Twelve Black Code Monkeys

My friend Eric at Off Wing mentions that he is getting more hits from Firefox. I’ve mentioned how much I love Firefox but hadn’t bothered to check my logs. So just now I went and, holy cow, 21.5% of my hits are coming from Firefox! Another 5.61% are coming from Safari, which is the Mac version of Firefox. IE is still #1 with 62%, but I remember checking just a few months ago, before I knew about Firefox, and IE was up at 90%! Way to go, Mozilla! At this rate FF will overtake IE in another few months.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

There is a huge glut of information out there today. Not only do we have the standard news feeds from the news giants like AP, Reuters, CNN, etc., but there are countless web-centric news outlets and of course the millions of blogs that provide RSS feeds.

I think I’ve been news-addicted since high school. One event sticks in my mind from back then – the Challenger disaster in 1986. I was in an art class and someone came in to say the Challenger had blown up. We all thought it was a joke and then the teacher put on a radio and we listened for the rest of class. When I got home I turned on CNN and watched the horrible spectacle for several hours straight. After that Headline News became my background noise. If I wasn’t watching but just wanted the TV on in the background, it was always tuned to Headline News.

Now that the Internet provides me immediate access to all kinds of stuff, I tend to get a lot of my news from Google News. I know you can collect a custom set of RSS feeds via your newsreader, but I’ve found doing so makes me feel like I need to go scan each and every article. In trying to limit the amount of time I spend on this stuff, I find just find browsing through the main Google News page is easier. Sure, I’m letting someone else filter the news for me, but for the moment, that’s ok.

For those who want a little more dynamic access to what’s going on in the world, I recently found out about a couple of sites that display news in a much more graphical way, and I may end up switching over to them eventually myself:

TenByTen.org: This site displays a flash animation consisting of a 10×10 grid of images culled from major news stories from Reuters, BBC, and the New York Times. Because it uses images, you can immediately see which stories are getting the most coverage. Unfortunately it’s not really configurable. You just get any story from just these three sources. You can’t specify categories or search words, and what I’d love is to be able to expand or contract the dimensions of the grid as well as the actual images, which are fairly small on my high-resolution screen.

NewsisFree.com: NewsIsFree has lots of different features that allow you to syndicate news on your site, browse news, and more. What I found most immediately useful (partially because it’s free) is their “News Map” which is a great Java applet that produces a graphical representation of the current news. Although it doesn’t produce images like TenByTen, it does create a kind of color-coded “map” that contains different-sized rectangular areas kind of like a county or district electoral map. You can group articles by popularity or source; you can color code or size by popularity or age. You can also filter for various news categories or individual keywords, and the list of sources is numbers over 100. It’s definitely a potentially very powerful tool for news junkies, editors, and bloggers. Speaking of bloggers, creating a site like this that searched the blogosphere and not the mainstream media outlets would be great – you could discover memes very quickly indeed!

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

I’ve been using Firefox for a while now and played with a bunch of the extension – I have a list here of the ones I like. Another feature that FF has is an integrated text field for searching for something on various sites. So instead of having to go to google to look something up, you can just type it in this text field on the browser. FF comes by default with “engines” for Google, Amazon, Ebay, Dictionary.com and Creative Commons.

I’ve downloaded toolbars in the past that did this in Internet Explorer, but was never very impressed, and my initial impression of this feature on FF was the same. One of the things that got to me was the inconvenience of having to click on the field. I tried figuring out a way to tab over to the field, but that didn’t seem to work, so I decided it wasn’t possible. I’m one of those people who uses the keyboard as much as I can over the mouse, especially when dealing with a situation where I know I’m going to be entering text – and that’s what the whole search thing is about!

Today I read a post on Engadget about how someone had created an engine for searches for their site in FF and that led me to Mozilla’s page dedicated to these. Like FF’s extensions and themes, one can install new search engines, and there are quite a few of them out there. I went browsing and came up with a bunch for sites that I go to on a fairly regular basis, or ones that looked like they might be very useful.

