Collected Musings of a Hill Wanderer

Over the past few weeks, I have been engaging in a spot of website tuning from time to time. There has been the occasional tweak to appearances but it’s mainly been about tweaking things behind the scenes. There is always plenty of that to be done but, sometimes, a complete redesign can be an unavoidable and, if you’re doing it yourself like I would be, time consuming operation. The last one was a few years ago and there’s plenty of life in what I have so I’ll continue to tweak and improve it as long as I can.

If you are a regular visitor, you may have noticed that the masthead image of the site has changed. Travelling on ferries like I did last month meant that a trap was set for me: ending up with photos of slivers of land dividing land from sea. Even with my alleged (D)SLR-wielding sophistication, such is the beauty of sunlit green land juxtaposed against blue sky and sea that it can happen to me too. Photos like those do have their uses though and they are perfect for creating masthead images like what you see above. A spot of cropping in Photoshop Elements followed by some tweaking of levels, curves and colours is just what’s needed to get the required results.

Speaking of processing photos, it’s probably a good time to look at my photo gallery and freshen it up with some new images and do a spot of pruning too. I am always finding things to add to the blog so it’s too easy to neglect the site’s initial raison d’être. I have some ideas in mind for bigger changes to the photo gallery but I’ll let them develop before anything happens.

Update, 2008-09-29: That evolution remains ongoing and users of Firefox, Safari and Chrome should notice that most corners are now rounded. Visitors with Internet Explorer and Opera will not see any rounding because this is an aspect of CSS3 that is only partially implemented for now. It’d be very nice if it gained more widespread implementation but graceful degradation will do for now. Any other tweaks should be seen by all.

For one reason or another, this past June has involved me pondering hill wandering treks rather than doing very many of them. That still means ideas for the blog but having them is one thing but making something out of them is yet another. In fact, an idea can transform into something very different on its execution. For instance, I still have do another part of my Argyll trip report for May and that has spawned thoughts of walking that I have done while on excursions based in Oban, an idea for another post. Then, there are thoughts of places where I haven’t visited for a while and those that I have yet to reach. Among the latter are the Western Isles (otherwise known as the Outer Hebrides or Na hEileanan an Iar) and the prospect of spending some time there this summer has prompted another idea for a posting on here. It’s amazing what can come from meandering through the countryside in the mind whilst comfortably seated in one’s armchair. Even so, I really need to get out in the countryside for real rather than using the virtual reality opportunities of the theatre of the skull. Hopefully, July will offer some chances.

The prospect of seeing something new has often been a great motivator for me when it comes to enjoying the outdoors. The sunny weather on Monday had me out and about locally only for me to discover a reservoir within the town of Macclesfield that I didn’t even know was there; I have been living around these parts for eight years and I still keep finding new things. Speaking of discoveries, I made one yesterday that I’d rather have not seen: a manifestation of the Internet Explorer "peekaboo" bug on my new thumbnail gallery pages. Some of the image caption text wasn’t being displayed and last night’s being dull allowed for a night in to quash the thing after a combination of googling and tinkering. Being a Linux and Firefox user, I suppose that I slipped up on my IE testing but that’s another reminder of an old lesson. Anyway, all’s well now and my mind is again free to turn its attention out of doors, opportunities allowing.

I mentioned at the end of April that the photo gallery was to get a new PHP/MySQL "engine". However, the fine May saw to it that I did a lot of walking rather than finishing it off. In fact, it was this past weekend when the weather was in a less clement mood that I managed to finalise things and let it loose on the public. There may be some spots of roughness remaining with the new underpinnings but I’ll be making any refinements that are needed. In any case, it should be a lot smoother than the previous Perl/PHP/XML edifice that served me well for so long.

With a blog, it’s a fact of life that some posts attract masses of attention and continue to do so while others gather dust on the back shelves. With this blog having passed the two year mark, there’s quite a few of the latter and, towards giving these a bit more of the limelight, I have added something that I have seen cropping up on other blogs: a listing of related posts at the end of an entry in single post view. I am hoping that it allows you, the reader, to see more of what’s here and in a way that could is much less formal than looking down a category list on a sidebar. Speaking of the sidebar, it now features an area devoted to listing those posts that many come to see. That may even prompt an enjoyable journey all of its own…