Wirehead Arts

Colophon

This site uses the Rm website engine that I've been hacking on for quite some time now. My overriding goal was to make a site was neither "just" a blog or "just" a collection of photos, but to create something that used the best pieces of each working model.

Photos

All in all, I tried to mimic the bits of the Flickr page interface that I like. So a lot of the same features are coded into here. The image sizes provided are identical, there's a button bar in roughly the same place, etc. But I'm not making a flickr clone, so I don't try to duplicate each and every little bit of functionality.

Instead of the usual tricks of trying to disable right-clicks or putting invisible images atop the real images or putting obnoxious watermarks or other such things, I'm using Derek's technique to unobtrusively add a watermark. I'm also adding a convenient interface to suggest how somebody might hotlink an image.

I hate the "Lightroom" style interface, so I'm not using anything like that.

Blogging

I realized along the way that if I am to provide a friendly way to share my love of art with others, I needed to find a way to combine the blogging experience with the photo portfolio experience. So I kept thinking about ways to merge these two forms. Most blogging platforms have fairly poor media support.

Just as I borrowed what works from Flickr for the photo sharing interface, I decided that I liked how Vox works to include media elements in a textual blog, so I duplicated that functionality. Except that I made things even more flexible in many respects so that I can better include blocks of content and provide alternative descriptions for things.

There are a lot of subtle features I like, such as the ability to post images as being part of the portfolio or just part of the blog.

Tagging

The big visible difference between a site built on Rm and sites like Vox and Flickr is the tagging engine. My engine is much more sophisticated.

The biggest thing is that all tags can work like "Machine tags" on Flickr and tags can have more information associated with them. So instead of just assuming that "tx" is associated with my Canon TX (and not Texas), when I tag an image, you can tell that I mean my Canon TX.

Layouts

The standard advice is to hire a designer for such a site. They aren't that expensive. But I'm too obsessive-compulsive for that, so I designed my own look. I grabbed some images I happened to be editing and mashed them into a template.

I find that for a site like this, I like making gridded layouts for important pages so that I can provide multiple ways to navigate away from a page. I also found through all of the versions of the site that I like having a sidebar with secondary content.

I got curious and there are:

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