Doing a little more digging, I found that I can get to the search field easily with a control-K or control-E on my PC (probably the same for the Mac?). So far so good, however, there didn’t seem to be an obvious way of actually specifying what search engine you wanted to use. It’s one thing if you use one of these 99% of the time, but what if you use a variety of them? I discovered that when you hit control-K, and if there’s a no previous search word in the field, you can click the up or down arrow to present you with a scrollable list of previous search words. If there was a word already there, it will just highlight it and the arrow keys don’t do anything unless you hit delete to clear the field. Instead of hitting the arrow keys, if you hit control in combination with the arrow keys, the little icon that represents which engine to use changes! Voila! The only problem is that you now have to distinguish the search engine you want by this tiny icon. It’s better than nothing, but I wish someone would change this to simply pop up the same list that you see in my screen capture, which currently is only available by… yes clicking on the mouse on that little engine icon. The other little nigly problem I have is that I can’t see a way of removing these engines. It’s probably something I’ve just overlooked, but there should be some kind of “manage engines” screen linked to the pull-down list of engines.

In any case, despite the fact that the interface isn’t optimal to my peculiar preferences, the feature does seem to be potentially extremely powerful. It theoretically lets you find a piece info by hitting a key combo (control-K), typing a word, number, etc. into the field, and if necessary hitting another key combo of control-down-arrow until the desired engine is selected, and then finally hitting enter. Seems like a process that could take a few seconds before results pop up as opposed to browsing to a new site, clicking into the field you need, typing the search, and hitting return. I just tried this out and it took me approximately 3 or 4 seconds to look up Liv Tyler in IMDB and get the results on my screen – from thought to result in a few seconds. Doing it in the standard way took at least twice as long. The differential will vary, I know, but all in all, I feel a bit silly for initially discounting what could potentially be such a powerful tool! Here’s a list of the ones I installed with links to install them yourself if you are using Firefox [correction: there doesn't seem to be a way to easily create these links, but I'm trying to contact th developer community to see if it's possible and if it is I'll be updating this entry - for now, you'll have to settle for just a list - you can go to the site to install them yourself]

• Wikipedia – the collaborative encyclopedia – the English version
• IMDB – Internet Movie Database
• Pubmed Books – search for books geared to professionals in Medicine
• WebMD – Medical lookups
• Moviefone Location – type a zipcode to get a list of theaters and what they’re playing
• Moviefone title – type in a movie title to get a list of theathers it’s playing in
• MRQE - search printed or online reviews for a film
• Daypop – search both regular websites and the blogosphere in one shot.
• Froogle – search Google’s comparison shopping engine for a given product
• Shopping.com – similar to Froogle
• PriceGrabber – another price comparison engine
• Yahoo! Auctions – why be satisfied with only eBay’s auctions?
• Amazon.com Auctions – yet more auctions
• Yahoo Yellow Pages – find a store or company, etc. (this is one of those where you need to also specify where you are searching, but if you already have done this previously, it’s probably set in a cookie and doesn’t need to be done again)
• Torrentsearch – Mmmmm files….
• Craigs List For Sale – the local version of eBay, or something like that. I’ve never used it personally but have heard a bit about it
• The Quotations Page – to figure out where the hell that thing you just said came from!
• Jewish Encyclopedia – never used it, but figured it might be useful when a non-jewish friend asks why shellfish isn’t kosher, or somesuch, and since my own knowledge of this stuff is lacking to say the least!
• HowStuffWorks – when you really need to know why that evil sump pump just decided to stop working and create an indoor pool in your house
• AllRecipes – give the microwave a break and cook some real food!
• Epicurious – I think this is another recipe sight or general culinary/food info site
• Acronym Finder – What is this damn “FF” I keep seeing everywhere?
• Webster Thesaurus – like, uh… you know!
• Wordorigins.org – for when you’re really bored

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

As I become more and more addicted to reading news from a collection of blogs and other sites, I have been trying to come up with ways to get more of this reading done faster.

Newsreaders have been a favorite tool for some. It’s a program that one downloads and installs on a computer and lets you subscribe to and read just the content of each entry of each feed without having to navigate to different addresses. This blog is actually a default syndicated blog for one such newsreader, called Project DU.

