Growing up in West Hollywood, CA

Growing up in West Hollywood, CA

Image by Vaguely Artistic

An Updated twenty200

Image by that guy named Rob
I haven't been posting on flickr as much lately because I've been working on a few projects that turned into ginormous timesucks. One of these was updating my twenty200 website to be mobile friendly.

Twenty200 began as a place for me to post photos. I didn't understand flickr at first. I thought it would be better to have my own domain name and host my photography there. I thought that posting on flickr would make me look like an amateur or something. Forget the fact that I am, in fact, an amateur! Anyway....

I created twenty200 back in 2005. I literally hand coded the database for it. This meant I had to hand update it each time I wanted to add photos. I was only posting a few shots each month back then, but still, it was a pain.

Eventually, I gave into the lure of flickr. Rather than killing off my twenty200 site, however, I turned it into a virtual business card. Sort of. I gave it an ultra-minimal home page that led to either a small collection of my writing or a flash player with my flickr stream ("Words" or "Photos"). The beauty of this setup was that I never had to update the site anymore. The writing was pulled automatically from my blog and the photos were pulled automatically from flickr. Neato!

But! Then! Steve! Jobs! Wrecked! My! Design!

I realize that's not fair. Steve didn't wreck my design. The advances of technology did. Specifically, I'm referring to touchscreen devices like the iPhone and iPad. Touchscreens are killing off all sorts of design concepts that probably weren't the best design to begin with, and my minimal home page for twenty200 was one of them.

This doesn't work on a touch device. So, I had to redesign the home page. And as long as I was doing that, I might as well get rid of the flash player too, right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Here on flickr, I've had my photos in sets for a while. So... why not use those sets on twenty200 as categories? Why not indeed!

The picture you see above is a complete rework of my previous design. Twenty200 now works quite well even on a screen as small as an iPhone. In fact, I created two versions of each page: one for a large screen such as an iPad or computer monitor, and one for the small screen of a phone. Luckily, the work was all up front. Now that the site is built, it automatically pulls photos from my sets here on flickr. Yay for the mostly-superduper flickr API.

The above pic is a screen capture of twenty200 on an iPad.