A Day in My Life

Over the course of time, BGerdin.com has gone through a few major changes. Here is how I classify these changes:

• 1.0: The original instance of my website was built on pretty simplistic HTML with Blogger being used to host my blog. I had a basic main page with a few pages based on that same format. Nothing special, but it worked. This remained the format of my website for quite a number of years and allowed me to experiment with the world of web. Along the way, I made minor changes and additions that I wouldn’t really call major updates.
• 2.0: The way I see it, my first major upgrade to my website actually happened less than a year ago. This occurred when I switched my blog hosting from Blogger over to WordPress. When I made this move, Austin told me I would never look back, and I sure haven’t. WordPress is a much nicer blogging package to work with and it allows me to do many more customizations that I couldn’t do with blogger. The templates are also a lot nicer which enhances my site that much more. Along with this change, I eliminated the remaining portions of my site that were written in simple HTML and started to replace them with WordPress pages.
• 3.0: That brings us to my latest major site upgrade. Many of you only check out my blog through RSS and probably haven’t noticed this change up until now. With the purchase of my camera in the last month, I have started to take many more pictures. Up until now, I haven’t had a real good way to display my pictures in a way that I have liked. All my options forced me link to outside hosting sites. While this worked, I didn’t like that I didn’t have control of my pictures and how they were presented. That, my friends, is now history. I now have complete control of my pictures and control over the way my galleries are displayed through the use of Smugmug! For those of you who don’t know, Smugmug is regularly listed as one of the best photo hosting site on the web. Using Smugmug, I am able to have professional looking galleries that are contained in the realm of BGerdin.com. With moving to Smugmug, I have also gotten rid of my main page and now have a great looking Smugmug slideshow as the main BGerdin.com page. If you haven’t been to my main page recently, you should really check it out. I am much happier with the way my site looks and with the functionality I have with this great addition.

One other thing that you may or may not be interested in is that a New Years resolution of mine was to take a picture every day of 2010. It can be of anything I see or experience throughout the day. This is to help me better understand my camera and to start visualizing pictures so I become a better photographer. I’m writing this on the 22nd day of January and so far, I haven’t missed a day. To give you a taste of my pictures and to show off a little of what Smugmug and WordPress can do, here are three of my recent pictures for you to look at. Click on each to see them larger:

You will find a link to the full gallery under these three pictures. If you want to keep up to date with my daily pictures, you can add this gallery to your RSS reader. I have also added a little picture preview on the right side of my blog that shows off the most recent pictures I have added to this gallery. One caveat for you RSS people is that you won’t get to experience any of these cool features on my site unless you actually go to my site to check them out.