While such applications serve their purpose and do make things easier, I haven’t quite taken to them yet. This may be simply because I haven’t really played with many, and I might find them to be much more useful than the alternative I list below. But the main problem I see with these is that they are somewhat proprietary, meaning that I can’t just use them on any and all platforms I want. They are usually designed for the PC, or for Mac, or for a mobile device, but not all of them. Plus I don’t want to go around installing programs on a friend’s machine and I’m not supposed to install any programs on my work machine either. Finally, I have a Treo 600 Phone that theoretically could serve as a way to read some of these feeds, but the Treo newsreaders I’ve played with so far have left me wanting.

I want something that I can access from all the platforms I use, be they my home computer, work computer, phone, or a friend’s computer. With this in mind, it seems, the perfect solution is something along the lines of a web-based newsreader. My Yahoo! has a beta that incorporates RSS feeds, and it’s probably only a matter of time before Gmail supports them as well. But so far the site that has been most useful to me is Bloglines. The features make reading news very flexible. I can wade through the dozens or even hundreds of messages and check off the ones I want to come back and read later. Those will stay until I tell them to go. It remembers what I’ve read and what I haven’t. It just makes managing the reading a lot easier. And I just found out that it has a mobile version, woo hoo! Of course, the mobile version seems to be lacking some of the main feature I find the most useful! Hopefully, though, they will be added it soon.

I’m not stuck on Bloglines by any means, but currently it suits my needs the closest. I think in the future I may start downloading “podcasts.” Currently podcasts are primarily audio content that is normally listened to on the net via streaming audio – internet radio programs and such. But I see the potential of this idea combining with the popularity of newsfeeds and weblogs to compel bloggers and others to actually create audio versions of their content so that they can be listened to in addition to being read. This would tremendously increase the amount of feeds one could keep track of, especially for those who do a lot of driving and/or exercising, or other activities where reading simultaneously is an impossibility. There does seem to be so much development in this area that it will become easier and easier to find ways to manage and keep up to date with your favorite feeds almost anywhere.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

The web browser that comes with my phone, the Treo 600, is not a bad browser at all, at least compared to other alternatives. Many phones simply have a “WAP” browser, which can only display text, and not much of it at that. You cannot go to a regular web page with such a browser, the webmaster has to intentionally create a WAP version of the site. Even with my T-Mobile Sidekick, a device made for surfing the web among other things, one can’t get to a lot of sites because the browser won’t support JavaScript, Java Applets, or other such browser technologies. So when I got my Treo 600 I was delighted that Blazer, the browser that comes with the phone, was able to get to most sites and display them properly.

Being a web developer I’ve had the blessing of being used to higher-speed internet for a good 5 years now, maybe a little more. So using a mobile phone, especially one that uses the now aging standard of GPRS for its data communications, feels like going back in time. The fact is that GPRS only communicates at modem speeds. Thankfully, many phone browser solutions out there use what are known as “proxy servers” which serve as an intermediary between your phone and the website you want to view:

1. Your phone sends the proxy server a request to see a web page at GPRS (slow) speed
2. The proxy server, which is connected to the internet via a very fast connection, then retrieves the web page in an instant.
3. The proxy server then parses through the web page code looking for ways to make it smaller in size. So, for example, it takes images and shrinks them, and takes certain things your phone’s browser can’t display anyway, and gets rid of them. So a page that might originally be 100K in size shrinks to 10K or less.
4. The Proxy server finally sends the shrunken page back to your phone at GPRS speed.

So, in this way, the effective retrieval speeds for web pages are a lot faster than what a modem would offer, although it still can often feel a lot more sluggish than my T3 at work, or even a home DSL or a cable modem connection.

MyTreo.Net is one of the sites out there that I go to from time to time to talk about the Treo and to see what the newest hot programs are. They are unique, I think, in forging relationships with many developers so that the developers can put out their unfinished product to a select group of users and can then get feedback within the MyTreo message boards. This is how the new Chatter Email app has been handled.

