In any case, thank you for sticking around so long. I hope that you keep coming back for more and keep on leaving comments even if they are short and snappy–they are often quite encouraging.

What’s been happening around here?

If you’re new, forgetful, or just curious, these are what I consider to be the big happenings of the past year.

• October, 2007 — Everything went pink for breast cancer awareness month. Will I go pink again this year? Probably.
• October 1, 2007 — I got fed up with fully-justified text on the web and wrote Unjustify, a bookmarklet to zap it to oblivion. And, I still use it all the time.
• January, 2008 — purchased my first set of lighting equipment and taught myself how to light photographs with some help from Light: Science and Magic (highly recommended).
• March 3, 2008 — released Smart Image Resizer the jawsome PHP script that powers the image resizing on this site.
• March 29, 2008 — released Amazon Search Plugin with Search Suggestions and started saving time shopping online.
• April 27, 2008 — updated Greased Lightbox to version 0.17. Is version 1.0 ever going to happen? We’ll see.
• May–June, 2008 — first solo art show at the River Rock in St. Peter. If you happened to see it, leave me a comment and let me know what you thought!
• April–present — making a film with Spike Lee… and you can still help!

Three Year Stats

WordPress is telling me that there are currently 421 posts and 1,373 comments on Shifting Pixel. So, here’s to another great year!

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I’ve had my work in art shows before but this is my first solo show, so it’s pretty cool to see my work publicly displayed. It gives me a good feeling of accomplishment. The feedback I’ve received so far has been positive, so it has been encouraging as well.

If you happen to be in town, make sure you cruise down to the River Rock and check it out. While you are there, be sure to get some coffee or a bite to eat–they make some delicious things.

Update (March 1, 2009): In case you missed it, I put together all of the work I had in the show right here. Enjoy.

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When I was accepted as a member, I had hoped that Shifting Pixel would get a little more traffic and that maybe I would be able to hang out with some of the cool kids on the Internet. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it all seemed positive.

Now that I have been in 9rules for nearly a year–interacting with the bosses, fellow members, and other community members–I have gotten to know more intimately what 9rules is all about. There are some good people in 9rules, and I have really enjoyed getting to know them over the past ten months. Relationships have begun that I am happy to have.

This Tuesday (tomorrow), 9rules will be undergoing a massive change codenamed Ali2. This entails, among other things (like sweet new features that I’ve had the pleasure of previewing), a new member agreement that requires member participation in either the member-only forums or in my.9r, the world-wide-open forums. Since I have already been participating in the forums over there, the new member agreement doesn’t make me do anything new in order to stay with 9rules. It did, however, cause me to reexamine my status as a member and the direction that the network is heading.

The destination for 9rules, as far as I can tell, is that of a strong community. I know that the seeds are there, and given a little time, it will grow into one of the best communities on the Internet. I can honestly say that it is the best virtual community I have ever been part of and I am really looking forward to where Ali2 will take us. Therefore, I am recommitting to 9rules and hope to be able to give back to it what I have already received.

If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to check out the community and get to know some of the people over there. Ask some questions and join in on some conversations. It’s just a good place to hang out.

More voices

• 9rules Inspiration Always Comes in Nines – NDNL
• 9rules.com – Ali2 comes out tomorrow! – System 13
• A Year In The Nine – Knee High to a Grasshopper
• 9rules Launches Site Overhaul Tomorrow – Think Artificial
• 9rules is Launching Ali2 Today – cavemonkey50.com
• 9rules Ali2 – Launching Today – publicenergy
• New 9rules: Ali 2 and my re-commitment to 9rules – Diary of a Website
• The New New 9rules: Ali 2 Launches – David Seah
• 9rules Ali2 Launches and Why I’m Part Of It – Footsteps in the Mirror
• 9rules Ali2 Launched – Tales of a Designer

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Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.

Thanks to Matthew Oliphant, this is actually the second year that websites will be going pink for October and will hopefully be a big and successful year for the cause. If you have a website, I encourage you to do the same thing and actually make a difference for once.

Pink for October

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And, keeping with tradition, I’m throwing a party.

Last year, I invited some of the photographers who had influenced me to guest post over here. Since it was so much fun to be able to showcase their work on my website, I figured, “hey, what the heck, let’s try this thing again.” Except this time there’s a new twist.

If you’ve been hanging out here since December, you probably know that I made it into the 9rules network. So, this year I’m excited to invite some of my fellow 9rules members to the party. Let me introduce them.

The Guest Photographers Are…

Dave Wild

Dave is a photographer from Nottinghamshire in the United Kingdom. He is married to a Nikon D50 but has move fun with the two mistresses that are a modified infrared Fuji Finepix S5600 and a Lomo Supersampler. He knows they’re cheap but he can’t resist them.

He was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in 2003 and decided to use mountain biking as a way to get fit. While out on the bike he enjoyed the countryside and decided to start taking photos. Since then the camera has been more of an addiction than the bike has and it has developed into something that now forms a large part of his life. In 2005 Dave started experimenting with digital infrared photography and that has also ballooned in to a major focus and after three years of using a normal digital camera for infrared shots, he recently purchased a camera that had been modified just for infrared use. That marks the start of another exciting period.

Nils Geylen

Nils is a 36-year old kid from Antwerp. Belgium. Europe. He currently lives off new media and the fresh fumes of city buses, which he takes each day on his commute to the small IT firm he recently started work.

