Widening my horizons

In celebration of my one year blogiversary (sorry) I decided to redecorate Gienna Writes a little bit. Rearrange the furniture, get rid of some of the nicknacks that were just collecting dust, and prettify things a bit.

One thing you'll notice right away is that I moved the pay-per-click ads from the top of the page to the bottom and replaced them with a Flickr badge that randomly displays 8 of my photos. You can click any of the pictures for the larger, full-sized image or click on the link to see all of my pictures in a really cool slideshow.

The other thing I did--and I can't quite believe I never thought of this before--was to expand the post space and reduce the size of the sidebar, which allows me to display my pictures at a larger size. There's two benefits to this. First, when you post to your blog using Flickr, you have to choose from preset sizes, none of which are the standard 400 pixel width that most Blogger templates use for the posting space. And, as I've discussed here before at great boring lengths, when you post a picture at a different size than the original it often looks pixilated. The medium size for pictures posted on Flickr is 500 pixels. So now I'm posting pictures at 500 pixels and, hopefully, that will improve the quality a great deal. The second benefit is that now folks don't have to click on the picture to see the larger, clearer image. It's just right there on the page.

I also reposted these three pictures at the larger sizes, and I think the difference in quality is clear, but I am going to resist the compulsive temptation to redo every photo I've ever posted here.

And, just in case anyone from work sees this, I did it all at home, I swear.
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