In the same way, a Japanese company called Mobirus which has had an alternate web browser out for a while called Xiino, has been using a similar relationship to get a new version of their browser out in a condition that will suit Treo 600 users. I’ve tried their beta version of this browser out just a little and I can say that it is much faster than Blazer. It renders pages a little differently, opting to shrink graphics down so much that the page looks very similar to what it would look like on a regular screen. The problem is that because the Treo’s screen is so small, these images become tiny. While this isn’t a problem with some pages, many pages use images as navigational buttons. If they have text on them they become illegible and they are also hard to select. I also had a problem with some images just not coming up. Nevertheless, this was just released to the community and it looks like Mobirus is very active in attacking any and all issues that people are having, so I suspect a much more polished product will be available fairly soon.

I do sometimes feel like all this work will be made irrelevant within a fairly short period of time – a year or three? – since technology is such that there’s lots of leapfrogging going on. It could just be a lot sooner than we think that there’s ubiquitous ( and I mean really ubiquitous) high-speed wireless access in addition to devices that use flexible polymer screens that can be rolled up or folded into one’s pocket, but when unfolded can be as big as a standard monitor. I guess at least until then it will make a lot of people’s experience a lot better, it just seems sad that all this work will be made irrelevant one day. But I guess that’s true of a lot of things in technology and you can’t let this become a barrier to providing interim solutions. After all, something in how Mobirus gets their browser to work so quickly may yet be useful in some other application that we simply can’t predict right now. Well, maybe Mobirus can.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

You would think that having been blogging for over a year and using a Treo 600 and before that a Sidekick I would have caught onto moblogging already. Perhaps its because I don’t go on a whole lot of trips and when I do go on trips I often bring my laptop and can post blog entries.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “moblogging” is short for mobile blogging and involves posting blog entries, often with images, but not necessarily, from your mobile phone, which is much more portable than even a laptop. Then again, taking pictures on your digital camera, downloading them to the PC, then emailing them, especially if you normally take them in RAW format, can be a very time-consuming process that works against the whole idea of blogging while on travel.

While I’m sure people have been doing this for a few years now (that is sending images and blog entries from their phone), it really hasn’t caught on until this last 6-12 months due to camera’s on phones either not being very good, or not even existing! In fact, my Color Sidekick’s camera, even though it was much better than the old one on the Black and White Sidekick I had initially, still produced a pathetically bad picture. It was only when I obtained my Treo 600 a couple of months ago that I had at my disposal a camera that I could actually bear to look at its 640 x 480 images (0.3 megapixel). Even so, they are pretty darn small and poor quality compared even to my first 1.3 megapixel camera that I got back in 2000. Suffice it to say I can’t wait until then next version of the Treo comes out which rumor has it contains a real 1 megapixel camera. I would be happy with just a half a megapixel (or 800 x 600), but I’ll take a full MP, as long as it doesn’t seriously tax the processor. I’m just afraid that pushing up the resolution too much may require many more seconds to record an image, thus making it hard to take very many pictures in a given period of time, so you could miss out on a bunch of great shots. A secondary issue for some may be the text entry process. Most phones are horrible at this and it will take you forever just to write a sentence. More specialized devices with keyboards like the Treo, the Blackberry, and the Sidekick, have keyboards that allow for much easier typing, although still not as easy as a full-sized keyboard.

In any case, after getting my Treo and starting to explore the wide world of applications out there, I came across a category of blogging tools. I tried a couple out, but didn’t get all that far. The ones I tried out really only let you send plain text and maybe upload an image, but you couldn’t submit html which would allow you to create links. Of course, I’ve only played with a couple of these, so I still need to do a lot more searching. In the mean time, I heard about these moblog sites that are specifically set up for mobile blogging. I found probably a good half dozen of these sites and culled this number down to a couple that looked like they were nicely polished, slick, and had lots of features and which you didn’t have to pay for – or at least there was a free account option in addition to payed premium account options. Those two moblog sites are Buzznet and TextAmerica.

