Squarespace Note

While browsing the RSS feed, I came across this new app. It was released by my blog engine, Squarespace, and looking at it closely, it was a pretty handy app to draft your entry. It was called Squarespace Note.

Previously, I have been using a different app called Day One. The beauty about hat app was it syncs through DropBox onto the iOS and the Mac app. I can draft it on the desktop and it would sync across automatically and appear on the iPhone or the iPad.

So far, it would get uploaded as a draft entry. And you could then put up the photos, and other changes from either the website, or the main Squarespace app before getting it published.

So, let us see how it worked ......

*this entry was drafted in Squarespace Note on my iphone*

Beta testing

I spent the whole morning beta testing. Beta testing for what you might ask? It was for the new iteration of my website engine, SquareSpace version 6. The version 5 has been up and running for a good 4 years, well before I started using the platform in March 2009. So far, small improvements were added into the system, but nothing major like the upcoming version.

Fired up, I singed in and did the needful. The template looked amazing, but since it was still in beta, it lacked flexibility. I think much work were put in for stability hence not much tweaking were able to be done. I ended up using an animation-rich setup, although the colour scheme needed looking into.

The gallery page took ages to load, mainly due to local flash-like execution. My SmugMug gallery tended to load up much faster, so I might be sticking to that.

Another issue was the width of the site. It was pretty limited, and the site ended up feeling like a tumblr project. Nice, but not really for serious blogging ….

I am sure many more improvement would be made, and I will be writing my feedback to SquareSpace from time to time. But now, it is time for exploration ……

Give the site a twirl here.

Who's the Mayor?

Happy Monday all. It's a brand new week. After the horrendous traffic situation driving in all last week, I decided to drive in early and have some breakfast at the cafe near the hospital. That won't be good for my waistline though!

Another bit news was I managed to oust @palmdoc as Mayor of SDMC. Now, my consultation fees would go up by 20% and everyone has to kneel before for I am the Mayor!

Mid-Life Crisis?

Not only that I managed to compile the Singapore links into one coherent group, I revamped the whole page as well. Instead of dark theme which I favor, everything now becomes much lighter. It may have caused havoc with my previous posts in terms of alignment, but I would be working on that. Otherwise, everything was working perfectly - the beauty of Squarespace I supposed. The chance of theme was just a click away ….

I'll keep this new theme for the next few days and see what comes of it. Some of my photos tended to come up better with a dark background. But maybe some of the other would turn up better instead. Well, why not have a change. The last theme has been up for the last 18 months. My wife must be wondering if I am going through a mid-life crisis!

Anyhow, all the links for Singapore are now up and running. Even the slideshows onto the sister photography blog were also linked up. I still have a few entry on the trips needing to be written, but I am sure I would get them done by the weekend. I'll make do with what I have at the moment.

HarisPhotoBlog.com Migration

With the recent fanfare over the announcement of iCloud and iOS 5, the rumors finally came through. The era MobileMe as we knew it was coming to an end, and it was a long time coming. Being a subscriber of MobileMe since 2004 during it's .mac days - haven't I told you that I'm a Mac fanboy? - the webmail service and other utilities it offered - iDisc especially was pretty cumbersome. And worst of all was iWeb. It was a closed platform and it was only possible to update the site from a single computer! Even if you were to used another Mac and log into the system, you would not be able to enter iWeb. It was a closed - and doomed - platform.

My previous attempt at starting a blog using the iWeb platform were abandoned not once, twice, but three times. I just couldn't cope with the interface. I can't customise the blog, nor can I update it on the fly. That really defeated the purpose of it being a mobile platform. I finally got my act together to start this blog and I have been active since its inception in March 2009 - this was the first entry. I have since had close to 800 blog entries, and the main reason for its longevity if you could call it that was the brilliant web hosting service from SquareSpace. I couldn't speak highly enough of the platform. I can update the blog directly of any web browser, iPhone, iPad, or just through a plain old email.

The longest surviving site I maintained on an iWeb platform was harisphotoblog.com. It was mainly a flash portal from my SmugMug storage. It just needed maintaining every few weeks or so, but even then, I felt the pain every time an update was needed. The upload failure rate was also rather high, and options were limited. I was not able to inject too much code into the system at all.

From next June, iWeb would cease to exist. I therefore decided to bail out, and opened another SquareSpace site. The difference was spectacular. I was able to post the photos and slideshows at HD size. The site was more customisable and the analytics were more thorough. Have a look at the site. You might find it a hard squeeze if you were browsing in a laptop or a mobile device ........