Tag: photography

  • How many times am I going to try again? Maybe I will go for broke.

    Black and white photo of a Snow Leopard at the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Massachusetts. It shows the snow leopards head and shoulders. This photo was taken in 2009

     

    Snow Leopard at Stone Zoo – 2009

    My two biggest concerns have always been losing all my previous posts if I totally revise things, and having to try, all over again, to have this blog have the same format as my website, ArtNortonPhoto.

    First concern – Losing all my previous posts.

    I am guessing that there might be a way to export all the “data” and then import it after I re-do the format of the blog.

    I need to research this and probably do a chat with the WordPress support center. I have been told that they are very helpful.

    Second concern – Should the blog be the same format as my website?

    Some people would say “Yes. You need things to be consistent.” But I am really wondering about that. I am beginning to think that it is quite acceptable to treat them as two separate entities but still have them linked.

    My plan at this point is to spend some time going back and watching some of the beginner tutorials on YouTube and see if I can get comfortable with things again and then have a chat with tech support.

    AND an Oops

    I didn’t realize that somewhere along the way, I shut off the tool that allowed someone that looked at the post to sign up for notifications. I think I have fixed that. 😊

    I guess that is all for now. I am going to spend the rest of today looking at tutorials.😒

    Thanks for stopping by!

    Art

  • Note to Self – Do I really want to do a blog at all?

    Morning Mist

    I haven’t touched this blog since July of this year and I am wondering if it is even worth it. Maybe I should just keep my SmugMug website (https://www.artnortonphoto.com/) active and the heck with the rest.

    I have spent the last couple of weeks reviewing my website. I ended up changing the primary template and adding a couple of additional galleries which are pretty sparsely populated at the moment. I have also gone back and started to update keywords for all the photos. That is going to be a very long process, but, from what I have read, it should be well worth it from an SEO standpoint.

    As for this blog, I guess only time will tell as to whether I will keep it or let it disappear into the sunset.

    Thanks for stopping by.

    Art

  • Trying again

    I keep trying to figure out a way to have a blog inside of SmugMug, but it just doesn’t seem to work out. I have thought about giving up on SmugMug and going with hosting someplace else and creating a website with everthing that I have in SmugMug AND a blog using WordPress. But, I really do like the look and feel of SmugMug and I don’t want to have to recreate it.

    In other words, I am going to try working with SmugMug and WordPress to see if I can get the two sites looking identical. So far, I am not getting very far. I am afraid I am going to have to go back and look at some of the old classes that I have taken on WordPress to get familiar with it all over again. Yuck!!

    I am also going to re-work my website a little bit by changing the template and mixing things up a little bit. Just another curve in this adventure. 😀

  • Heading in another direction?

    Photo taken at the Blithewold Mansion in Bistol, RI. I have always been fascinated by the pool table and the way they have the cue sticks set up on it.

    Well, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to proceed with this blog and my website. While I am not going to start over, I have decided to most likely move things over to WordPress.org at some point and maybe use SmugMug for just my photo galleries. That will require getting a web host for the blog and the pages that are currently on SmugMug. Still not totally sure I want to do all that but in order to use the plugins that I want/need, I have to move off of WordPress.com.

    What I have done is signed up for a UDEMY course on WordPress.org. The instructor (Andy Williams) is a gentleman from the U.K. and he did an excellent job of putting the course together. I am about half way through the course and from my standpoint, it is a heck of a lot better than most of the WordPress tutorials I have seen on YouTube. I am actually enjoying it and he has been very quick to respond to any questions that I have had.

    And last thoughts for tonight. For quite some time I had stopped doing anything with Instagram. I think it was 3+ months of no posting. I have decided to start posting again, but I am making a point of only doing a single post each week. It could be of anything that I have taken in the previous week. I think in most cases it will be a photo from my morning walks at the park across the street from where we live.

    That’s it for tonight. Have a good evening/morning depending on where in the world you are.

    Thanks for stopping by,

    Art

  • Setting a Goal

    Not exactly a morning walk. A couple of red-winged blackbirds
    showed up at the feeder the other day. This is just a shot through the window.

    As I mentioned in my previous post “Trying this again” I have been thinking about using my posts to talk about the morning walks that I take at the state park across the street. As I have been thinking about this, I started wondering about using my SmugMug account to create my blog posts. SmugMug doesn’t have an actual blog function which has been frustrating becuase I can’t get SmugMug and WordPress to have the exact same format. I poked around YouTube quite a bit and found a video on creating a blog post on SmugMug by Ian Middleton from the UK. He is a SmugMug affiliate and took some time to put a video together to show one way to do it. I think I may give that a try.

    So, my goal, with no end date, is to develop a blog page using my SmugMug account and then transfering all my previous posts to SmugMug.

    Right now, the link that I have for my blog on Smug Mug comes to this site. I think I will add another link that, for now, I will call BLOG-NEW and I will change the BLOG to BLOG-OLD. We will see how this goes. I will add the link for BLOG-NEW here once I have created it on my SmugMug account.

    As always, thanks for stopping by,

    Art