Hello world, literally.

Welcome to Big Picture Notes, a meta-blog for The Big Picture (TBP). I plan for this Notes blog to be the warehouse for everything related to TBP - follow-up photography from previous stories, one-off photos, shorter stories, link love to other great sites, commentary from me, administrivia and anything else relevant.

An appropriate image for a launch: The Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off from launch pad 39-A at Kennedy Space Center on May 31, 2008 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, en route to the International Space Station on a construction mission. (Eliot J. Schechter /Getty Images) [click for larger image]

In the past, whenever I've had something to say about an entry, or the blog itself, I've inserted an entry clumsily into TBP, or put it in a comment, which really does not work too well - plus, when I designed the wide-format photo blog, I removed a traditional side-column, where one would normally find links, blogrolls, etc. Now, it's nice to have a place for these things.

The posts here will be far more irregular than normal entries on TBP, both in content and frequency. I've been looking forward to this for quite a while. I can't tell you how many times I've posted an entry, only to find a fantastic photo on the same subject the following day, and wished for a simple way to get it 'out there' in context.

Inline images here won't be the traditional 990 pixels wide that you find on TBP proper, but they will be clickable so you can view them at large size (it's a trade-off, gain a link column, lose some inline image size).

Thanks again for coming along with me on the ride that has been The Big Picture. I can't believe that I've been doing this for 9 months already.

All the best,
-Alan