As stated , I’m working on compiling detailed content for most of the major events that have unfolded since the last post in Feburary. In the mean time I wanted to get a post up that listed all of the photo album updates that have transpired since Eli’s birthday.
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As you can tell by the lack of updated content (last post 02/07…UHG), I’m falling horribly behind on updates to Wykleville. Between work, travel, work, kids, health, work, and self…I’ve only able to post the new Picasa photo albums. With this simple public post, I’m vowing today that I will make a concerted effort this weekend to get back into sync with the Wykleville and make a grand push to bring everything up to present day. After all, this ongoing work makes my life easier at the end of the year when I go to compile the 3rd annual Wykleville blog book. Thanks for the understanding!
In keeping with last year’s promised tradition, I created another “Wykleville – year in review” scrapbook. I took most of the posts from Wykleville as the foundation and added many additional photos. Given the success from last year, I used Blurb again to produce the book and FotoFusion as the software creation tool. I upgraded to the “Extreme” version of FotoFusion in order to the full double page layouts and higher resolution. I also used Microsoft Autocollege product that to produce a few of the picture collages (soccer and gymnastic pages).
This year I did something a bit different on the front and back cover. In an effort to capture the look and feel of the Wykleville site, I wanted to duplicate the website layout on the book’s cover. I tried a few different methods to screen capture the site from the web browser, but was not happy with the results. The outputs from this method were quite low in resolution and would have looked crappy in the printed high resolution end product. The only alternative I could find was to create the site fully in a graphics program (Gimp). I’ve been using Gimp for many years. It is a free and open source program that mimics many aspects of the extremely expensive Adobe PhotoShop. This took a few hours of manual creation time, but I think was well worth the extra effort. This will allow me to remember the progression of the Wykleville site’s layout and design.
You can check out the finished product by clicking on the icon below…
I wasn’t very happy with the Blogger service (inflexible) and decided to give WordPress a try. I found a very nice theme (Structure) that is easy to work with and I think the new site looks very nice and allows for many “plug-in” features. As you can see the site has a bit of a “newspaper” layout and feel. You can get to individual posts a number of ways…by way of tagging, category tabs, popularity rankings, resent post, etc. WordPress is a very powerful platform that is open source and accommodates “open source” development from the users. I have included many plug-ins to add functionality to the site (Picasa Feed, Gravitar Avatars, and Guestbook).
As with any blog, the content is key. My desire is to use this forum for communication between our distant family members and I will try to do a better job of keeping everything up to date. As they…”The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. ;)