Nils can’t choose between the page and the picture, so he foolhardily tries to combine the two. He blogs at NDNL, and tries posting a picture a day on Flickr. Writing came at an early age, but Nils discovered photography in college where his media classes taught him what a dark room really looks like on the inside. These days, like so many others, he simply dabbles in digital. Everywhere he goes, the surroundings present themselves like stills from a nouvelle-vague movie. He’s definitely not an artist, but when people like his shots, he tends to like the people. Easy does it, right?

Jeff Ngan

Jeff is an amateur photographer who took up the camera as a better way to document his life. He currently spends his time updating his blog, practicing Tai Chi, and pondering the Tao.

Andrew Faulkner

Andrew Faulkner takes random photos but spends more time as the administrator at fadtastic.net. fadtastic.net is a multi-author web design trends journal. The authors have a passion for web design and particularly web design trends—whether they be graphical, typographical or maybe standards-related. It’s all here, so why not stay a while?

A Few Additional Features

I also decided to add a couple of nice little features that you may have noticed if you’ve stopped by in the past few days.

• I had been missing my Exif data (the exposure info that shows up below most of my photos now) ever since I moved from Pixelpost to WordPress, so I’m really happy to see that back in action.
• If I typed in a description for a photo when I uploaded it, the description didn’t end up getting used anywhere on my site. Well, now it does. Now, occasionally there will be a little extra info for some photos.
• Jeff wanted to do a series of photos so his post would be more like a photo essay. I was excited about this but hadn’t set things up to do it. Now I have. I think that it’s pretty cool and I hope you like it.
• Although I don’t know if this is a “new feature” per se, it is new… I’ve been making some design tweaks here and there that add up to somewhat of a small refreshining for the site. I hope you like what I’ve done with the place (if you notice anything out of the ordinary, please let me know). I have some more ideas in store that I will implement whenever I get time, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Two Year Stats

Finally, WordPress is telling me that there are currently 345 posts and 907 comments on Shifting Pixel. Not too bad, eh?

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I’m really hoping that Sufjan will make it into the next issue, but that all depends on you. I need your vote to make this happen.

If you’d like to join in and help out, pop on over to JPG and cast your vote (if you don’t have an account with them yet, you’ll need to sign up first). If you really like it, add it as a favorite—that’s like bonus points.

There aren’t that many votes cast, so each vote counts big time. You’ll be a big help and you’ll make my day.

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It seems like not that long ago I just passed the first 150 photos here. Honestly, I can’t believe that I’ve made it this far. 300 photos is an exciting milestone for me.

If you’ve been visiting for a while, thanks for sticking around. If you are new around here, I hope you like what you see. Please feel free to subscribe.

The images (starting top-left and going clockwise):

1. Sufjan Stevens Playing Banjo
2. Unicycle 4
3. Tongue
4. Rock, Tree

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If you are a photoblog reader (which you are if you are reading this), you really need to head over to the Photobloggies site and nominate your favorite photoblogs in all of the appropriate categories.

Which categories is Shifting Pixel eligible for?

If you’d like to nominate Shifting Pixel, that would be really cool. Here are the categories in which I am primarily eligible:

• Best American Photoblog
• Best Writing
• Best Kept Secret
• Best Photoblog Design
• Photo of the Year
• Photoblog of the Year

There are also a smattering of additional topical categories that I may or may not entirely fit into (Best Black and White Photography, Best Animal Photography, Best Abstract Photography, Best Landscape Photography, and Best Toy Camera Photography). I’ll let you be the judge on that one.

I’m looking forward to seeing this year’s results, so go nominate your favorites!

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Why change?

While I really liked my previous design, I feel that the new one is easier to use and just makes a lot more sense when considering some of the new things that I have been doing with Shifting Pixel since the last design. I know, it’s a big departure from what I previously had, but I feel not only had I outgrown the previous design but also this is a step in the right direction. With this redesign I wanted to examine each piece of the website and figure out how to make it work better. Hopefully I have accomplished that.

What’s this design all about?

One of the biggest changes that you might notice is that I have moved from a 700 pixel wide format to 940 pixels wide. This may affect some of you, but hopefully won’t be too annoying. Hardware is improving rapidly and soon enough most people will be running 1024×768 anyway.

I paid closer attention to a number of items with this redesign than I have in the past. For instance, I wanted a good, strong, simple, structured, and meaningful logo. The rectangle of my new logo represents a photo and matches the aspect ratio of photos that my camera takes (3:2). The logo as a whole alludes to a Polaroid picture with the writing on the bottom.

I also focused a lot on the typography and vertical rhythm of the site. Without a lot of trickery, fonts on the web are pretty limited. I decided to go with Arial. While at lower sizes, I don’t really care for Arial, but at larger sizes, it actually looks kinda nice (although not quite as nice as Helvetica… sigh). For some details, I’m using Georgia… a font that is superior to Times New Roman. (Update: I am now using Calibri and Arial as a fallback.)

More in store

I’ll get back to pounding out the bugs and quirks with the new design now. There are a few sections that I still need to bring online and there are probably some issues somewhere that I didn’t catch in my beta testing. After things get running smoothly around here again, I’ll be trying to add nice little features incrementally in my spare time. And don’t worry… soon enough I’ll have a new photo up.

Finally, I’d love to hear what you think of the new design, both good and bad. Please drop me a comment.

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