To make things more consistent I’ve finished renaming all the galleries, now they are called “Fractal Gallery XX” instead of just “Gallery”. The reason for this change is quite obvious when you think about searches in Google for fractals and image galleries. Also, another page for the galleries 21 to 30 was added to the main menu. It seems that it’s the preferred way to browse and find the images, as it’s not easy to go through all the posts to find the galleries, and the search and tags isn’t very precise (it’s not the right word though) at times and gives more results than you would like to visit if you are looking just for an image gallery. If a post is tagged with “image” or “fractal” or “gallery” (lots of posts have the first two tags) it will appear in the same search along with the actual gallery posts. Tags are really strange… I’ve also just found that in WordPress the tags for the images in the image galleries aren’t the same as tags used in posts and are in fact different entities, like for example the tag “abstract” that appears in a lot of images in the galleries, but it isn’t listed in my most used tags list. In fact, it has zero entries in posts, so making a search like “abstract fractal” won’t return any results… same happened with some other relatively important tags, like “3D/3-D”.
Tag Archive: layout
A few more entries added to the galleries menu in the front page, soon I’ll have them all listed there. Hopefully these will get as much attention as the single posts about my attempts with the Mandelbulbs. Sad, really. Mandelbulbs aren’t my cup of tea and will be restrained to these 2 images only (well not really just 2 images, I’ll be posting some Mandelbulbs here and there as I get how that thing works, but it will not be the main kind of fractal imagery you will find in here). Those who are looking for the Mandelbulbs here could at least have a look at the other galleries. I’ll stuck with Ultra Fractal and Fractint and the Mandelbulbs will be done just for fun, not because they are the latest trend. I can’t stand even Apophysis at the moment.
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With the new layout I’m trying also some new thumbnail settings for the galleries. Now the thumbnails are set to 90 x 90 pixels (maximum) and are not taking into consideration the original proportion of the image, so some of these might look a bit strange. The galleries can have a custom number of columns, so the size of the thumbnails isn’t exactly a problem but I still have to find what’s the best combination with the 4-columns gallery layout. Also available are some different templates for the galleries, and some really don’t fit well with any theme and others seem to not have any noticeable changes. Another change was the number of images related to the post that are displayed in the small “footer” of the posts, now there are 10 images displayed. Clicking these will open the image(s) individually, not its gallery.
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I think I’ll stay with this layout (Arclite) for a while. Still needs some small fixes but this seems to be a good one for a while. Some galleries might look a little messed up because of the width of the main content, I’ll fix that later. It ended up still keeping some blue, after all. Other colours didn’t really mixed well with the fonts, blue seems a more “natural” colour for the web. Maybe just a few tweaks in the font sizes and that’s it. Also there are options for custom logos in the header, but it’s not in the plans as I’ve said in the previous post.
Edit: as Michael Jackson would say, this is it. It’s working, looks OK, all it needs now is maybe a very few adjustments. All settings were mostly kept, which is nice. And the 16 images format for the gallery works.
As most of the hard work is finally finished (the galleries themselves), it’s time to make some customizations for real. I’ll be changing this theme soon. It’s not that ugly, it loads fast and all that, but I’m just not very fond of blue (and it has a lot of blue…) and things seems to be too big font-wise so to speak. Also, some basic features don’t seem to work nicely with this theme like some basic things in the pages – submenus for custom pages, which can be an important part in the future, to use these in a separate link in some sort of a “menu” for easy access to the galleries and even pagination. At the same time that it’s basic enough to load fast and have a clean appearance, it’s too simple to make some basic things work. Also it’s a bit too thin, text gets too extended when in fact it’s not that long. It’s thin in its overall width, but the fonts are way bigger. Not very proportional, and I’m not in the mood of customizing CSS right now.
I’ve tried some new themes, and those that I liked still need some small fixings (easy stuff, basically) before being used right away, while this I’ll be also looking for other options. I might use one from these pre-installed after all, but if I find something else that fits better with my tastes and the overall look and theme of the site, it will be replaced. I’ll probably not be using any theme with some sort of a big “logo” or “top banner” design, as it would require extra customization as in making a specific fractal just for that, making smaller banners based on that for links etc. etc.. It might work, but it’s not really something that is needed. I could (re)use a logo/banner I did for fractalland.com, but as it has some transparency over some odd background colour, probably it won’t fit. Also if a theme doesn’t work with a plugin that I’ll be using that will be a part of the whole layout and that can’t or won’t be disabled – like the Font Burner plugin – the theme will not be used.