I’ve been quite busy lately with off-line life. I spent a few days last week at the Ayodya Hotel (previously Bali Hilton) in Bali for a conference; turned out to be fun but a bit of a tease considering you have to be indoors all day while the glistening ocean is only minutes away.

The Muslim Idul Fitri holiday starts Wednesday, which means a week off work. Unfortunately, if you’re a slacker in regards to travel plans, it’s a horrible time to try to book tickets anywhere. Oh well, it’s actually not a bad time to hang around Jakarta. The air magically clears, the volcanoes finally show themselves and traffic is almost like a normal city (L.A., NYC). We might just spend the break here and catch up on some quality chill time.

I’ve upgraded the blog to WP 2.3 last night and will be looking at options to alter the theme. I know there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s time for a change. If you check in and things look a bit funky, that’ll be why.

Additionally, I’ve finally settled on a photoblog style that I think will work (for now at least). It’s a regular WordPress installation, utilizing the YAPB Yet Another Photo Blog plugin with the wonderful “Grain” theme.

Why bother with a separate photoblog? I feel this current blog and archives are limiting in its ability to display photographs (currently 500px max width), and I think it’d be great to have a place where just images are available for those people searching for only my visual content. The new photoblog displays images at 800px and has some great features like automatic extraction of EXIF data (and the option to choose what data is shown), categories, nice archives, and some visual candy that may or may not play well with other browsers than Firefox.

Now I just need to settle on the address (currently www.photoblog.thejavajive.com vs www.thejavajive.com/photoblog – which seems easier to remember?) and need to start getting some images uploaded. To see what it currently looks like, here’s a preview.

I may be altering some of the layout and/or design aspects and color schemes, but with YAPB and Grain, I think I’ve found a powerful combination that really displays photographs in a clean, easy to use format.