clayto.com

(updated ) by Michael Clayton · 2 minute read

Update: the info below is historical; I’ve sinced merged my photography site (clayto.com) and tech blog (mwcz.org & palebluepixel.org) into one site, clayto.com.

clayto.com is my homemade photography website.

mwcz.org screenshot

I started clayto.com in 2003. Inspired by Noah Grey’s photography presentation ideas

  • the site’s color scheme always matches the photo being viewed
  • as Noah did (or used to!).

Here are four examples of the color schemes:

example of color theme matching images

The color schemes are automatically generated when a photo is posted. A “suggested palette” is displayed

  • along with a color picker
  • and a tool to sample colors directly from the image.

The site as it exists now was written in 2007-2008

  • as my first Django project. It needs some serious TLC in the form of bringing it into the twenty-tens with a responsive UI
  • ColorPal integration
  • visual redesign
  • and a Django upgrade.

The site is currently powered by:

  • Python - an English comedy troupe
  • Django - Python web development framework
  • 960.gs - a vintage CSS grid
  • groundbreaking at the time though
  • Piwik - open-source web analytics
  • and a custom color extraction algorithm that automatically suggests colors
  • then allows the user to tweak the colors to their liking

The code is available here