The urge to hibernate was particularly strong this past winter, but over the past month I've made a bunch of changes and improvements on this ShinyPhoto site with major changes across the site from a visual spring-clean refresh of key pages to lots of work on backend architecture making things faster, more secure, easier for me to publish.

Biggest features added:

• you're looking at it now - I have a new Blog for when photos need to work together with words
• added a new browseable map overview of everywhere I've taken photos
• I'm happy to offer talks either in person (central Scotland) or online via Zoom - see the Contact page

Several other design improvements have happened as well:

• the homepage now has a new section for my favourite photographic themes as well as the current top-4 portfolio
• subtle design tweaks in the masthead
• the gallery stays exactly as it always was
• new: the site now prefers AVIF format over WEBP and JPEG - a 12.5% saving in file size across the whole gallery - making for faster page loads and better bandwidth efficiency
• individual photo display pages have been refreshed with clearer link to buy photos in various formats on Redbubble
• Feeds have been rationalized - take your pick from gallery RSS, gallery Atom, blog RSS, blog Atom, subscribe to any/all in your RSS aggregator of choice

I've also added a few backend features:

• caching - as if HTML pages weren't rendered fast enough already, now they come from a cache for real speed
• baddies rejection - rate-limiting and blocking for obviously bad actors trying to spam, scam or exploit the site
• an admin section with proper authentication, giving me better overview of the site performance and an easier upload process

The underlying source has been tidied and refactored and reorganized as well.

I have a backlog dating back nearly 3 years so maybe it's time to stop hacking and get back on with uploading new works :)