Please Excuse Our [Digital] Dust

Ghost Tree - A never before posted favorite from 2009

Regular visitors to chrisskopec.com should have noticed a rather large change recently. For quite some time, the landing page for chrisskopec.com was a nice little slide show filled with some of my favorite images. If you got past the slide show and looked around through some of the links, you'd eventually find a link to my blog, which contained plenty of nonsensical and infrequent ramblings about where I had recently been along with a couple photos. It's all been switched around now.

The slide show was beginning to lose its appeal to me the more I looked at it. Despite having some of my favorite photos in it, it was largely devoid of content. It wasn't easy to update, so many new photos no matter how good they were never made it there. I didn't like the random feel to having vertically and horizontally oriented photos rotate through, so the slide show featured only horizontal images, meaning a good vertical image (like the one here on the right) would never make it to the front page. And worst of all, the blog, which was intended to be a major connection to the world was buried deep within some drop down menus. (Plus, the slide show was starting to feel very much like a cheesy flash intro and I don't know anyone who actually watches those anymore.)

Now visiting chrisskopec.com takes you straight to my blog solving a few problems all at once.

• Findability - OK, I admit one of the major reasons for the switch is a selfish reason. Having an active blog is a key to being relevant to internet search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing...). When the blog was buried, I hardly posted at all. By making it the front page, I'm forcing myself to keep posting and keeping the blog active and hopefully more findable for new visitors.
• Better Writing - No more rambling, half-incoherent writing allowed! I'm restricting myself to a set format for each post (with a few exceptions for major photo trips) which is one photo and a short description of it.
• More Photos - The new format I've set up, allows for both horizontal and vertical images so I'm no longer restricted to just one type of image. That means each new post will feature the best of the best, not just the best landscape oriented image.

And before this post begins to ramble, I'll wrap it up by saying that while the switch has been mostly implemented, there are still a few links to fix and minor inconsistencies to clean up so in the meantime, please excuse our [digital] dust! :)

PS - If you want to get straight to the photos at any point and skip the blog, they can be accessed directly at photos.chrisskopec.com.