Photocritic gets a new look
Oh will you look at that. How very Web 2.0!
Well, it’s been a good long while (November 2006, in fact) since Photocritic went Retro, and I’ve been considering to make a bit of a change to the site for the past few months.
So now, after spending a whole week-end ankle-deep in CSS, PHP and Wordpress (after recently doing a bit of coding on a piece of forum software, it’s very good to be back on the Wordpress codebase. I guess it’s difficult to appreciate how lovely it is unless you go through the hell that is badly coded software), I proudly present the new-look Photocritic.
It’s not completely finished yet – you’ll notice, for example, that the 4 thingies underneath the 3 thingies on the home page are still looking a bit spartan, how there are a few pages around the site that don’t really work with the new design, and how there are occasional quirks and wonkiness elsewhere, so please allow me to iron those out – if you do find any bugs or things that don’t quite look right, however, then please do leave a comment and let me know. (Unless you’re on Internet Explorer 6, in which case, please get a real browser and have another look)
Things I particularly enjoy about this design is that it is modular, and almost entirely Widgets-driven. That means that the 4 menu type things on the home page, the ‘featured articles’ on the homepage, the ‘Recent Flickr’ thingies in the right-hand menu bar on article pages (like the page you’re looking at now) etc can be added, removed, and moved about without touching any code.
The design reflects that I’m spending more time doing things which aren’t Photocritic – but are still related to the site; I’m microblogging about photography on Twitter, I’m more active on Flickr, and I’ve got a couple of other sites I’m interacting with more frequently, too – all of which is now better reflected throughout the site – a trend I’m intending to continue.
So yes, thank you for sticking with me, everybody, and I’m looking forward to run Photocritic v4 going forward!
Rock on,
- Haje
My day job, if it can be called that, is being a writer. I've got one book out there so far and it's awesome, so go ahead and buy a copy! It's available from 
In front of you, five hyperactive men with guitars, drums, and microphones. Behind you, five thousand fans. In your hands, a camera... You're going to need more than just a little bit of good luck to pull this one off. That's where this book comes in.
Take a Canon EOS 450D. Attach a Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens. Hit the streets of London. See what happens.
Insights, suggestions and comments
no clown barf this time, looks good!
Looks great mate! It was time for a change… Don’t u just love Wordpress!
Looks great, Haje! :D
Hi, i am a long time reader and your web site looks great with the update, your website actually helped me decided on choosing to go down the career path of photography.
thank you very much.
It’s as if people only use Internet Explorer just to annoy web designers.
Looks good.
I was wondering what flickr plugin you are using to display the images on the right?
I have been looking for a good one (the one on your site), but I’m not sure which one to go with.
The Flickr thing is called FlickrRSS (see
http://eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/), and is combined with a
PHP-enabled widget (see the http://blog.dragonsoft.us/tag/widget/
site) which allows me to run any PHP code inside a widget. As a
result, I can display different Flickr feeds by putting a snippet like
get_flickrRSS(8, “favorite”, “”, “square”, “”,
“”, ‘83688756@N00′, ”); inside a widget.
The formatting is standard CSS.
I definitely like the new look!
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