Jun 272011
 

Maybe some paper dries instantly – but it all depends on what you mean by the word “dry.”  Inkjet paper may dry to the touch quickly, but many papers are still giving off gases for a day or so.  At any rate, this was the system that I came up with a few years back for stacking prints so that they could dry, get some air-flow, and at the same time not have dust, cat hair, and other junk fall onto the surface and possibly stick.

It’s cheap, and flexible meaning that you get to use your brackets for different sized paper and if you are doing this as a business you will have a house filled with cardboard sheets.

Just buy a bunch of right-angle brackets, and as your prints come out of the printer you create a stack like this.  I can do a stack of about eight at a time this way.  It’s especially useful for those of us that don’t have much horizontal space to work with.

12 x 18 stack of inkjets

 

An actual right-angle hinge and some inkjet cartridges

Jun 272011
 

I seem to have all these Doors songs rattling around in my head lately.  They keep popping up as post titles.  I wonder if that’s what happening to baby boomers all over the world right now.  As we move into our 60′s, we’ll get to live through the 60′s all over again.

Purpose of this post: I setup a new fan at the evil empire (Facebook)

If you would be kind enough to LIKE IT, then when I get to 25 likes I can give it a proper url.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-York-Photo-Blog/212600228785027 as opposed to being the number you see here.

Jun 252011
 

One area of the photography SEO that is especially confusing, is the Google image search. Now remember, I’m not talking about the normal web search for key words such as Black and White Photography or New York Photography, but the Google Image search.

I have no presence in that search.  And even if I do a search for my own name, Dave Beckerman, the images that show up are all mine, but from other people’s sites.  So even with years of futzing with the search engines, and reading as much as could find out about image searches, this is one area that remains completely mysterious.  It’s an interesting search – as I get to see some places where my images are being used, often without attribution, but as to why those other sites show up and not my own – as I say – I don’t have a clue.

 

Jun 232011
 

I posted a few days back about using a Wishlist (or favorite images) for users.  Now, one thing that I had totally forgotten about was that the favorites plugin also included an accumulated stats widget.  I just put it up in the photography store sidebar (scroll down a bit) and you’ll be able to see what people have added to their wishlists – which is to say a sort of real tally of what prints are most popular.

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Jun 232011
 

I realize that this post is pretty technical and is only going to make sense to about 1 percent of the readers of this blog, but nevertheless, no one is forcing you to read it. In fact, if you don’t know what PHP is and don’t know WordPress well, just pretend you never saw this post.

My photography store cart is built using the Simple Paypal Shopping Cart for WordPress.

Simple Paypal Shopping cart plugin is a simple plugin to setup for the non-programmer. By the time I get done with it – it has become complicated – but also solves a lot of work and makes it easy to add sizes and change prices with a few keystrokes.
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Jun 212011
 

And this, is exactly the problem with the whole cloud technology: my Time Warner connection is down.  I’m posting this with 3G from an iPhone.

The idea of having all my stuff on a cloud that I may or may not be able to connect to – that is a crazy thing.

Here I am with my fast connection down, but I can still work on all the images and documents that are stored on my mac. And they are backed up onto hard drives as well, and some even on DVDs.

Now, if you want to talk about the use of the techno-cloud for non-mission critical purposes, such as – duh – backup. That’s another story. Make sure that you have an excellent up- and down- speed to the cloud because if you do have to do a total restore, uhm – figure out how long that will take.

Also, the idea that your applications are on the cloud as well: this is still lunacy, in my not so humble point-of-view. Lunacy. Unless you are using applications that you don’t really need. Then you may as well store them anywhere, like on your own computer.

Do you think that the cloud is some magical place (it sounds like it) beyond the laws of physics, that is to say beyond the laws of drives and networks? Do you think that the cloud is somewhere over the rainbow?

I’m afraid that it is subject to the same laws, especially those of complex systems that often go out of control.

I will give you another example. I am not perfect in my predictions. A few years ago, I signed up for AWS (the Amazon Web Service). Now after loading a few things that amounted to a bill of about 50 cents a month, and seeing how long it took to upload, and then forgetting that I had those things up there on the cloud, I forgot about them and every once in a while noticed the 50 cent charge on my credit card, until my credit card happened to expire.

I wrote to AWS a few times asking to have my account canceled but never received an answer and then began to get emails saying that my account was in danger of being closed because my credit card had expired.

Good, I said. Close it. I wrote back, telling them to close it. But now I am on the automated cloud finance app, and it is sending me emails every second day telling me that my account is past due and unless I pay them the fifty cents they will be forced to close my account.

Of course, they also never do close the account, or even cancel. it. And I don’t want to give them a new credit card because somewhere, deep down, I’m curious to see what happens. Also, if I give them my credit card, who knows what the crazy cloud machine will do.

On top of that – what cloud is smart enough to look at the balance of fifty cents and figure out that it is may reach a point where it simply is not worth sending emails to this deadbeat and actually close the account? Not a cloud in the sky knows how to deal with this, and I suppose that also gives me some perverse pleasure.

Jun 192011
 

In a typical month, you will find about 15,000 unique visitors passing through the doors of my online store. The average stay is about 2 and 1/2 minutes. And you think sometimes, that if this were a physical store, with 15,000 visitors strolling through it in a month, you would be a wealthy individual. Even if one percent of these potential customers bought one print, that would be 150 prints sold.

Possibly if you were selling toasters at a cut-rate price you could do that sort of business, but the art world is a horse of a different color.

For one thing, in order to get to your online store, the potential customer didn’t need to hop into a cab, get dressed, or even be more than slightly awake.

There is no sense of urgency, unless you have a sale which “ends soon.” As they all do.

Now – even the people that do decide to buy something almost never do it immediately. (The one exception to this are art buyers and interior decorators) who are often in a rush to get prints to a client.

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