
	text-decoration: none;
}
.entry-title a:hover {
	color: #9d9fa1;
	text-decoration: none;
}
.entry-title {
	font-size: 1.8em;
}
/*
THIS IS TO MINIMIZE AND GREY OUT THE CATEGORY HEADERS
*/
.page-header:not(.page-header-light) h1 {
	margin: 0;
	text-align: center;
	font-size: 20px;
	color: #d4d5d6;
}
TLDR

TLDR: I’d like to be able to say that I coded the engine and styled all the pages from scratch but really it’s just a customized theme on a WordPress hosted site.

Thoughts on the Leica M10-P

If you’re a photographer, should you consider an expensive digital rangefinder?

Leica M10-P, Voiglander Nokton 40mm f/1.2

I’ve been using a Leica M9 rangefinder for almost ten years. It’s been a great camera. It forced me to get back to the basics of photography. Prime lenses. Framing each shot. Manual focusing. Considering exposure and depth of field for each press of the shutter. It was limiting but also liberating.

It’s easy to let the computer inside a modern camera do a lot of those things for you and I think I was falling into that trap. Too much automation can make photography rote. I still use my Nikon DSLR and mirrorless cameras and zoom lenses for speed and versatility, especially when traveling – but alongside the Leica.

Digital technology has a lifespan and, after ten years, the CCD sensor in the M9 was getting a little dated. It still produced beautiful warm RAW images but there was no live view and no ability to do focus peaking for very narrow depth of field shots – something becoming more important for my aging eyes.

I sat out several generations of upgrades to Leica’s rangefinders, successors to the M9, like the M240, the M and a few other variants. I thought the advances were negligible and didn’t warrant the price. My M9 was working just fine. Then, in 2017, Leica released the M10. It had a new 24mp CMOS sensor, a larger optical viewfinder and, most importantly, the ability to use a high resolution electronic viewfinder. Now I was tempted.

So after waiting (and saving) for a year or so I decided to pull the trigger. I checked the B&H used inventory and found an ‘open box special’ for an M10-P, a more expensive version of the M10 with no red dot and a quieter shutter. Because it had been a demo unit it was priced lower than a regular new M10. So I ordered it.

Leica M10-P, 50mm Summilux with Visoflex EVF

Although impeccably engineered, the original M9 was a slightly awkward looking camera. It was the first Leica rangefinder designed for a full frame digital sensor. To fit the electronics and a full frame sensor that could accommodate traditional M lenses, the camera ended up being a little thick and it had some jutting edges. But the photos were amazing so all that was forgiven.

Aesthetically and ergonomically the M10-P seems close to perfect to me. It’s beautiful to look at. The controls make sense. It feels solid in the hand. It’s the thinnest digital M yet. And the quiet shutter is incredible. The damping gives it a nice feel and you barely hear the Pa-lunk sound.

How are the images? I attached a 35mm Summilux lens to the camera. This lens is a little soft wide open but it’s a classic and I wanted to see how it looked with this new sensor. Pretty good, it turns out. Images had that classic Kodachrome look. The sensor was at least as good as the CCD in the M9 in its color tone and rendition.

Fall colors, Leica M10-P, 35mm

Next I tried the super sharp 50mm Summilux ASPH FLE and opened it up. I used the Visoflex EVF. Peaking worked flawlessly and I was able to nail focus.

Hawk on a post. Leica M10-P

I have been using the M10-P for just over a year now and it has not disappointed. It has been a pleasure to use. (My new favorite lens to use with it is the Voiglander Nokton 40mm f/1.2.) Here are a few more photos from the M10-P.

Connemara Ponies. Leica M10-P
Man in Portree. Leica M10-P
Leica M10-P
Portree Harbor. Leica M10-P

Leica gear is expensive, no getting around that. But the quality is undeniable.

Is something like the Leica M10-P worth the cost? I like to think of these Leica rangefinders as my version of a mid-life-crisis Harley Davidson, something a lot of people in my shoes go for. In that light the cost is not so bad. So yes, for me it was worth it. Your milage, of course, may vary.

One dataset

You know that you’re being tracked, right? This article, in a series on technology and privacy by the New York Times, illustrates just how easy it is to track you through your phone, using commercially available data.

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.

The article also suggests a few ways to protect yourself.

Daytime long exposure

I’ve been experimenting with DLE photography. I ordered some ICE neutral density filters and downloaded the NDTimer app to help with the math. Here are a couple of experimental shots from this afternoon.

15 second exposure.
15 minute exposure

The first is a 15 second exposure with a 10X ND filter. The second is a 15 minute exposure, using a combination of 10X and 6X ND filters.

The effects from the longer exposures are apparent but it’s a matter of taste whether they’re desirable in a photo. The light diffusion is nice. But LDE photos can be a bit gimmicky sometimes. In this case I like the dramatic clouds in the shorter exposure but the glassy water effect in the longer exposure jumps out. Very situational. But, it’s another tool in the box so I’ll continue to experiment and hopefully learn more about it.

Links are powerful

Anil Dash on the scarcity of links on platforms like Instagram or Facebook.

With billions of people using the major social platforms, and the people who remember a pre-social-media web increasing in age while decreasing as cultural force on the internet, we’re rapidly losing fluency in what the internet could look like. We’re almost forgotten that links are powerful, and that restraining links through artificial scarcity is an absurdly coercive behavior.

An anachronistic blogger agrees.

Mac Pro config pricing

Mac Pros are up on the website and the configuration options are available.

So if I went with the basic processor and graphics card, a 3.5GHz 8‑core Intel Xeon W and Radeon Pro 580X, then bumped up the memory to 48GB of DDR4 ECC and added a 4TB SSD, my total would be $7,699.00. No monitor yet.

Add the Pro Display with standard glass, and optional stand, and I’m at $13,697.00. That would be my configuration if I had any interest in getting one of these. That’s actually about $4,400 less than I had guessed.

But still, that is one expensive computer. Good thing I didn’t really spec it up. (Or add wheels.)