Identi.ca is like twitter, but just better. Its open source and the system with groups and tags doesn’t seem to exist to the same degree in twitter.

I added a widget to show the latest updates from identi.ca to the blog (Identi.ca Tools)

Finally I have started tagging my blog and photos. which gives me the ability to offer better searches and display nice tagclouds.

For the blog I have used the plugin Simple Tags which offers a huge range of features.

I found that the things I like most is

1. Auto tagging

The blog already had a lot of articles, well more than I wanted to go through and tag one by one. So Simple Tags’s auto tagging, was crucial. It will look at the contents of an article and select tags that seems to fit, from your current list of tags. It seems like it has done a good job, I didn’t find any tags that seemed out of order.

2. Suggest tags

Simple tags has a feature where it will suggest tags from yahoo and tag the net based on the content of the article. This is a huge help to get som useful tags. And having a nice collection of tags fits nicely with the auto tagging feature.

3. Meta keywords

Most people find their way  to this blog using a search engine, so why not give them a helping hand? simple tags will generate meta keywords from the tags.

The tagcloud that simple tags generates is more pleasing to the eye than the standard WordPress tagcloud. It varies the color as well as the size. Furthermore it is possible to customize it.

I have toyed a bit with the ability to only display tags from a specific category. This can be seen on the category pages ( ie weird ), where I display the tags for a category.I really would have liked to somehow use that to further specify what to look at. For example I want everything from the category “weird” tagged with “fun”. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to figure out to go about that. I really don’t want to get my hands dirty fiddling with to much WordPress php, but it seems that it somehow has to be the only way to go?

Another of Simple Tags features can be seen below, the related posts is generated based on the tags. Just as auto tagging, it seems to work quite nicely.

I really like the contrast between the decaying plants from the last season and the new growth. Since the the sun is hanging low, but shining brightly, there also is some very nice shadows.

The growth is still in its infancy, but in a couple of weeks everything will explode in green.

In order to show the images I installed Zenphoto and zenphotopress. It seems cleaner than coppermine, both to look at and to work with. And at the same time I changed the theme for the blog, and added a widget to show random images from the gallery.

Some of the images are high-dynamic-range(HDR) images.

I use a point and shoot camera, so I’m limited in the range and do not have access to raw images. But this is how i do it

Use autobracket

This takes 3 images. One with the default settings, two with respectively +/- 1 ev

Use a tripod and self-timer

This makes sure that the images are aligned in the best possible way.

Combine images

I use Qtpfsgui and i finally managed to compile and use hugins align_image_stack. Its necessary to align the images even though i use the tripod, as just a slight vibration will move the images a couple of pixels, and this results in fuzzy images. The align_image_stack is quite powerful, so handheld images is a possibility

Tonemap

I usually use the Mantiuk algorithm, but i tweak it so the colors become more vivid/surreal.

]]> http://rotand.dk/blog/2009/03/12/spring-is-in-the-air/feed/ 1 http://rotand.dk/blog/2007/05/27/another-one-bites-the-bits/ http://rotand.dk/blog/2007/05/27/another-one-bites-the-bits/#comments Sun, 27 May 2007 19:33:18 +0000 admin http://rotand.dk/blog/?p=3 Well it was ment to happen.

Everybody has one, so now I have to join in, with another pointless blog.

I will primarily use it to show off :

• Code – i like programming

• Weird links

• I intend to stay away from political and personal rants.