I don’t usually talk about the mechanics of running a travel blog while on the road. Most of the people who visit here are more interested in seeing photos and hearing stories of the the places I visit. Nonetheless, it is occasionally necessary to delve into the dirty underside of the business of running this site.
Sometime in the next week you should see a brand new version 3.0 of my website. It has taken a lot of time and but it is almost ready to go. I’ve never been satisfied with my website, so I got some professional help. I think the new site looks great and will be something I can live with for quite a while. It will be more visual, easier to navigate, and should really show off my photography much better.
Organizing my photography has been a real sore spot for me. Back in May I tried to self host my photos with a Galley2, which is open source photo management software. While it works, it has proven difficult to manage by myself. It has also failed spectacularly in my main objective of getting my photos indexed by Google Images. Less than 10% of my photos have been indexed in almost a year.
I also am now taking up 20gb of storage on my webserver which is waaay more than what I’m paying for. I am going to move to Smugmug.com as my photography solution. Not only is it cheaper than trying to self host 20gb of photos, but they have everything which Flickr doesn’t. I can map my own domain name to my Smugmug site, which means I can point photography.Everything-Everywhere.com to them and no one need know they are at another site…except for the fact that I just told everyone. I can protect images by blocking download of images larger than a set size, which Flickr cannot do. I’m pretty confident that Smugmug will be my long term photo solution. So far, the support they’ve given has been fantastic.
Going back and fixing the links to all my images is going to take a bunch of work. Going back and changing the links doesn’t bother so much as trying to do it with Egyptian bandwidth. I’m guessing it is a process which will take about 2 months, working on it on and off. I have also not been able to upload most of my photos since I’ve arrived in the Middle East. I’m sitting on almost 300 photos from the last 2 months which I can’t upload because the connection is too slow. One photo can take 10-20 minutes and the connection will usually time out before it is finished.
When the dust settles, everything should be working like I want it to. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Managing a website from the middle of nowhere can be a pain in the butt sometimes, but overall I really enjoy it.