Glencaple Trawler Bow II

So here is the final image of the Glencaple Trawler. I thought i’d add a third photograph to make a nice trio 🙂 This final shot looks up the River Nith towards Dumfries.

All of the photos were taken on the morning i was heading for home. After a rainy day or two the clouds finally parted, blue sky was revealed and the sun made a welcome appearance – just as i was heading back home. Typical eh. So I took my shots in the rather warm light of the mid morning, got back in the car and headed for home.

As for the trawler seen in the photographs, i’m not exactly sure if it was in the early stages of restoration, used as somewhere to stay or just waiting for the scrap man to arrive. From certain things i saw it could be the second of those options.

There is something compelling though about boats and ships that are at the end of their working lives. Something rather sad. We attach a lot of emotion to boats and ships, maybe more than we do any other method of transport.

A new Scotland gallery has been started on the main website and features a rather good panoramic photograph of the River Nith. The gallery, which is a work in progress with new images to be added regularly, can be found at:-

http://www.richardflintphoto.com/portfolio/scotland/

Saving for a Rainy Day

Bamburgh castle from the sand dunes

I’m currently reinstalling everything back onto my laptop. Great fun! After around 18 months of flawless use, the laptop finally started freezing on me in critical situations, so i decided to do a factory reset. A drastic move, i know, but it means a fresh, clean laptop ready to go soon. It’ll just take me several days to put all the software back on it.

Fortunately there was nothing on the hard drive of great value. I backup to DVD-ROM and memory stick, and now DropBox, as often as i can, but it never seems quite enough. The fear of losing digital content has increased each year as i realise how much I rely on files just being there. To complicate matters, the laptop DVD-RW would no longer burn discs due to a software issue. The factory reset has removed this problem too. Phew!

Just recently I started using an online service called CodeGuard after i realised how much blood, sweat, tears and man hours had gone into the main website redesign. The idea of someone wrecking all that work with a hack [shiver] terrified me! CodeGuard simply backup your website (all the files on your server) so you have a fall-back (or several!) should the worse happen. So far it looks like a great service.

Conversion Completed

Yes! Yesterday, the final galleries of the portfolio were converted over to the SlideShowPro system and the WordPress gallery plugin I’d been using was deleted. I finally got rid of what i regarded as the weak link in the chain from the website.

The gallery plugin hadn’t been updated for over a year, with the developer just abandoning his creation – no word, no improvements, nothing! I just knew that eventually i would update WordPress and find that the galleries no longer functioned. Sadly, the options available in the plugin repository were rather lacking in features, and so i ended up looking for alternatives outside of the WordPress system.

So what now? There is plenty left to do, with the work now focussed around the editing of gallery images and uploading them the website.  I am, for once, ahead of schedule  – the complete conversion to SlideShowPro was pencilled in for completion by the end of January – any further developments this month will be an added bonus.