[Insert Witty Title Here]

After a lot of messing around, a week or more of inaction, and a little more messing around, I finally got my photoblog up and running.  The bottom line seems to be that WordPress and the photoblogging plug-in don’t play nicely with 10MP images.  I had been hoping that I would be able to use the plug-in to automatically upload, resize, and thumbnail all the images I wanted to post on the photoblog, and while that may still be possible, I have given up trying to make it work.  For now, I will resize the images manually and then use the WordPress administrative interface to upload things.  This also will give me the opportunity to think about whether I want to crop the pictures at all in order to make sure the picture is composed exactly as I want it.

Anyway, my photoblog is now available at the unsurprising URL: http://imladris.mit.edu/photoblog/  (Update: this site is now down – see its replacement at http://instantforever.org)

I wrestled with the title for quite awhile, rather than choosing something lame like “insert title here”.  My initial choice was “14 Shots of the Dome”, which was meant to say something about how this site featured photography (“shots”) and about how I am a student of MIT, the most easily recognizable architectural feature of which is its dome.  I thought this title was a clever double meaning to both “shots” and “dome”, playing off L.L. Cool J’s album “14 Shots to the Dome”.  However, after some consideration, I decided not to use a name that evoked thoughts of someone getting shot in the head.

Going back to the drawing board, I began to think a lot about the nature of photography, which, I would say, is the way in which it takes a fleeting moment and records it, preserving it for eternity.  I’ve been thinking more about speaking German lately, so I thought I might want to choose a title in German.  Furthermore, the people who made both the WordPress photoblog plug-in as well as the WordPress theme I’m using are German speakers, so this seemed doubly appropriate.  In the end, I settled on “Der Ewige Augenblick”, which roughly translates to “The Eternal Instant” or “The Everlasting Moment”.  I also considered “Der Ewiggewordene Augenblick”, which would more precisely capture the idea of an instant becoming eternal, but that seems like a mouthful for English speakers.

I posted a picture last night and another one tonight.  I hope that you’ll take a look and let me know what you think.