How I Built My Photoblog
12.1.07 | Filed under Design, Photography.
From the first hour of planning Original Gray, my fantastic new photoblog, I knew this would be an amazing learning experience. I also knew it would make a great blog post. So here is a first-hand account of the construction of my photoblog.
The Humble Beginnings
I started out by doing extensive research and reading on how others built their photo site around Wordpress. This, I knew, was definitely going to be the major obstacle to overcome. There aren’t many articles out there on photoblogging with Wordpress because there aren’t many photoblogs powered by Wordpress, period. The majority of the resources I found involved Flickr. This made a lot of sense: there are some obvious reasons why to use Flickr. I won’t mention these because I didn’t end up using Flickr. After several days of research, I resolved to go with a locally-hosted system. All that remained was to find the best possible photoblog plugin for Wordpress.
Whoismanu?
I settled on the amazing PhotoQ tool by whoismanu. It has all I want in a photoblog and a slick uploading/management UI. I highly recommend this plugin to anyone considering building their own photoblog. So whoismanu it is.
Time to break out the carving knives.
With most of my backend issues resolved, I dove into Photoshop to start some mockups for the face of Original Gray. I also spent long hours combing the big CSS galleries to see what people had already done for photoblog designs.
The photoblog layout is minimalistic in principle - there’s really not much to throw in the soup other than a dozen or so images and thumbnails, along with some nice navigation and links. So I had a bit of freedom to experiment with empty pixels. I don’t think I need to go into detail on what I did - you can see it and view the CSS for yourself.
Last Minute Issues
The only major hassle in the latter part of the process was finding the right Wordpress plugins and markup to handle the thumbnail menu on the front page of Original Gray. The plugin HTML for WP Customizable Post Listings was messing with my head, and the CSS wasn’t behaving. But this was eventually fixed.
So there you have it, an account of how I built my photoblog. When I launch the next edition of BetaTalk (version 5), I’ll devote a few posts and a page to the topic of how I built it.
Andreas Gohr
01.6.08
6:16 pm
You didn’t link your photoblog. For everyone else wondering, here is the link: http://www.originalgray.com/