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#1
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
I'm a "web application developer" and freelance web designer by day,
and I get asked a lot of questions about building websites, sometimes by photographers. I have found that a lot of photographers out there take matters into their own hands or hire a third party (purchase gallery hosting space, etc.) without knowing some important things to look out for. I've just written an article going over some "best practices" for web development that particularly apply to photographers, which might help steer you in the right direction. I've submitted the article to PhotographyVoter.com, it's a new site, not a ton of traffic yet, but you might think about signing up for it and helping them out. If you do, vote for me! Some really nice articles show up there on a regular basis but I sense that they need more voting participation to separate the wheat from the chaff. http://photographyvoter.com/story.ph...-Photographers Here's the direct link if you're completely not interested in PV: http://www.singleservingphoto.com/20...photographers/ Cheers! -- Aaron http://www.fisheyegallery.com http://www.singleservingphoto.com |
#2
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
DOCJohnson wrote: On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:19:40 GMT, Aaron wrote: I'm a "web application developer" and freelance web designer by day, and I get asked a lot of questions about building websites, sometimes by photographers. I have found that a lot of photographers out there take matters into their own hands or hire a third party (purchase gallery hosting space, etc.) without knowing some important things to look out for. I've just written an article going over some "best practices" for web development that particularly apply to photographers, which might help steer you in the right direction. Quite a ****-poor attempt to bring traffic to your site just to sell your crap. You didn't even cover things like the uselessness of watermarks, the best way to protect images (low resolution and high jpg compression), etc. Take a hike spammer. I think Mr DOCJohnson is hypercritical. I looked at the blog-like page and found it included some good information. It seemed to me there would be nothing of much use to me behind the other links, so I didn't follow them. I would recommend to Aaron that he reconsider editing "Entire sites such as YouTube, digg, del.icio.us, and the brand new PhotographyVoter.com is based on this principle." "sites ... is" seems not-too-pretty-good to me. -- Frank ess |
#3
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
"Frank ess" wrote:
I think Mr DOCJohnson is hypercritical. YMMV. I looked at the blog-like page and found it included some good information. It seemed to me there would be nothing of much use to me behind the other links, so I didn't follow them. You got more out of it than I did. I would recommend to Aaron that he reconsider editing "Entire sites such as YouTube, digg, del.icio.us, and the brand new PhotographyVoter.com is based on this principle." "sites ... is" seems not-too-pretty-good to me. That's merely grammar. I'm more concerned about the key points that were missed, namely that while the whole 'sharing is caring' has a point, and while it can be beneficial, the act of directly revealing your image's URL just makes it all the easier to be misused, such as copied (theft) or hotlinked to (appropriation of your bandwidth & your storage that they're not paying for). I've been debating on if to switch over to .PDFs as a means to disrupt the casual 'borrower' of my copyrighted stuff. I have a couple of trial balloons running now; will see what their hit rate looks like in the logs in 2-3 months. -hh |
#4
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
And lo, DOCJohnson emerged from the ether
and spake thus: On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 12:19:40 GMT, Aaron wrote: I'm a "web application developer" and freelance web designer by day, and I get asked a lot of questions about building websites, sometimes by photographers. I have found that a lot of photographers out there take matters into their own hands or hire a third party (purchase gallery hosting space, etc.) without knowing some important things to look out for. I've just written an article going over some "best practices" for web development that particularly apply to photographers, which might help steer you in the right direction. Quite a ****-poor attempt to bring traffic to your site just to sell your crap. You didn't even cover things like the uselessness of watermarks, the best way to protect images (low resolution and high jpg compression), etc. Take a hike spammer. I covered both of those topics in previous articles, lazy. I will take your advice and link to them from that article, though, now that you mention it. Cheers. -- Aaron http://www.fisheyegallery.com http://www.singleservingphoto.com |
#5
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
And lo, -hh emerged from the ether
and spake thus: "Frank ess" wrote: I think Mr DOCJohnson is hypercritical. YMMV. I looked at the blog-like page and found it included some good information. It seemed to me there would be nothing of much use to me behind the other links, so I didn't follow them. You got more out of it than I did. I would recommend to Aaron that he reconsider editing "Entire sites such as YouTube, digg, del.icio.us, and the brand new PhotographyVoter.com is based on this principle." "sites ... is" seems not-too-pretty-good to me. That's merely grammar. I'm more concerned about the key points that were missed, namely that while the whole 'sharing is caring' has a point, and while it can be beneficial, the act of directly revealing your image's URL just makes it all the easier to be misused, such as copied (theft) or hotlinked to (appropriation of your bandwidth & your storage that they're not paying for). I've been debating on if to switch over to .PDFs as a means to disrupt the casual 'borrower' of my copyrighted stuff. I have a couple of trial balloons running now; will see what their hit rate looks like in the logs in 2-3 months. -hh Good catch on the grammar