You may have noticed a slight change in the website over the past couple of weeks. This is a work in progress and has been prompted by a major update in the Photocrati theme that I use. Rather than the more frequent incremental point update this is a completely new version (Photocrati 10) to accommodate upcoming changes in WordPress.

These updates always come with teething problems and a lot of time trouble-shooting to get things working as you want. I have tried to keep the colour scheme and layout roughly the same but have changed back to a top menu rather left sided design.

I have added a couple of widgets to the blog to link to the most popular posts and my latest Instagram images. Getting the links for the Master Posts back into the sidebar was frustrating as things that should have worked just didn’t. Fortunately the Smart Recent Posts widget did the job and has plenty of customisation options. Another issue that made captions of images hard to read required some custom CSS but that is now also resolved.

Another frustration has been that a lot of previous blog posts have randomly lost their featured image so have no image thumbnails on the blog page. I am working my way through correcting this but it will take a bit of bad indoor weather before I am finished with it. Portrait orientated featured images are messing up the formatting of the page and I haven’t yet found a solution to this.

This new Photocrati 10 theme no longer supports the previous Photocrati legacy galleries so I have had to convert all to NextGen galleries so these do look a little different. It has reminded me how out of date most of the galleries are and the next step will be to update a lot of images and remove some entire galleries to focus mainly on birds and some landscapes. Longer term I want to better organise my New Zealand bird images taxonomically. This will need an extended period of indoor weather! The blog will still feature a full range of my photography.

One big benefit of the upgrade is that the whole site is loading significantly more quickly. I think I have identified most of the issues and resolved them. Please let me know if you find any errors or issues that make the site difficult to use.

Stork photo with Nikon D800 and Nikon 500mm f4VR. Edited in Photoshop with addition as a gift for an expectant mother!