dispatches

The impending vacation

I'm off to Maui in a couple of days, for a week. It's not a job. It's an actual vacation, with Robin. She just concluded writing her latest book, “The Trauma Treatment Handbook,” and her due is that she gets to go to a warm, sunny place. Where she can snorkel. 

I'm coming along as the mate, even though warmth and sun in a destination are qualities I try to avoid if possible. I find the sun mostly an annoyance and an irritant. Back when I was travelling  on my own, it was to Ireland in January. If I knew of a location in the continental US cloudier than where I live now, I would probably move there. 

Nonetheless, I'm making a vacation out of it. Maui looks pretty cool in the guidebooks, if one stays out of the resorts. In consolation, I was able to book three nights in Hana, on the wet side of the island. 

One of the ways I'm making this a real vacation is that I'm not taking a computer. I lose hours at night when I travel to processing photos. I'll travel with my entire stash of CF cards instead, and just store them up. The biggest impact will be a hiatus on the Daily Photo updates. I'll keep up on email on the iPhone, so this isn't a total digital-free interval. But I spend too much of my life at a screen, and I look forward to a break.

Robin hasn't decided yet whether to go computer-free or not. She has an incipient Facebook addiction brewing, and is torn. If she brings hers, we won't fight over iPhone access. But I might end up as the abandoned spouse, instead of the other way around. 

If you want to watch how this unwinds, follow me on Twitter. 

Twitter, Facebook and me

I don't pretend to blog because I have a huge audience craving my thoughts. After five years of Dispatches, my stats are laughably minuscule. My Daily Photo audience has been even smaller, mostly because I have no text on that blog that a search engine can grab onto. But lately, the situation has reversed. My Daily Photo traffic is double, sometimes triple that of the written blog. Why? 

Facebook. 

Since I began micro-blogging on Twitter, and feeding that stream to Facebook, the number of people who are paying attention to what I do has multiplied severalfold. I suspect that many people who pay attention to web information have migrated their reading to the social media sites, and that has knocked back readership stats on a lot of personal blogs. My numbers on Dispatches have been trending downwards for the past year. But every day I get several new Twitter followers.

Some of those are social media parasites responding to a search term, and I will often block those if their website link or their posts look too smarmy. But many are readers that appear genuinely interested in what I have to say. Just like in the beginning of the blog craze several years ago. 

I cross post everything―blog posts go to Facebook. Twitter posts show up on the blog and Facebook. But I noticed a big uptick on Daily Photo traffic when I made a separate entry on Facebook, with the photo. Text didn't drive traffic. A photo did. I post to both platforms now, every day. 

And my Daily Photo traffic has soared. 

The website redesign

A website redesign has sucked up much of my attention in the last two weeks. Here's what I learned. 

 Livebooks is the big player for professional photography websites, for good reason. Their sites look fabulous, and they have great credibility in both the photography and client communities. A newer player is Rob Haggart's A Photo Folio. Rob made his name in the community through his A Photo Editor blog, where his acerbic, jaded take on the magazine business won him massive attention, which he has parlayed into his website venture. 

Despite the tone of his personality, I decided his web platform would work better for me than Livebooks. What won me over was the video features. In a custom designed Livebooks site, you have to pay anytime you want to change a video. With A Photo Folio video changes were no harder than moving around an image portfolio. 

Livebooks seems to be going through a growth spurt lately, and it was amazingly difficult to talk to a live person about their product. When a salesman complained to me about how busy he was, it was a sign that my business wasn't particularly needed and I wasn't going to get the attention I wanted.

I thought I would get more assistance at APF, but setting up a website with them is entirely a DIY construction. The help manual is a kludgy, ill-organized affair, and I wrote a lot of support tickets to try and make things work. I really needed handholding at times, particularly when the DNS transfer broke my email. The founder's personality is unfortunately front and center, as when I wrote a rant about how difficult Google Apps was to figure out, he replied, in essence, “Get your assistant to figure it out for you.”

Notwithstanding that, I still think A Photo Folio was the right choice. I'm considering making a separate site with them for my wedding photography, though I'm a little unhappy that I'll need to pay a second monthly hosting fee. I'm open to alternatives. Got any?

The © bug

One of the annoyances of Photoshop and Bridge is that it's difficult to mark your photos as copyrighted. There's a metadata field for it, but the only access is to open up File-Info on each image, and change it in the metadata box there. 

Andrew Macpherson has written a small xml file to fix this. Go to his site and grab the file (right-click to download it), and move it here: Library/Application Support/Adobe/XMP/Metadata Templates/. If someone knows the PC equivalent of this location, let us know in the comments.

Now your photos will open up with this lovely © symbol.