Photogabble has been about since 2004 and initially started out as an online gallery of my work to present various universities with in the hope of getting a placement. It wasn’t much to look at and only had fifty or so of my best photos presented by an exceedingly basic gallery system I devised in php. The whole setup ran off an ancient apple PowerPC from 1986 and pretty much any script I wanted to run I had to customize so it would run in less than ten seconds. Soon after starting photogabble on that ancient server I was given an relatively modern computer by a friend at school and to this day photogabble still runs on it and with only a couple modifications over the years including an hard drive upgrade, brand new raid card and memory it has proved to be as reliable as you could expect with a 98% uptime record.
Although the first version of this website focused on my photographic and design work, each initiation of the site since then has moved further and further away from that idea, into the ambiguous territory of being about everything I found interesting. The most recent reboot of the site happened in Q1 2008 and took the website back to its roots, the design which had gone stale since I abandoned it in mid 2007 has been replaced with a brand new one based upon several design aesthetics “borrowed” and “inspired” by other websites. So in essence photogabble is supposedly information, tutorials, and news on the photography scene with a little bit of personality inserted by myself and those who guest post here as well.
The man behind the site:
My name is Simon, I was born on September 11th a bit longer than two decades ago. Since then I have been immersed in to art and culture by my parents and family and become fascinated by media, culture, linguistics, and sociology. I currently study at Coventry University and am in the final leg of completing my BA Honors Degree in Communication, Culture & Media before beginning my Masters in Media and Cultural Analysis on my journey to becoming a recognised specialist within my chosen field. In my spare time I like to take my camera out and shoot some photos or organise a photo shoot with friends, in between that and work I also develop php scripts and occasionally release plugins and fixes for the wordpress blogging platform. This website is a big mixing pot of my vices and interests, feel free to wonder about and leave a message.
Site Backend:
The website is built upon the WordPress blogging platform running on my server, which possesses a 1.11 GHz AMD Duron Processor and 504MB of Memory.
Website Design:
I re-design the website about once every year on average however this is the first design I have created for my own website that I have actually published after I finished it and the content. The theme called “Poivre Piquant” is based on the colourlovers theme of the same name submitted by pyramus. I decided to attempt to create a simple yet accessible theme based upon a very simple five colour scheme. I did end up using a couple extra colours from toscana nord submitted by anycolourilike. The theme itself I have to admit is based upon and inspired by the new wordpress redesign and simplebits which you might notice in the coding style and base layout concept.
Favicon:
The favicon for photogabble has changed from time to time, the most recent version was sourced from favicon.cc and created by Patrick Santiague whom has released it under a Creative Commons, no attribution license.