My idea was to pick one and take pictures on my recent trip to North Carolina and send the pictures. Of course, things were just too busy before the trip and during to figure out which site would work best, so I ended up just deciding to take a few pictures and then wait till I got back and had a bit of free time to explore these sites more. Now that I’m back, that’s just what I’m doing:

Buzznet – So far, Buzznet is free, but will supposedly be unveiling a paid service in the future which will affect what they offer for the free account. Their interface to me is a little more intuitive and it’s less JavaScript-intensive which just means that I might be able to access it via the web browser on my Treo as opposed to TextAmerica which might not work. Their user pages (where your photos show up) look a whole lot nicer than the default you get with (the free version of ) TextAmerica. The one problem I’ve had with Buzznet so far is that it seems to be slow, both when you go to their site, but more importantly in actually posting images. When I posted a test image to both sites via email, the one TextAmerica image came up immediately whereas I had to wait a couple of minutes for Buzznet to display it. Then I tried a couple more and nothing happened! Eventually – like 20 or 30 minutes later – I got replies from Buzznet with some error messages, but then when I checked the images were finally visible. Another downside is that Buzznet only allows you to post 10 images per day and 200 per month (for now), The other not so great thing about Buzznet is that there’s very little in the way of support. They have an FAQ and some help information on some of the screens, but this doesn’t amount to much. There are no support forums or a support page, or even an email for support. This is really important in my opinion and a company that doesn’t set up a support infrastructure to help their users and for their users to help each other is, I think, shooting itself in the foot. The one thing that makes Buzznet usable for me, though, is that they let you syndicate your content very easily. They provide feed files in a bunch of different formats and also provide a JavaScript tag that just lets you embed the content. Here, though, we again come to the weakness in not having adequate support info: apparently you can customize how your content is formatted where it’s being syndicated, but there’s no information on how to actually modify the feeds or the JavaScript. Nevertheless, the default is decent enough that I have added it to the right side of my blog here. If you don’t see it, scroll up or down a bit and you should see the last 5 images from my Buzznet moblog (I’ve only put two in so far as of this writing). You can click on these images to get a title and more detailed description. What I would like to customize is just to be able to include the title with the image here on the right…

TextAmerica – TextAmerica seems to have a lot of strengths where Buzznet is weak and visa versa. As mentioned, the initial image I posted came up immediately after it was sent. The main pages and the admin pages are very slick looking, but individual moblog pages seem very plain in comparison. For some, this may actually be preferable, but not for others. Unlike Buzznet, TextAmerica has extensive help information in their user guide. In addition to this they have an FAQ, and moblog hosted by their technical support person which includes updates on features and fixes as they are made. Finally, they actually have someone you can IM with questions to get immediate help (although when I looked this screen name was not logged in. The free service comes with 25MB of storage, enough for at least 500 small images, and a lot more if they are compressed enough. Unfortunately, going up one level to the paid service will jump you up to $7/month. This provides a bunch of additional features, twice the storage and additional bandwidth. The main thing that I wanted to do, though, has eluded me so far with TextAmerica. They say on their FAQ that there is code available that will let you syndicate your moblog, but they don’t provide it there and a search in their userguide also turned up nothing, so for now this pretty much eliminates TextAmerica as far as I’m concerned, but I am going to try to get in touch with them to see if I can get this code from them to syndicate here.

There’s something else that these sites offer for some people which is just as important as the functionality of posting your pictures – a community. People get to link to each other, label themselves as friends of another user, comment on their entries, etc. – genuinely picture-sharing sites. While definitely an interesting function, and very useful for some, it isn’t really something I want to use it for. I have a blog here at blog city and do all my writing here, so why have another just for photos? My inclination is to basically stick to one host for everything. I know people who have blogs, Livejournal journals, moblogs, and more where you can find their various kinds of content. To me, though, it’s a lot easier if I have a central place to go to for everything and I think easier for others as well. So why would I then go to another service for moblogging? Well, while Blog City, my blog host, does have SOME of the functionality of a moblog. I can email text entries from my phone and have the show up in my blog. I can also email an address at Blog City with an attached image and it will show up in my photo album. But unfortunately so far you cannot post an entry with both text and an image in it via an email with an attached photo and some text, which is what you would need to emulate the functionality of a moblog. I’ve contacted Blog City and as usual they were very receptive about the idea, but who knows how hard it is to implement and thus when (or if) it will. All I know is if it is offered then I can actually ditch the separate moblogs and use Blog City exclusively, which would be a whole lot simpler!

