new year new (the)me

hello all.

in preparation for the upcoming second trip, this website has undergone some changes.

if you are reading this, the obvious thing you might notice first is that i changed the color scheme. i like it. i don’t know if its better. it is certainly a lot less simple than before. i kept the same shade of green for the header, and then used a website called coolors to find other colors i liked to go with it. the background is now more of a blue/black than before. and the title text went from white to a greenish white. the paragraph text went from white to a peachy white. if anyone actually looks at this, please let me know if the colors are better or worse.

the next change is much bigger, the gallery:

i have offloaded all of the photos in the gallery to two third party services. there are over a thousand photos in there, and they take up a lot of space. i needed to move the images to another provider that is more equipped to hold thousands of photos.

the /gallery/ link now directs to a separate website hosted on adobe portfolio that i built alongside this one. i did this because i learned that adobe portfolio comes with lightroom, which i was already paying for. it also has features nobody but me cares about, like not having to manually upload the photos to it. i already edit them in lightroom, and on adobe portfolio i can just tell it “insert the tokyo 3/23 album on this page” etc. its awesome and will save me several hours of waiting for photos to upload during this trip.

i also created an account on 500px. this website is like… instagram for real photographers i guess. no shade to the instagram andys out there. it sort of tries to be a social media application, but really its just a place to store (and if you want to, license / sell) your photos. because it is the year of our lord 2025, it also has an infinite doomscroll algorithm where it learns (or you can tell it) what you like it and it will serve you infinite images forever and hope you don’t notice you’ve been on the toilet scrolling through cat pictures or whatever for 83 minutes. when i first set up this account, their stupid ai told me that ~50 of the photos i took last trip were good enough to license and sell on their platform. so i jumped through the relatively few hoops required to do that, and then was told the images had to be reviewed by a human to make sure no copyright material was present, and that it would take 2 days. 4 weeks later the review hadn’t been done, so i did some googling and found out that even if they had been reviewed, people much more talented than me have licensed photos on 500px, not been told who the buyer was, and then found out later their picture got used by a giant mega corporation in a smartphone ad and they got paid 12 cents one time for it. so i cancelled that whole idea. im a beginner at photography, and if an actual professional is getting paid 12 cents, i am not going to get anywhere with that. oh well, i wasn’t planning to try and make money on this anyway.

I was originally going to use 500px as a substitute for my gallery, however i only learned recently that the website is extremely annoying / borderline impossible to use if you don’t have an account. if you clicked that link above to my 500px page, you probably learned that immediately. i don’t really expect this blog to get much traffic in the first place, let alone click through to my gallery to look at everything i took. so i don’t think that will really annoy anyone, since i don’t expect anyone will click it in the first place. but on principle, i find the concept of “sign up for an account!” popup spam boxes that stop you from using a website to be annoying and i refuse to even theoretically imply anyone should engage with that.

i made a couple more changes that wont be visible until the trip starts and the blog posts come out. i guess you’ll have to wait and see for that.

and lastly, i am considering deleting the entire /calendar/ page. i don’t think it really has any value, and when i am not actively on a trip and posting, its just a blank calendar. yeah, in theory you could scroll back to march 2024 and find the blog posts that day. but who on this earth is like “i need to know what his blog post was on april 9th 2024 and i refuse to just go to the blog and scroll down to find it.”

its a cool idea, and if i posted every single day all year it would be way cooler. but the format of this website makes the calendar page kind of not make any sense.

anyways thats the update. bye