Roll-Out of the New Eibonvale Gallery

Ok folks – I am rolling out the new version of my gallery. There is still a lot of work to do in terms of adding new material (I STILL don’t have that scanner!) and I will also be slowly updating some of the oldcamera images with high-quality scans whenever I get time. There’s a simple search engine on there now that I HOPE will do the job. I will also be trickling on some basic updates of stones over the next several days as well – just basic backlog stuff for now. The exciting stuff will happen when my scanner arrives! 🙂

I am quite sure that there are still a load of faults and blunders and spelling mistakes in the site, which I will slowly fix as I find them. Any thoughts, opinions, criticisms would be very gratefully received!

Changes and Developments

It’s maybe a good thing I don’t believe in karma, otherwise I might be tempted to start going on guilt trips, trying to work out what I did wrong to deserve the rather strange quagmire that seems to have overtaken me lately.  Let’s just say that this is turning into a few weeks of ‘anything that can go wrong, will go wrong’ and right now, I am getting to the stage of wanting to punch Murphy on the nose!

Most of this is not thunderegg related – a printer I needed seeming no longer to exist, a large cheque being paid into my bank . . . but with the decimal point shifted two spaces to the left leaving me flat broke, a new internet connection as intermittent as an unreliable girlfriend, a ‘mystery pain’ that means I can barely move like a normal human . . . but crucially, after waiting several weeks for the dispatch of the new scanner I need in order to continue presenting these stones (the queue that has built up over the last few months), the tracking info seems to suggest that it has vanished into the great beyond and I have NO IDEA where it has been delivered save that it most certainly ain’t here.

So yes – I am feeling a bit fed up at the moment and in need of a bit of whinging!  For once, the site is in limbo for reasons other than my own laziness!  New locations to be published in the near or middling future include Mirador (Argentina), Wycarbah (Aus), Baden Baden (Germany), Fern Meadow (USA), some Ethiopian specimens, an utterly superb Black Queen (USA), a Cerro El Grillo reverse sceptre amethyst thunderegg (Mex), Eddy’s Bed (USA), Richardson bed 6 (USA), Yadrino (Russia) . . . quite a long list.  Just bear with me a bit longer, dear and patient people!

I have been trying to make the best use of this extra time though.  I have been ‘amusing’ myself by preparing a massive upgrade of the site, which I think will be a great improvement over the barely controlled muddle that existed before. Quite frankly, this gallery has proved so popular lately and is getting so many hits that the old web-design it still had was getting embarrassing!  Of course, Murphy is still sitting in the middle of it all sniggering at me – there is a sort of quasi-malicious irrational chaos about web design. The sort of thing that has me spending hours struggling with any of the hundreds of different tools and controls simply to find out (or work around) why this one tiny element is just refusing to do what I am telling it to do.  Come on little image, pleeeeeese?  Just place yourself at the top of this box, which incidentally is what this button should make you do!  And the image just says nope!  With my fraying temper, this has proved an interesting few days but the end results should be good.  There will be a whole new graphic environment and proper navigation for the first time.  I have also tidied up some old pages that urgently needed it, such as Australia and Mexico.  There will be a new Non-Thundereggs section as well, simply including any odd rock-based things that happened to catch my interest, including Dulcote Agates, a lovely Keokuk geode, my polished Kent Flints and eventually some of the famous Folkstone fossils.

As a curious aside, fiddling with Dreamweaver’s search features and hunting down certain specific fragments of code has finally allowed me to get a reasonably accurate count of the number of stones featured on the site, which I never managed to figure out before.  There are 873 different thunderegg specimens (including a very few non-thundereggs) – not bad!

Finally – I can’t do a post here without some kind of illustration.  I can’t share any of the new ones yet, so I will calm myself down with one of my all-time favourite thundereggs – this beauty from Naches River Bed 1.  Unusually intact, beautiful crystal, amazing colours and tilt lines!  I just love it.

Aaaaaaaahhhhhh – that’s better!