PHOTOS and other news

Big news, people. Ghostface Buddha now has a photo gallery!

The gallery is a Flickr account, linked at the very top right-hand side of this page, where you can also quickly check if there have been any updates, and admire a single image that will sit there for an arbitrary period of time, hinting at what wonders lie beyond the hyperlink.

Alas, due to many misfortunes large and small, the majority of the photographs from the month of October have been irretrievably lost, most tragically those of the Pushkar Camel Fair, but also from most of Uttar Pradesh except those salvaged from Facebook. I have however been stepping up on the photography of late and hopefully this trend will continue. The gallery now contains rescued images from the Varanasi area as well as increasing numbers of photographs from the last few weeks in Rajasthan. [edit: many of the places of which photos were lost have been revisited, and photos are now in the gallery, with the exceptions of Mathura, Vrindavan, Faizabad (oh no), and Ayodhya. -GFB]

I have captioned some but not all of the images. I have tried to be basically informative and occasionally witty, but there is only so much you can say about pictures of sunsets or whatever so I haven't been too fastidious about explaining everything...."this is a picture of the same throne room....viewed from the other side!"

For those of you not familiar with Flickr, it is a fairly versatile and elegant photo storage mechanism that allows much higher quality and better organizaton than hosting directly on this blog would permit. The main "snag" you might encounter when browsing the gallery is that unlike other photo sharing sites you are likely familiar with *cough*Facebook, clicking on an image will not skip directly ahead to the next in the batch. Instead you will see in a box to the right two thumbnails of the images before and after the one you are currently viewing. Should you so desire, it is possible to view higher-quality versions of the image than the default one displayed by clicking on the teeny upper button that says "All Sizes", which is also where you need to go if for whatever reason you wish to save a photo to your computer.


In other blog-related news, as the audience of this site has grown somewhat broader than I anticipated and as the right-hand side of the site was becoming increasingly clustered with the proliferation of archive links, etc., I have been working on a basic site navigator bar you will see above, that will allow you to jump around the page more easily. This may or may not be working completely correctly yet (because I haven't written my own HTML in about seven years). I've also tweaked some of the colors and content to make things slightly more readable.

OK that's about it. Enjoy the photos. I'll be coming back with a post about Jodhpur as soon as I finish up the last three articles I'm supposed to have done for work. I have to find something valuable and informative to say about riding camels that isn't just bitching about how they smell. It's going to be a long night.