I finally launched my photo portfolio & blog

I spend a lot of my spare time bird watching, out taking pictures, or in editing pictures. And a lot of those pictures over time have just ended up on a hard drive.

I've printed some to hang in our apartment, we're creating photobooks for all of our trips (although I am lagging several trips behind 😅), and some get posted to Instagram, Mastodon, and Flickr, but I felt like none of that really does justice to the amount of time and passion I put into my work.

I wanted a place where I could have complete freedom over how I present my pictures, and where I could focus on text-content in addition.

Focus on the wildlife

An important "feature" for me is the ability to focus on the species I photograph. All my photos, albums, and blog posts are collected by species. Each species has its own detail page, where I can include additional information about the species as well.

Everything is connected

All of the photos have their own page, but can also be:

• added to collections/photo albums,
• connected to species,
• mentioned in blog posts

Everything is customizable

All colors, grids, and layouts are customizable on page level. For example, this herring gull has a matching black background or this kittiwake with the matching red accent color. Gulliver & Josefine's pictures are presented in large format where there's a lot of focus on each picture, whereas my Finnmark album gives more of a birds eye view.

It may sound like a useless feature, but I had a lot of fun building it, and enjoy being able to customize how I present my content.

Subscribe to RSS

Some gulls have their own Instagram account, mine have their own RSS feed 🤓.

My website's main RSS feed collects all photos and blog posts. Additionally it's also possible to subscribe to just the photos, just the blog posts, or each of the collections and species.

Maybe you're particularly invested in Gulliver & Josefine's story or want to follow along our adventures in the north? Or maybe you only want to see auks like puffins or murres, or get notifications for new kittiwake content? It's possible to subscribe to any of the collections and species by adding feed.xml at the end of their URL.

Made with Eleventy

I'll probably write about how I built the website on my tech blog, but to get a bit technical here as well: I write all the content in markdown format and use Eleventy & JavaScript in the background to turn this into static HTML & CSS files.

This set-up gives me a lot of flexibility over the layout and data, without having to load a lot of (currently no) JavaScript code in the browser. It also lets me keep ownership over my content, which is a huge plus for me.

What's to come?

Amongst the updates I'm planning for the website are:

• Improving the size and loading speed of the images
• Observation log
• Collection types and filters
• Photo types and filters
• Browse by location
• Browse by gear

Spot an issue?

This website is a living document and as a result a forever work-in-progress. If you encounter any bugs, weird UX, or accessibility issues, please reach out to me on Mastodon, Instagram, or e-mail.