Limited time to do anything at the moment

Anyone who reads this blog regularly (and I’m happy to say there are a few that fit that category) will have probably noticed that my frequency of posting has been severely curtailed over the last few weeks. This is due to a number of factors:

• Very busy at work which means I’ve been working longer hours than usual
• No new vintage cameras to work on 🙁
• Several problems with the found-film site to deal with.

Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately) the work situation isn’t likely to change in the next few months since I’m just starting on a new project (actually something quite interesting – creating a recommendation service with Solr), and the vintage camera supply doesn’t seem to be improving since I can’t seem to find anything interesting to buy at the moment.

The found-film issue is to do with the usability of the site on mobile, which I found a few days ago was rather destroyed when I did some changes to introduce maps to the display. Because of this issue, I decided to actually make a change I’ve been thinking about for several months, which is to produce a site which allows me to more easily change the WordPress theme.

When I first created the found-film site about a year ago, I had no experience with WordPress development, and basically did things in a pretty non-standard way. This resulted in me creating template files which overrode the built-in theme files for use in displaying some of the pages (archive, single post and search).

So the changes I’ve introduced have restored the site’s usability on mobile and allowed me to ditch a whole load of templating files and just set a theme as I want. The result is that I’ve changed the overall look and feel a bit which is shown below.

As well as improving the mobile experience, another big plus is that the individual pictures are now much bigger than they were which allows anyone who wants to try to work out locations etc a better chance to do it. Although I’m reasonably happy with the theme I’m now using, I’ll be looking at others to see if they give a better experience so I could well change it again in the next few days.