I’ve put up some new pictures from 2009 in the suburban, urban, landscapes, gallimaufry and people sections.

Suburban

Urban

Landscapes

Gallimaufry

People

It has been far too long since the design of the site has been updated, so today I’ve remedied that. The new design is personal, distinctive and much more serviceable.

Under the hood, the site is sporting the latest Textpattern with some of Jeff Soo’s excellent addins. Rather than using Flash-based text replacement, it now uses an embedded font, Gentium Bergamo. I have not tested anything outside of Firefox so I do hope your viewing experience is pleasurable.

Update I wasn’t entirely happy with the rendering of Gentium, so I’ve switched to Bergamo. Neither seem particularly well-hinted for screen usage, but Bergamo’s Postscript outlines seem to render better, albeit a bit whiskery.

This rainy Sunday I scratched two of my (many) perennial itches: neatness and creativity.

Sorting and cataloguing photographs somewhat sated my pernickety Virgo desire for neatness and order. When things are not ‘in place’ I am essentially incapacitated until they are. Someone dear to me composed a little ditty about my behaviour, something along the lines of:

“Something’s in a place it shouldn’t be! I’m going to fetch my apparatus to put it right”

They would gently sing it to me in an ultimately vain attempt for me to come to my senses when I was in a ‘putting-in-order’ paralysis.

In the process of tagging, starring and deleting I found a number of photos I wanted to polish up and put online. The ensuing Photoshopping sated my second itch of the day. As for other itches, let me just thank-you for the cream recommendation; it’s working out fantastically.

As a result, there are a number of new pictures up in:

• City slices
• Gallimaufry
• People
• Street
• Suburban
• Urban

I’ve put the Ligerator online. It’s a simple web-based tool which lets you easily generate a Microsoft Word macro to do a bunch of text replacements.

My main reason for developing it was to maintain scripts for typographic ligature replacement, for example to transform:

into:

Once you’ve set it up, you can bookmark a magic URL which allows you to return to the preset, make some changes and re-generate a new macro, or share it with someone else.

The code generated should be portable across Word versions and platforms, however I’ve only tested on Word 2007 running on Windows.

p.s., if you don’t see the difference in the two samples above, Ligerator is clearly not for you.

I’ve rejigged the photos section somewhat, moving all the travel photos off to their own section. I want to reorganise the main photos section to be more of a portfolio of sorts, organised by theme and style rather than geography. In the process some old photos from that delightful little Grand Duchy have been added. There’s still a massive backlog of stuff to been added but pesky work and life interfere.