posted on Thu 21 December 2017

A new year is coming on us quickly, so how about a nice new website to go with it?

Baby New Year from 110 years ago …

houz and I have been working hard over the past few months to migrate the old website from Wordpress to a new static site, using Python/Pelican. This should make things more secure and safer for both you and us (see the problems that rawsamples.ch had for the perils of using a db-driven backend for a website). Not to mention it makes collaboration and contributing a bit easier now, as the entire site gets its own GitHub repository (I’ll be eagerly awaiting your pull requests).

I tried to create a design that had a bit more emphasis on accessibility and readability. The site is fully responsive for screens ranging from a mobile phone to a full desktop. The type is larger and generally given a bit more room to breathe in the page and we tried to highlight images a bit more, as this is a photography-centered project.

This is just one small way for me to contribute and give back to the community in my own way (you should probably not let me near any real code). In fact, this is one of the reasons I started up the community over at PIXLS.US. We needed a community focused specifically on Free Software photography and a way for us to freely share our knowledge and experiences to help everyone, especially across multiple projects.

pixls.us

If you’re not familiar with the community yet, why not?! We’re all photography folks who have a passion for Free Software with the mission:

To provide tutorials, workflows and a showcase for high-quality photography using Free/Open Source Software.

We also happen to have quite a few developers of various types in the community, and as a way to assist projects and contribute back we’ve been working on websites and other community-oriented functionality (like the forums, hosting comments, files, and more). I’d get in trouble if I didn’t mention that we also got raw.pixls.us setup to replace the ailing rawsamples.ch also.

One neat way we’re able to help out even more is by integrating the commenting system here into the forums. It’s how we manage commenting on the main pixls.us website, and we had great success with this approach for the digiKam project when we built them a new website earlier this year. This lets us moderate comments in one place, allows for cross-pollination of knowledge between the projects, and users get to truly own their comments (instead of being monetized and tracked by some third-party commenting system like Disqus).

Happy New Year

Have a look around the new site and please don’t hesitate to point out any problems you may run into! From me, thank you x1000 to the developers for this awesome project.

patdavid ♥’s darktable