mistake there, I just fixed it. What I perhaps should have added is something about how your web server can be configured not to serve your images via direct links when they are placed on other sites. I had that happen once with an Apple logo that I had on my site simply as a visual aid for an article about logos. Some kid placed it in a forum post (ironically flaming Apple), so I started blocking outside referrers on image file requests. I track my site's traffic closely using AWStats (.org) and at the moment my bandwidth is not being stressed so I am not blocking outside image referrers; I figure it's "free" publicity, the only price I'm paying is a bit of bandwidth. When I started writing this latest article, being a web developer myself, I found myself slipping deeper and deeper into technical issues that I'm not sure would be helpful to a casual photographer. I could outline, in great detail, how Apache's mod_rewrite can be configured to block outside sites from snagging your images, but I haven't met many photographers who are also server administrators and I wonder how helpful that would be. Still, I suppose it bears mentioning. I've written a bunch of articles in the past few months and most of them have been very well received, but I have also found that the more technical they get (not related to photography, but rather programming, server configuration, etc.) the less my readers seem to care, so I tend to shy away from being too nerdy outside of the photography realm. There is definitely a geek threshold. -- Aaron http://www.fisheyegallery.com http://www.singleservingphoto.com |
#6
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
Aaron wrote:
What I perhaps should have added is something about how your web server can be configured not to serve your images via direct links when they are placed on other sites. That would be useful, although it would have also necessitated mentioning the 'darker'side of the web that's less altruistic. I could outline, in great detail, how Apache's mod_rewrite can be configured to block outside sites from snagging your images, but I haven't met many photographers who are also server administrators and I wonder how helpful that would be. Still, I suppose it bears mentioning. You could be helpful by talking about the pros/cons of various blocking options within the Apache cpanel web interface, as that's an easy enough tool for general use. -hh |
#7
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
And lo, -hh emerged from the ether
and spake thus: Aaron wrote: What I perhaps should have added is something about how your web server can be configured not to serve your images via direct links when they are placed on other sites. That would be useful, although it would have also necessitated mentioning the 'darker'side of the web that's less altruistic. I could outline, in great detail, how Apache's mod_rewrite can be configured to block outside sites from snagging your images, but I haven't met many photographers who are also server administrators and I wonder how helpful that would be. Still, I suppose it bears mentioning. You could be helpful by talking about the pros/cons of various blocking options within the Apache cpanel web interface, as that's an easy enough tool for general use. -hh In my experience, based on years of geekery, the Internet is generally altruistic. Unfortunately, the nature of the Internet makes it easy for a small number of malicious people to affect a large number of non-malicious people. That said, I tend to be more defensive than offensive and cross my bridges as I come to them. I've never used cpanel, having jumped straight into manual configuration since day one, but if cpanel is something that web hosts offer, it would be worth investigating for the sake of people with access to it. The web hosts I had who offered control panel interfaces pretty much rolled their own, I think. I used apollohosting.com for a while and also phpwebhosting.com, both of whom developed their own stuff. In the end, I wound up switching to a Linux-based virtual hosting setup where I basically get SSH and root account access to a virtual machine with nothing but a barebones Linux distribution on it and I can just go wild. It's both challenging as well as satisfying to have that level of control. At least with mod_rewrite you can often place the directives in your own .htaccess file, but that seems way over the heads of the people I generally write for. I have a more technical/personal blog where I write about crazy stuff I do at work like editing VIM syntax files, word stemming in JavaScript, and that sort of thing, but I don't think it interests photographers too much. -- Aaron http://www.fisheyegallery.com http://www.singleservingphoto.com |
#8
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How to make your photography website more accessible.
Aaron wrote:
In my experience, based on years of geekery, the Internet is generally altruistic. Unfortunately, the nature of the Internet makes it easy for a small number of malicious people to affect a large number of non-malicious people. That is the basic problem: the .01%'ers that can really screw things up. The problem is that there's not just 50,000 of us on the web anymore, so .01% of a hundred million ends up being a lot of folks (its the statisics of large numbers). Just within the past ~6 months, I've had around 3 known instances of copyright theft (a highly relevant topic in a photo group) and within the past month, I had a script kiddie attack successfully hack a password onto an Apache system, which to be safe required it to be completely wiped and restored from backup. I've never used cpanel, having jumped straight into manual configuration since day one, but if cpanel is something that web hosts offer, it would be worth investigating for the sake of people with access to it. Some hosts do offer it and for end-users looking for Admin tools with a low bull**** quotient, it is quite useful. Awstats is offered, as are also IP Deny and Hotlink Deny modules. I suspect that it probably does most of what you think people need, with no need to get mired down in the detailed line code. -hh |
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