I finished the preliminary redesign of xenogere unseen.  Much work remains as I have only completed the image migration for a tiny fraction of the pictures.

As for the design, I’ll tinker with it a bit more as I continue refining it, but overall I’m quite happy with it.

I wanted to keep it simple, to make the photo the center of the page and the main focus of attention.

As for the overall “Polaroid” look of the theme, I rather like the idea and believe it appropriate for the purpose of the site.  Some will undoubtedly disagree.

That said, the new approach to the photoblog gives me a lot more versatility in modifying or changing the theme.  I already have other designs I’m working on that could eventually go into production, but for now I think I’m happy with the way things are.

One thing this update offers is the ability of users to see the photos in all feed readers.  I hope that comes as a welcome change.

As for the overall photo migration to SmugMug from Zooomr and Flickr, this exercise with xenogere unseen has taught me it will take longer than anticipated.  While I hadn’t planned on doing such a thing, I’ve found it behooves me to reprocess all photos as I transition them.  This increases the quality and corrects some problems I hadn’t the time or expertise to correct along the way.

As I’ve gotten better with photography and the back-end processing of images, I’ve learned things that can improve many of the photos—not the least of which is removing the lossy compression I put into all of them as a security measure and means to keep my bandwidth consumption lower than it otherwise would have been.

But at least I’m on my way.  Once all the photoblog entries have been transitioned and updated, I’ll begin the migration from other hosting services to SmugMug.

Meanwhile, new photos should demonstrate better quality now that I’ve stopped degrading them both intentionally and unintentionally.

With the major work out of the way on xenogere unseen and the tedious effort stretched out ahead of me, hopefully now I can return to somewhat normal content and a regular posting schedule here.