Time for Uploading

After a couple of full days of photo taking, post-editing came as a drag. Even though I have the routine sorted out, it was the upload onto the server later on which could take some time. Usually Sunday morning would be the best time, but loading up almost 200MB of data on a slow broadband connection from the Gombak home - the apartment had 30Gb - took a bit longer usually.

The main photographs were from the Urbanscapes outing yesterday afternoon. I have yet to find time to blog about that. Maybe I would do that some time thins afternoon. As for now, it was time for breakfast, and Sunday morning rounds.

Foto by Haris

Since beginning of the year, I had been doing beta testing for my blog engine, SquareSpace. It was mainly for the need iteration, SquareSpace version 6. Certainly it was a departure from the software behind harisrahman.com, which ran on version 5. I was offered to upgrade but decided otherwise. The current blog was already week customised, I couldn't be asked to spend the extra time doing the updating. The current routine works OK as far as I was concerned.

As a reward, I was given a free account. One of the thing I noticed about the new version was, it was platform agnostic. The website more or less looked the same no matter what device you use. It looked the same on the laptop, the iPad and even the iPhone. It also optimises itself for viewing on the Nexus 7. A sister website, fotobyharis.com was born.

The new version also has an excellent gallery feature for photographs. So, I decided to use that for a new gallery. I used to use another account for this but I found it to be rather cumbersome. With the new engine, I just upload it straight up and the website optimised itself. Less headache. I still use SmugMug for my repositories, and that would remain so for some time.

I actually starting to like the new version. It still took a bit of time to get used to things. Updating on the fly was still not possible as I used to do it. But the site definitely has potential .......

Updated

After we decided to call the afternoon trip earlier, I spent the the rest of the afternoon updating my blog. Plenty of the entries from the Fraser's Hill trip were still not uploaded since the photographs took a bit of time to edit. They had been ready for the last few weeks but I didn't have time to update them. they were now finally up.

I then collated the entries into a stream of links. Next would be to put together the Ramadhan entries into one coherent link group. I may do that later tonight while waiting for United to kick off the new season. That would be 3 am though, and I was not sure if I could stay awake until then. I may have to set the alarm up then ....

Good luck to me :)

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.

Construction completed

Construction completed, originally uploaded by Haris Abdul Rahman.

What a football it was last night, and I finally got to bed just after 2, having to wake up after a couple fo hours for Sahur. United played Spurs and as I was settling down for some noodle and titbits, Spurs scored after 50 seconds. Oh dear!

But United actually passed their way back into the match superbly and were crafting chances. After a few misses, finally Giggsy stroked in the equaliser from a freekick. Before halftime, we were were leading with Anderson hitting the onion bag. The match took a turn when good old Scholesy ... did a Scholesy and was sent off. We held on though, and it was clear that Spurs will not win if they did not score within 5 minutes of the sending off allowing United to regroup. Rooney scored another later in the match with United the deserved victor. It was a good night all around.

Woke up this morning pretty early with one thing in my mind. I wanted to upgrade my photoblog and get it up and running. I purchased a new theme last night which I thought was appropriate for it, and I must say I was pretty pleased. Setting and lining the site up took some doing however but I think it ws well worth the time. Please visit it at harisphotoblog.com and see what you think. No, I have not yet had the time to go out shooting for a themed slideshow yet. Maybe I will do that in the coming holidays.

And talking about holidays, we will be heading to Sungai Petani for the second day of Hari Raya. We have already booked a couple of rooms at Kelab Cinta Sayang, and will probably be staying there for three nights. Should be a good break. Will be bringing the Wii of course. Will definitely be visiting the family in Penang as well.