No photo today 
. I’ve just started a new job, plus I’m having an interview for the JET Programme in a week or so (that ultra cool Japanese Exchange Teaching Programme that would see me move to Japan for a year or more) so I’m spending some time preparing for that also. All this change means I need to find time in my very disrupted schedule to continue posting!
Category Archives: Site Updates
Quickie….
Photomatix Coupon Up Again!
The crowd over at Photomatix have been very prompt in reactivating my coupon code “projectvisual”, which will give you 15% off Photomatix either for Windows or MAC. So if you have any new years resolutions for making great HDR photos now is a great time to get started!
Fotomoto – Sell Your Photos Direct From Your Website
I just discovered a new website called Fotomoto. I don’t know how new or popular it currently is, but I really like the concept behind it. For any photographers out there that would like to try to make a bit of cast from their photos, it looks like a really interesting option. Simply insert a bit of javascript before the tag of your site, and Fotomoto will insert some handy buttons under each photo on your site. Check out the image below for example. IF you click on one of the buttons, (go on you won’t be committing to buying anything!) some options pop up and the customer to buy a print at whatever price is set, l without ever leaving your site!
Of course it needs some high res images if it’s gonna give your customers value for money so these need to be uploaded to your site somewhere that Fotomoto can find them; I’m currently trying to find all my original files and get them uploaded. I post updates of how I find the service and things develop.
Photo Included In Schmap Berlin Guide
I just got word from those wonderful people at Schmap that one of my photos has been included in their Schmap Berlin Guide. I originally got word through flickr about my shortlisting, and was rather chuffed. You can see the picture along with their Berlin write-up here.
Or, here’s the original picture if you are opposed to clicking on the link above 
A Particularly Awesome Backlink
Everyone likes backlinks right? Well today on Twitter I was more than pleasantly surprised when a one Ted Baker (who you can follow on Twitter @webted2) sent me a link to a wonderful write up he has done on this site!! Thanks Ted!
Oh and if you live in Florida and need advice on Real Estate, Ted is the man to talk to
All Photos On A Single Page!
This is my 100th post, and to mark the occasion I’ve made a new page showing thumbnails of all my photographs thus far! I’ll continue to add to this archive page on a fairly regular basis, at the moment there are only 39 images but that number is sure to grow You can also find the link at the very top of this page, called Photo Archives
Win a 15” MacBook Pro with HDR Max From Ariea
Ariea are promoting their new HDR photo software, HDR Max, by offering HDR enthusiasts the chance of winning a spanking new 15” MacBook Pro, or a free copy of the HDR software (it’s usually $149). All you have to do is submit up to three photos processed with HDR Max to Airea before January 31st 2009. Taken verbatim from Ariea, the prizes and guidelines are:
PRIZES
- 1st prize is a new 15″ MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo.
- 2nd and 3rd prize is a free copy of HDR MAX.
CONTEST GUIDLINES
- All entries should be sent to submissions@ariea.com.
- Entries should be submitted in the JPEG format.
- Each image should be named using the yourname_filename.jpg
- format. All entries must contain orginal work.
- The deadline for submissions is January 31st, 2009 at 11:59pm PST.
I’ve given the trial version a go, which you can download for free at the site, and it looks promising. I havn’t created any HDR’s with it yet as I literally just got it working a few minutes ago, and thought I’d quickly bang out this post. You see there was a problem with a previous version of HDR Max in that it wouldn’t process Nikon NEF files, at least ones from a D300 anyway! The problem has been resolved however with the latest version (1.3.2).
I’ll likely post up a comparison between Photomatix Pro and HDR Max tomorrow to ring off 2008 – in the meatime look out for a new HDR photo post later today!
Posting from my ipod touch
No new pictures with this post I’m afraid – I recently got an iPod touch and I’ve been installing all sorts of useless stuff on it: facebook, twitter, and now a wordpress plugin! I’m writing this post on the touch and it’s surprisingly simple – the touch keyboard is easy to use and picks up on most spelling mistakes. Ok now my finger’s getting tired – could someone invent speech to text for the iPod touch please?
Win 6300 Entrecard Points. The Question: Do You Want Them?
Firstly, apologies for not posting any super duper photos of late – college has been hectic, the days are getting shorter and colder; I’ve just not been able to squeeze and photography time into by crazy schedule! I vow to get back to posting on Monday.
But I digress, I want to talk about Entrecard – I’ve given up on it. It’s a futile endeavour really. Visiting websites, 99% of the time to simply drop your Entrecard and then leave without even seeing what the site is about?! And of course the exact same is happening to my site also – that’s not what I want! I want people to visit my site because it offers something of value (check out a wonderful shipwreck, a tree battered by nature, or my very first nikon D300 image!), not to drop a stupid Entrecard!
So, I’ve got 6300 Entrecard points to give away to one person. The question is: Do you want them?
