Hmmmm….

Well, I manaded to get a new picture on the blogg. But not quite the way I would have loked to do it: it only appears to be on the blogg, but it is in reality hosted somewhere entirely different. Granted, I own the server the picture is on, but it feels ever so slightly wrong transfering the picture to my server, and then linking to it from inside WordPress.

Ah well, it works at least. But whether or not my uploading problems persist remains to be seen, as does whether or not I will keep on blogging here if I must host the pictures somewhere else.

What happened to user-friendliness?

A long time has passed since I last tried uploading a picture to this blogg, and I feel slightly ill at ease over it.  A blogg is meant to attract readers (or in our case viewers) by being updated on a regular basis, and I have failed the viewers on this point.

Yet, I must fail the viewers once again. And probably for a good long time to come. I was out earlier today, taking pictures for the sole purpose of uploading at least one here, and found no problem with transfering the pictures to my laptop, editing the selected picture was a breeze (even if I did end up merging two separate exposures into one). Saving the two-layer XCF as a PNG is a trivial matter with GIMP.

But when the time comes to upload the picture to WordPress, I find myself with a problem I don’t seem to be able to overcome. I have now tried three times, and each time Firefox has crashed. No explanation or error messages, just suddenly not ‘there’… Although I cannot claim to know much about the inner workings of Firefox, I do wonder if the new GUI WordPress has is not to blame for part of this unwanted behaviour.

I guess the new GUI we have to use to upload pictures is meant to be ‘user-friendly’ but for me it turns out to be most unfriendly.

Before anyone tells me to upgrade to the latest Flash, I wish to point out that I did just that before posting my previous entry. As far as I am concerned, I would be better off with a GUI built with only HTML.

Lövånger church

I was going to add a gorgeous picture of Lövånger church that i have, but found that I cannot upload it. WordPress have changed the user interface, and neither Firefox nor Konqueror will upload a picture.

When I first tried Firefox would randomly crash, or apparently upload the picture but not get past a text saying “Crunching”. Now that I updated to the latest version of Flash I don’t even get that far… It seems the only way I can get a picture into a post is by hosting it elsewhere first. But in my mind that removes the incentive to use WordPress in the first place: I have my own server, so I can easily host the images somewhere, but why then bother with WordPress?

Whatever comes of this, it seems that it will be some time before I can upload a picture again.

Oh, and before anybody tells me to use Internet Explorer to upload my pictures: I use Linux. The newest version of IE that I have access to at home is the one that came with Windows 98. I don’t think I can update that to the latest version of Flash. I could obviously walk off to a neighbour and ask to borrow his/her computer, but that would make the idea of hosting my own blogg much more appealing.

Bratten

Not quite this season yet, we have not really come to spring yet, but I thought a nice summer picture wouldn’t be a bad idea considering Umeå has been through a long winter. Just another few weeks and we will have spring, and two months or so later it will be summer.

The picture is from a small set of rapids at Bratten, in Lycksele. Originally taken on Sensia slide film, with an EOS30, and scanned with my crappy can’t-remember-the-make-or-model scanner. Unfortunately the picture looks incredibly much better when projected on a screen than it does on my computer screen.

Log cabin

This is actually an old picture. I took it a few years ago, while I was living in Lycksele.  This time there are no footprints in the snow, and hardly any sky to be seen.

Umeå sky

This is the view that greated me when I looked towards Umeå from a hill-top near home.

Light phenomenon

While taking a walk with my camera I came upon this sky. I can’t say why, but the sky was much brighter farther away, without the clouds looking any thinner.

Driving home today I stopped to photograph a cottage, but had to give up because of the deep snow around it. This is part of it’s wall, bathed in winter sun.

Moon over Holmsund, revisited.

This is actually not a second version of my previous post “Moon over Holmsund”, it’s still Holmsund and still the moon, but a very different part of Holmsund.

In case anyone is wondering, Holmsund is where I live.

Cool boat?

The blue tint in this picture suggests it was taken with the sun hanging low in the sky, but it wasn’t. The reason for the blue hue is that the shadow cast over the boat and surroundings. I don’t know what it is with shadows that makes snow and ice look blue (anybody who knows is welcome to explain), but it always happens. Had I shot this picture in the evening, I think the blue tint would have been too intense. Am I right?