Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Centre communautaire de loisiers Sainte-Catherine d'Aleandrie. And a couple of bikes.
As everyone probably knows by now, Blogger was out of commission for most of a couple days. Several posts with a couple comments disappeared here, and I've put the pictures back up again. This might result in duplicate postings, more or less, if the lost posts are repopulated by Blogger.
7 comments:
Well, I don't know if "everybody" knew, but I certainly did.
I continue to be impressed by the quality of your photos on the front page. Do you have to resize them in any particular way? My photos (using a Blogger old-style template) , before enlarging, are decidedly fuzzy.
Mike, I'm using a new-style template, and set the front-page pictures to "x-large". The file I upload is sized 1000 pixels wide (or 800 pixels tall for verticals) and saved as a level 8 JPEG. Since Blogger is resizing for the front page, the initial size of the uploaded file *could* make a difference, but I don't know what Blogger is actually doing under the hood.
Blogger says they are back, we will see, nice series here Carl
Mike, I took a quick look at your blog (will go back for a better look later) and I think you need to update to the current software/templates to fix the issue. It's really not a big deal. A couple days ago I had to update my wife's blog, which we've only used to announce her exhibits and was still on the old software. Updating the software, specifying a template, customizing the "width" settings to accommodate the x-large front page picture presentation all took less than half an hour. I just used the same template as my blogs, so that's cheating a bit, but still I don't think you'll need an hour to cross your blog over starting from scratch.
Don, the returned Blogger appears to be stable, but I wonder what will happen when they try again to do the maintenance, upgrade, or whatever it was that crashed the system.
My little Montreal trip was surprisingly productive. It was definitely not a photo expedition, but a meet-up with my wife's French cousin. We spent two full days just wandering on foot around the old part of the city, enjoying the wonderful food and doing typical tourist stuff. I just carried a camera and made pictures on autopilot, but my autopilot has fifty years of training and does a pretty decent job ;-)
Also, the bed & breakfast where we stayed didn't serve breakfast until 8:00, so that gave me three two-hour concentrated shooting walkabouts in nice morning light. The weather cooperated as well. It was supposed to rain cats and dogs, but held off until late in the second afternoon, so I had a lot of my very favorite "edge of the rain" light to work with.
Carl, thanks! You know, I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the newer templates on a made-up blog.
Quite a bit of time and effort, erased, apparently, by the recent Blogger meltdown. But I tried that resize thingie and it seemed to work, here. (Warning: grotesque.)
Mike, that larger front picture is nice and crisp, but it's overshooting the blog layout. You need to play with the design features to change the column width. It looks as though not all templates allow you to do that, so you may need to change templates in order to use the larger picture size. The "Simple" template works fine, and comes in several different flavors.
Carl, Mike: That enforced small size of the old blogger templates was one of the main reasons to switch to my own self-hosted wordpress blog.
Now blogger has templates much better suited for large images - but I know, playing and fiddling to find the one best suited to one's needs is time-consuming. The best thing is that you can set up as many blogs as you want for testing... and the worst thing is that you have to try many setups until you find the best setup ;) Anyhow, compared to the housekeeping of a self-hosted blog it still is a very very reasonable alternative.
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