HAVE A PHOTOBLOG DAY ALL TO YOURSELF

Imagine a day when, the content of your photoblog (say four or five posts), suddenly appears in 50 other photoblogs as the latest post.  The lastest content from your photoblog is suddenly all over the internet.  People are discovering your photos wherever they go.  As the day goes on, other posts begin to appear in the 50 photoblogs, and slowly the post with your wonderful content drops down a notch… and eventually becomes another archived post. But since the post is through an RSS feed, it still changes as you add new photos to your blog.

Still, every so often, since you’ve been featured in 50 photoblogs, you still get a better ranking in search engines, and your traffic goes up.

That’s the idea of the Photoblogger Society.

To make this work, you’ll need to be accepted into the Photoblogger For A Day Society.  And when asked to, 50 times a year if there are 50 members, you’ll be asked to feature another photobloggers content in your blog as a post.  Don’t worry.  You don’t need to write anything.  You will be supplied a few lines of RSS code and copy and paste that into a post in your blog.  That’s all there is to it.

IMPORTANT WORDPRESS REQUIREMENT: The code you will be given to display in your post uses Javascript.  That’s what Feedburner (owned by Google) generates.  If your photoblog is hosted at Wordpress.com (the free version), then you may already know – they will not run Javascript.  No way.  If you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog (such as the one you’re reading now) that no problem.  Javascript is fine.  So once again, if you have a site that looks something like dbeckerman.wordpress.com, I can’t accept you as a member because your site won’t be able to display other photobloggers sites.

What will show up on other people’s sites.
What would be best is if your feed has your best / most striking images. For example, on my site, I created a category called, Best-Photos. That’s the category/feed that I’m going to use. If you just leave it up to chance, you’re latest blog posts may just be rants about this or that and won’t really be what you want to deluge the world with. Or at least, not what I’m looking to deluge the world of photoblogs with.

In wordpress, you just need to add “feed” after the the url. For example, my category feed for Best-Photos looks like this: http://beckermanphoto.com/blog/best-photos/feed

How it Works

Assuming that you have been accepted, you will have supplied the society editor with the RSS address for your blog.  *See previous notes about what should be in the feed* The editor puts that into Feedburner / BuzzBlast which will give the editor a few lines of code (actually it’s a single line of javascript that points back to Feedburner) and you’ll be able to select whether to show the other photobloggers work as FULL HTML or PLAIN.

YOU DO NOT NEED FEEDBURNER.  YOU DON’T NEED A FEEDBURNER ACCOUNT.  You don’t need to know anything about feedburner or RSS.  All you need to know is the RSS feed for your own site (you’ll be filling that out in the application below); and how to copy and paste code into your own new blog post.

The goal is to gain exposure for fine art photographers. Although my site is all black and white photography; and all urban. That doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters in terms of being accepted is the quality of your work from a creative point of view and the depth of your photoblog portfolio.  In other words, we’re interested in photobloggers with a good deal of high quality posts.

TIP: WHAT FEED SHOULD YOU USE?

When you’re day comes, you might want to have a feed to your best pictures, rather than just the first six or so posts in your blog.  With wordpress you can get a feed to a category very easily.  For example, here’s the RSS feed to my “best-shots” category from my blog:

http://www.beckermanphoto.com/blog/category/best-photos/feed

I’ll e-mail you after I’ve had a chance to review your photoblog whether you are in or not.

You’ll need to fill in the information below so that your photoblog can be considered.

Current Editor: Dave Beckerman

Test Code Page
If you’d like to see whether the code will work in your photoblog, here’s the code and a PhotoBlogger Society badge that will show 6 posts from this blog. What I’ve done is to create a category with my Best Posts, and that’s what will be pulled into your photoblog. CODE TO TEST HOW ANOTHER PHOTOBLOG WILL APPEAR IN YOUR SITE.

Feel free to delete the post after you see whether it works.