SquareSpace 6 vs. not changing
Over the last few months or so I have been vacillating over whether to convert my site to SquareSpace 6 or to leave it as it is in SquareSpace 5. It has not been an easy decision. As is generally the case with any change there are pluses and minuses.
One of the key minuses is that I would no longer be able to key up my posts in Microsoft Live Writer and see them almost exactly as they are going to be posted before I post them. If I convert to SquareSpace 6 then posts would need to be keyed into the SquareSpace Web-based editor to see how they are going to look. And the Web-based editor does not even provide spell checking. Also you don’t seem to be able to do bullet items in the SquareSpace 6 editor and I often use bullet items.
But . . . one of the key drivers to go to SquareSpace 6 is that it has a lightbox function for photographs. This would mean I could post much larger higher resolution photographs and when you click on the smaller picture in the post it would instantly open up in the SquareSpace ‘lightbox’ at a larger size.
Also SquareSpace 6 is more mobile-device friendly.
One of the other big downsides of moving over to SquareSpace 6 is that the formatting of all my previously posted articles would basically be wrecked by the import into SquareSpace 6. Over time I would have to revisit every post and reformat them to look ‘better’ in the SquareSpace 6 format. This would be a huge job.
At this stage I am going to remain with SquareSpace 5 but I will put my photographs into SmugMug and link them. Abalook has had a SmugMug account for a number of years now and I will make more use of it. I have used SmugMug for many of the posts of SCN in order for you to see the larger higher resolution versions.
So now for my photography related posts I will put the larger higher resolution ‘original’ picture in SmugMug and a reduced-size reduced-resolution picture in the actual Abalook post. When you click on the smaller picture in the post it will then open the ‘full’ picture in SmugMug in a new Tab or browser windows (depending how you have set your browser up).
As an example of how this works I have posted a small picture of Heather Graham. The picture in the post is only 350x (i.e., 350 pixels wide) and the size is 120KB for faster downloading.
But if you click the picture it will open the full sized original from SmugMug which is 1600x (i.e., 4.5 times wider) and 1.2MB in size. In order to see this picture full size you will need a monitor that can display a picture 1600x1200 and you will need your browser set to full screen (which can be done by hitting F11 in Internet Explorer or FireFox).
Obviously if you are using your 7” or 10.1” tablet you are not going to see the picture full size, but it will still display much bigger and you may need to scroll to see the whole picture. Ditto on a smartphone.
I have tested this on my Lumia 720 Windows Phone and it all seems to work okay.
For those that might not be aware of it, Heather Graham is in the second season of Twin Peaks. She becomes the love interest of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.