As you can tell, I am still really feeling my way through this whole phenomenon, and I may be missing a lot of things that some moblog veterans out there may be shaking their heads at. All I can say is – please correct me! Anything that I don’t have right, or that’s incomplete, please enlighten me (us) as to what the real deal is. If you have additional suggestions or corrections, I want to hear them!

Update: I finally got ahold of the TextAmerica support person via AIM and they said that syndication was only available on “upgraded” (read paid) accounts. Free accounts do not provide this, so I think it looks like Buzznet for now unless I come accross another moblog host that was previously unknown to me that provides even more for free…

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

Back a few months ago I was on a hunt to find a better site to host my digital photos and let me share them with others. I have used a couple of sites for years:

Imagestation.com is a site started by Sony that I subscribed to because it was free and because my first digital camera back in 2000 was a Sony. Doing research later I found it to be one of the most sophisticated sites at the time and probably the most likely to stay in business during what turned out to be the begging of the dot bomb (dot com crash).

Pbase.com is a hopegrown site developed by one person that was initially free. Other than the difference between an individual owning the site vs. a massive corporation, a few others were as follows: Imagestation offers prints and unlimited downloads, Pbase offers a Bulletin Board system, and is more geared towards professionals, with display of exif info, incredible flexibility in display, etc. Pbase was initially free, but eventually started charging a fee.

So for a long time I was actually storing my photos on both of these sites. I would upload the original image to Imagestation because I got unlimited storage, so it was a sort of extra backup scheme. Then I would upload a 640×480 or 800×600 reduced image to Pbase. The other thing that Imagestation has going for it is that you can create a list of people, even by importing your address book from Outlook or other application, so that you can quickly send out mass invites to see a new album. I would sometimes use this feature, but eventually Imagestation made it so that you had to register on their site in order to look at images, and some of my friends just did not want to do this.

I got married in October of 2003 and my wife has a side business in photography which I have been starting to contribute to at least in a minor way. She did not host her photos anywhere and I really felt like the double work I was doing posting my shots to two separate sites was wasting time. Furthermore we wanted a site where we could also upload all our wedding shots so that the guests at our wedding could look at them and even order prints if they so chose.

So I started doing an exhaustive search. I started with a great resource that lets you compare different sites based on a bunch of different criteria. Some of the information is not very complete and it’s really hard to get a handle on exactly how a site is going to work until you actually go to it and try using it. So I started subscribing to many of these sites, posting some sample images, editing, deleting, changing the display properties, and so forth. Other than wanting to have prints as an option, other things I looked for were display flexibility (different resolutions, customizability of the layout, password protection, hierarchical structure of albums within folders, ease of moving images around, deleting, etc), how stable the company looked, how responsive they are to customers, whether they are geared to professionals, and many others.

I created a big spreadsheet which I unfortunately don’t have anymore, and after starting with probably 30 sites (after eliminating some almost immediately because they didn’t have some basic feature or just looked really amateurish, nascent, or scammish), I finally got it down to 5 sites. These sites were Clubphoto.com, Printroom.com, Fotki.com, Fototime.com, and Smugmug.com. All of these sites have different strengths and weaknesses in their interface, features, etc. I was having a hard time paring it down from here, so I figured this was a good point to actually compare the print quality. We ordered about 6 or 7 prints (the same ones) from each of these sites and compared them. My wife, who has a much better eye for these things than myself, picked Smugmug as having the most realistic color reproduction. So after a little further looking to make sure there weren’t any serious deficits, we took the plunge and went for one of their professional level subscriptions.

