Time Immortal

I’ve been working on a bunch of stuff in Lost Sosaria proper, but the site design was getting on my nerves (am I ever happy?), so I opted to shift to something I found to be a little more…pleasing. And old-timey.

Also, I’ve changed the gallery component there away from Coppermine, and over to something a little more Wordpress-integrated. Among other things, it adds some nice AJAX magic to image-viewing, but also allows me to display gallery sections here on the site without having to redirect the Reader to a gallery sub-site.

NWN 1.69 was just released; this is the final patch BioWare plans to release for the game. It introduced a bunch of new tilesets and graphics changes, so some of the tilesets I’m using will be adapting to those changes in the near future; look for such changes to be reflected here on the site as they happen.

Apologies — it appears that I now have a Coppermine installation to fix.

Update: okay, fixed it.

Blazing Cat Fur sends a short note in:

Thanks for the student link. You are a terrific photographer and where would we be without your graphics. Great work!

The Blazing One is most welcome; as I noted in my post on the Iranian students, this blog stands in solidarity with anyone, anywhere, who speaks out in the cause of freedom from oppression.

Some of my less religious readers might be tittering at the thought of an avowed Papist rallying to the cause of freedom from oppression, so perhaps it is fitting to share a reflection that has stuck with me for a number of years:

A man lit three candles on a certain day each year. Each candle held symbolic significance: one was for the time that had passed before he was alive; one was for the time of the his life; and one was for time that passed after he had died. Each year the man would stare and watch the candles until they had burned out.

Was the man really watching time go by in any symbolic sense? He thought so. He thought that each flicker of the flame was a moment of time that had passed or one that would pass.

At the moment of abstraction, when the man was imagining his life and his existence as a metaphor of the three candles, he was free: not free from rules of conduct or social constraints, but free to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.

It seems to me that what is at issue here, fundamentally, is just that: these students are lobbying for true freedom. Freedom to dream, to learn, to inquire, and (if need be) to criticize. Freedoms, in other words, that they lack under the current Iranian regime, and have thus been imprisoned for demanding.

As for BCF’s other comments, well…I’m okay at Photography, and I’m trying to build up my skill bit by bit. But it is nice — always nice — to hear that people find some of the images I’ve taken compelling. As for the other graphics and bits of work I’ve generated over the years…I am glad they are found to be useful by people, and I always enjoy tripping over an image I’ve created when I’m visiting blogs and sites I’ve never been to before. These are important causes, and in this era of new digital media it is important that causes are able to very quickly, but very uniformly, be made visible. If I have managed to contribute to that phenomenon, then I count that as a way in which I have been blessed.

Hmmm…this seems a decent time to mention one bit of upgrading I’ve been doing in the gallery. With the change in template that has taken place there, I’ve been forced to down-grade the size of gallery preview images that I’m using, from 600 pixels wide to 450 pixels. I think I’ve now finished going through and resizing all the photos, but if any Reader should happen to notice a picture that does not fit in the space provided for a preview, do kindly let me know?

The site is going to be a bit wonky for the next couple of hours days. For the new year, I’ve decided to upgrade the functionality of the blog, and may in due time move on to upgrading the look of the blog itself. Haven’t decided on that just yet, but while the functionality gets updated expect to see things like the PHP error that currently adorns the top of the page.

Update: Okay, most of the updates are done. Among other things, I’ve updated to Wordpress 2.3.2, and Coppermine 1.4.14 (for my gallery). I’ve updated a couple of the Wordpress plugins I use as well, including the WP-Coppermine bridge plugin (the old version of which was responsible for the aforementioned PHP errors).

The template for the site is still the same, and will remain so for now, but I’m currently looking at options working on modifying to my exacting specifications a new site template for bridging the look and feel of the gallery with that of the site, or vice-versa. The site template has been changed, as has the gallery template, and overall I’m pretty happy with the new look. I’m still making changes in places, but for the most part things now look as they ought to.

Also, with Wordpress 2.3.2 comes a new tagging system, which I have begun to employ. The old tagging system, with links to Technorati topics, will remain intact, but a new “internal” tagging system will now accompany it — the net result is that each post will display two identical lists of tags, one of which will contain links offsite, and one of which will contain links to archive pages. All of the tags used on the site can be viewed in one giant cloud if you prefer, O Reader.