November 2007

In an earlier post I covered why I had pulled WidgetBucks from my blogs/sites (basically, you wouldn’t get any credit for any clicks originating from outside the US/Canada). Well, good news is coming, perhaps due to the number of people like myself who’d pulled it from their site(s)?

In December, WidgetBucks will be introducing a new widget. It will detect the geographical location of the visitor. If they are from the US/Canada, the “traditional” WidgetBucks widget we all know and love (ahem) will be displayed. If from another location, “then our system will determine a country- specific CPM ad to display.”.

This is potentially pretty good news. It was a tough decision to take down WidgetBucks as it generated a pretty good click through rate, but only for the 25% of my visitors that come from the US/Canada. Now it looks  like I might be putting it back on sometime soon.

I have a lot of portable media. I’ve got a 450Gb drive almost permanently connected to my laptop, a 250Gb USB powered drive that goes most places with me and a 2Gb pen drive that lives in my pocket most of the time. Oh yes, there’s the SD cards in my cameras, too. And my MP3 player with a 20Gb drive. Whilst almost everything that potentially leaves the house is encrypted, there’s always the fear of losing them/having them stolen.

Coming to my rescue is iHound Software, who have just launched a service allowing you to track up to 3 devices - hard drives, pen drives, iPod’s etc. If an item is stolen, as soon as it’s plugged into another computer, it will (assuming it’s connected to the Net) send you an email showing the IP address and geographical location of your gear, the idea being you can hand this to the police and hopefully allow them to track it down for you.

This is a great idea. For now, you can register 3 devices for free.

If you’d like a perfect example of why should think long and hard before leaving your blog in the hands of Guest Writers, take a look at the storm created over on TechCrunch when one such post by Dan Ackerman Greenberg apparently made it onto the very popular (one of my regular daily reads) tech blog without first being checked over by the blog owner.

Michael’s obviously keeping an eye on his blog whilst away, but not closely enough. His response was “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.”

BBC Radio 4 are tomorrow airing a documentary entitled “Kraftwerk: We Are the Robots” at 11:30 am GMT. I won’t be able to listen “live”, but hopefully they’ll make it available as a download. See the BBC web site for more info.

Kraftwerk are my all-time musical heroes. The Hall of Mirrors still sends shivers down my spine after 30 odd years. I’m very fussy with music, as any of my family, friends and colleagues can testify too. For some reason, I hate listening to “old” music (i.e. anything more than a year or two old!), but I can make an exception for Kraftwerk. I guess this is because, to me, they never sound dated.

Anyway, listen in and enjoy

Amongst many other things, I’m an avid photographer. As such, I’m constantly on the lookout for the best way for me to show my work. I don’t supposed anybody is that interested, but it keeps me happy!

I’ve tried countless methods of getting my images on the web. Until now, I’d settled on Flickr. Having just received their 2 billionth image, they must be doing something right. However, I’ve wanted something more “personalâ€? for some time. Browsing through a random blog the other day, I saw mention of http://www.zenfolio.com/ and thought I’d give it a try. I’m impressed. Very impressed. Here’s why (in nor particular order).

It’s cheap

For $40 a year (for the Unlimited account), you get (as the name would suggest) unlimited storage, a maximum file size of 12Mb (so you can store pretty much all of your images in their original size – ideal for backup), and a ton of other features, some of which I’ll outline below. You can find a full list on the Zenfolio web site.

They offer a number of other plans from $25 a year through to $80.

It’s beautiful

Take a look at my new gallery at markavey.zenfolio.com. The basic construction took me about 30 mins. I don’t think that looks at all bad given the time I’ve put into it.

It’s flexible

You can apply a range of different themes to your site. You can even apply different themes to different areas of your site. The Unlimited and Premium accounts will soon offer you the facility to design your own theme.

You can sell your photos, or choose not to. You can prohibit people from downloading your full resolution images. You can allow Zenfolio to choose a random photo from your collection for the “cover� of each group. You can set aside private, password protected areas of your site. You automatically get an RSS feed for your images. You can even get a neat little Wordpress plugin to show a random sample from your gallery (see the top of this blog). You can set your own domain to point to your gallery, so my own gallery will soon be pointing to photography.markavey.com.

It does all this and a great deal more. In a nutshell, it appears to do absolutely everything I’ve been looking for in an online gallery.

It’s dead easy to use

Of nearly every service I’ve tried, actually getting your photos on the site itself seems to vary between being a pain and being almost impossible. I’ve always thought this odd. Given that the entire purpose of these sites is to allow you to show the world your photos, you’d think they’d go out of their way to make the process as easy as possible.

Well, Zenfolio have done just that. They have provided what I consider to be one of the very best “web applicationsâ€? I’ve yet seen. Uploading is a doddle. Select the photos you want to upload and drag them onto the web page. Click one button to get things going. That’s it. Watch the beautifully designed uploader sending your images to your site. This is how it should be.

They also make the entire process of setting up your site very easy, with virtually everything being completed from your Organiser page. Here’s a screenshot:

From here, you can create your groups, galleries and collections, set their properties etc. It’s all very logical and well laid out.

Summary

I can’t think of a single good reason not to use Zenfolio, which is more than I can say for any other service or application I’ve tried. You get a 14 day trial, which I’m currently a couple of days into. After that, I think I’ll be going for the Unlimited plan, as it offers everything I need.

If, like me, you’re after the “Perfectâ€? online photo gallery, why not give it a try?