This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 17/03/09
Back In The Picture(s)
I mentioned a few weeks back that Multimap had decided to mess about with their layout, which meant that the map links from The Gallery were no longer coming up with the Ordnance Survey versions of the maps, and they had stuck one of those helpful (not!) information arrows on the maps.
(I hate it when organisations decide to 'improve' their sites with what they think enhance the 'customer experience', but which only ends up being a regal pain in the arse)
Anyway, it was clearly time to look elsewhere. The Ordnance Survey's own site doesn't seem to allow linking in the way I needed it, so that was a non-starter. Luckily, I found Streetmap, which offers what Multimap used to but has the added advantage of having far shorter and less complicated URLs.
So I set to work last Friday. I hadn't quite realised what I'd let myself in for, as I had to get the URLs for the right maps at the right scale and then insert them into about 150 different pages. I was also able to correct some of the map references which were slightly out, and to add something else, namely a set of co-ordinates for each location (and I found out while doing that that are many ways of typing the word 'co-ordinates' - only one of which is correct, of course).
Having taken almost the whole weekend doing this (apart from the time I spent trying to de-dandelion the garden - the weather was too good to waste), I then decided that it would be an idea to try to improve some of the photographs themselves. Some of the old photographs - which I'd taken in the 1980s with a Pocket Instamatic - had faded badly; some of the photographs were a different size to the standard 433x325 pixels which I've tended to use as a compromise between viewability and conservation of bandwidth (yours and mine); and others suffered from the main fault with my trusty BenQ DC C51, namely a terrible contrast problem in less-than-perfect light conditions which manifests itself in greens looking all wrong and browns shading into reds. I also wanted to standardise the copyright note on each one, as I seem to have used two different fonts in two different sizes.
So I fired up Paint Shop Pro and went to it, working from the original files (except for one, which seems to be like Clementine, i.e. lost and gone forever). It has taken me a further couple of days to get that all sorted out, and now both the pages and pictures are ready to go.
One word about the maps. Please ignore the way the arrow is pointing. That's just their thing and doesn't indicate the direction the photograph was taken in: that information is under each photograph.
To go to The Gallery, click on the link in the left sidebar.