Leave your answer as a comment below and I’ll pick a winner in the next few days.
(Update: I’m using entrecard again so the deal’s off!)
U Comment I Follow – WTF???
I started to get serious about this blog beginning in July 2008 (actually it will be December 19th 2008, in the future, when I get serious) and as part of my commitment I knew that I needed to build up some backlinks to promote the site. So over the past 6 weeks I’ve been visiting relevant forums, replying to interesting topics, and generally leaving my signature all over the place. Trading links is a bit more tricky so I’ll leave that for the moment. According to backlinkwatch.com, as of August 11th there are 296 backlinks to my site floating about – so far so good. Then I come across this ‘U comment I follow’ movement crap where I find out that some of these backlink that budding bloggers rely on may well be worth squat! Don’t get the wrong idea – ‘U comment I follow’ is a good thing – but the fact that it’s not the status quo is just nuts!
Let’s back up a little here; typically bloggers like to leave comments to other bloggers posting, a) because they’re interested in the topic, and b) because they can often leave a link back to their own website, thus generating some potential residual traffic. These backlinks also help boost a sites Google PageRank (does anything else matter these days??) since Google partly rates a websites importance based on the number of links back to that site. Sounds great! – leave an interesting comment on a blog you like and get a backlink to your site! Turns out that could be bullshit.
Some sites, WordPress springs to mind, when posting your comment will add a particular attribute to the ‘rel’ tag in the generated HTML. The ‘rel’ tag tells your browser what to do with a link (your precious backlink in this case) when it’s pressed e.g. ‘rel = external’ tells your browser to open the link in a new window. Wuppee. So what particular attribute am I talking about? I’m talking about ‘rel = nofollow’. If ‘nofollow’ is included within the rel tag (WordPress includes it by default and there’s no WordPress option to turn it off) then when Google crawls this backlink, it sees ‘nofollow’ in the tag and excludes the link from being counted as an actual backlink to your site! – NUTS! This nofollow crap was supposed to reduced spam comments (it doesn’t) and so it’s just hurting people from promoting their sites and connecting to each other.
I’ve become paranoid now about posting comments on blogs – I check its source code and head directly to the comments section, checking to see if nofollow is lurking about. I shouldn’t though; posting comments isn’t solely about generating more backlinks, but it’s a nice bonus!
There is hope though – for WordPress users there are plenty of plugins available that will strip the nofollow attribute from the HTML before it is posted, allowing your readers to post their comments knowing that they can promote their own site while contributing to your own. I’m using a plugin by Kimmo Suominen that’s easy to install and does the job well. Randa Clay has created some nice de facto official dofollow badges that one can put on their site declaring that it is nofollow free – see below this post? That’s one there!
I thought every linked post I made was a backlink to help promote this site – guess not. It’s great though to be aware about this now and to know that so many people are changing their HTML to get rid of this vestigal piece of code.
Update: I’m going to be a complete hypocrite now, I want to see if adding the nofollow tag actually has an influence on a sites pagerank. As soon as I find out for sure I’ll put the nofollow tag back in
Technorati Tags: u comment i follow, dofollow, commenting
Images Missing From Site. Don’t Panic – That’s My Job!
I’ve just noticed that a lot of images have vanished from this site – It’s rather ticked me off as I don’t have any backups with me at the moment. All images should have had ALT tags with them so you hopefully have some idea what the images were. Sorry for the inconvenience – I’ll restore all images within 24 48 hours. (Starting…. NOW!)
Breaking News: As far as I can tell all images have been restored. HURRAY! Think I’ll go make some backups…
RSS Feed Changed To Summaries – Stupid Google Adsense!
While I would prefer to provide a full RSS feed for this site, for the immediate future I’m sorry to say I can not. WordPress is just great – each post one makes is automatically added to ones feed at http://yoursite.com/feed. So in my case it’s located at http://projectvisual.net/feed. Unfortunately when I set my feed to full posts, WordPress also includes my Google Adsense ads that are at the beginning of each post. Now I can’t imagine anything more annoying than subscribing to a feed only to find adverts in them – I’d drop that feed without a seconds hesitation!
At the moment I’m unsure how to easily edit this feed, or if there’s a plugin to disable the Adsense code from being included. I could just make the feed manually but availing of the automatic feed that WordPress provides is just so fluidic I’m hesitant to give it up! So for the moment I’ll just be providing a summary feed (there’s no Adsense code in these) and as soon as I figure out how to disable the code from the full feed they’ll be back up again.
Changing From Rapidweaver To WordPress!
Hello everyone! I’ve just transferred by website from rapidweaver to WordPress, since I am hosted by Dreamhost and they offer 1 click installs of all the necessary software. Transferring over will also let me upload new posts from any computer, rather than being confined to using my oWn rapidweaver file on my laptop!
In the meantime why not check out the most recent posts to the right? Maybe what you’re looking for is there!
