On the following page you will find updates regarding the website and its content. The update appear in chronological order, with the latest update at the very top and earlier ones below it. I highly encourage you to check back here every so often so as to not miss out on new website features or content.
Happy New Year, everyone! There have not been a lot of updates lately due to the fact that it has been raining nigh-constantly here and I have, thus, been unable to go outside and take photos (my equipment is not waterproof, unfortunately). However, the weather has started clearning up a little bit and I have, once again, been able to start photographing birds. I will also be trying to update the site a bit more by adding things such as a gallery sorted by date (month and year) starting in 2024.
Hello and welcome to the new home of beakandlens.com! I initially created this site in April of 2023 to host my bird and wildlife photography using the open-source project called Piwigo
; and even though Piwigo worked, it didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped it would. Not only is it way too bloated for my use case, it also did not have a lot of functionality I needed, such as, for example, the ability to set custom pages (very important for even simple but legally required things such as an Impressum
). This meant that I was required to download extensions that added said functionality, but it never worked quite as I had hoped it would.
A few months later, in September 2023, I decided to rent a new VPS and cancel the old one. This meant that beakandlens.com would also have to move — a process which was a bit more convoluted in Piwigo than I had hoped it would be. This, in addition to the fact that I had been wanting to move my photos to a different platform, made me decide to ditch Piwigo and look for something else that was less bloated and allowed me to simply drag and drop my photos into a folder and have them be displayed on my website.
Unfortunately, however, actually finding something that did exactly what I wanted was very difficult. I did find a handful of very promising tools, such as foto (link to a GitHub repo) or moul (link to a GitHub repo). These, however, had other issue that made me not want to use them.
I, therefore, set out to make my own site by slightly adapting the CSS that I had already made for my other website, ancient-greek.net and by using Jekyll to make it a little easier.
And that is the current state of things. This website is still being worked on nearly daily and new things are being added constantly.