Boy, am I glad that we made that decision! They have been nothing but a pleasure to work with. Admittedly we have not ordered any other prints, nor have any of our wedding guests as far as we know, but otherwise, I have gotten extremely fast responses to any of my questions, suggestions, or an occasional spotting of a typo or other minor bug. Smugmug is run by a whole family. Chris MacAskill, his wife, sons, daughter, daughter in law, etc., created and manage the site. They do it with the pride and attention that shines through. They are extremely responsive to customers’ suggestions, going so far as to change their printing partner based on feedback from customers. It’s actually a bit funny that they did this, since we had based our decision off of their old printing partner, which happened to be the Clubphoto! Luckily, though, their new partner is the same lab as used by Printroom.com, EZprints, and this came in a close second to Clubphoto when we were comparing them. The apparent advantage of EZprints is that they provide proofs and ICC profiles, which are invaluable for photographers wanting to really make sure the end product matches what they see on their screen as closely as possible. They even wrote up a very thorough explanation of why they switched Ezprints. In other words, they really base their decisions on feedback from customers and totally keep those customers in the loop at every stage of the process! Since we’ve joined they’ve made some fairly significant additions to the features on the site (watermarking and the ability to customize your print prices just to name a couple) and you really get the impression that they are constantly working on new ones. They have also been active responding to questions posted in the forums on dpreview.com, where more and more photographers are repeating the good reviews I’m giving them here.

I definitely would recommend that you at least include them as one of the photo sharing/hosting sites that you look at when doing your own comparisons. Everyone has different requirements and priorities so they may not be the perfect host for everyone, but they will be for many. Here’s a link to my own galleries on the site – just note that none of these images are edited in any way. One of the things that is on my very long list of things to do is to get more skilled at Photoshop so that I can start editing my images in a competent way! If you do end up signing up for an account, I would just ask that you give my “coupon code” in the referral field. Of course it’s completely up to you, but it will at least give you $5 off the membership if you decide to go with them, and it will also compensate me for taking the time to write all this out ($10), lol! My coupon code is KBtZHuH46Crcw. Whichever host you end up with, good luck, and send me a link!

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!

 

As I’ve described in detail here before, I have been into photography for much of my life. After selling my old SLR after college to pay some bills, I spent many years without any camera at all, but then got a point and shoot 35mm, and soon had my first digital camera. I’m not on my 4th digital and I’m pretty sure than my next digital will be either a “prosumer” or professional digital SLR – either the Cannon EOS Digital Rebel 300D, or the EOS 10D.

Anyway, most of my digital photos are online at Pbase, a site I joined a couple of years ago that is a kind of home-grown site which used to be totally free, but now charges for hosting images. Now that we have all these wedding pictures we want to share with people – and let them print the ones they want directly as opposed to going through us – I have been looking into alternatives to Pbase to host my images. Pbase has no printmaking services. Many other sites do have print services, and in the past I used Sony Imagestation for this purpose. But that site has its disadvantages as well. I came across a great site that compares a lot of image hosting sites, and used its search engine as a starting point for looking for a site that would suit my needs. So far, I have pared my list down to 5 sites: Fotki, FotoTime, ImageEvent, Printroom Professional, and Smugmug Professional.

Even trying out the free versions of these sites and looking at reviews, it’s still hard to get a feel for which would be ideal. Another resource that I’ve found helpful in my search was dpreview.com. This is my favorite digital photography site as it has great reviews, lots of news, and a huge, extremely active discussion forum. On it there are discussions about various image hosts, but kind of scattered all over the place, and really not enough for me to make a decision that may entail laying out a decent amount of money for a year’s subscription. I felt there was a need for such a forum so I created my 4th Yahoo! Group, Image Hosting Sites. Hopefully it will generate some great discussions and resources.

A couple of other sites that do some comparisons of image hosting sites are:

Digitalvale.com

Rachael Kreisler’s review of print quality (no longer available)

If you have any experience (good or bad) with any image-hosting site, I’d love to hear about it, either here or at the Yahoo! Group.

Evernote lets you save all the interesting things you see online into a single place. Access all those saved pages from your computer, phone or the web. Sign up now or learn more. It's free!