EPKPhoto’s Tidbits

A recent announcement from Microsoft's Internet Explorer Platform Architect Chris Wilson last week has set the standards-aware web community afire with discussion. What it boils down to is that web developers will need to add a specific meta tag to their code (or change their web server configuration) for IE 8 to render their pages in a standards compliant manner. If that tag is absent, IE 8 will render as if it were IE 7. The goal of this is so developers can target their page to a specific version of IE that they tested against. So, if I wanted, down the road I could make a page render like it was being run in IE 8 even though let's say IE 10 is displaying it. That becomes a safeguard against future changes to IE's browser engine by locking the page to a specific state in the browser's version history. If that technical speak has not scared you off, read on so I can tell you why I think this is a bad idea and how Microsoft got itself in this mess.

Last night I posted 42 of the photos I took at this year's Honors Ski Trip. Every year, the RIT Honors Activities Committee plans a day trip to the Bristol Mountain Ski Resort. Thankfully I came back unscathed despite my somewhat comical trips down a couple of the runs at Bristol. I only took photos for a few minutes on the trip. The rest of the time I was skiing or trying (ie., failing) to capture some decent video. I continue to have an appreciation for skilled videographers as I stick to the art of still photography. Enjoy the photos!

Apparently I've been running this website for four solid years now. That's right, today, January 5th, marks the 4th birthday of epkphoto.com. Every year this day comes around, and I feel like doing something special, but I never get around to it. Well, this year is different. Today I'm making my new photo gallery system live! In the past weeks I have been working on building a new underlying infrastructure to manage my mounds of photos stored on this website. So take a look at the newly redesigned epkphoto.com/portfolio/ to try out some new things. Other than the layout, not much has changed from a user's perspective. The fact that many photos are tagged and drive the tag cloud display is certainly new, but it is only a hint at what lies ahead. Now that I have a better database-driven engine to manage my photos, in the future you'll be able to select your own favorite images, add tags yourself, view the most popular photos, and a host of other cool things. In my usual style, all this is hand-coded, so let me know of improvements I could make as I go forward! Enjoy