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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
September Archived
1 October 2014
The September issue of Photo Corners has just been archived. Volume 3 Number 9 broke a few records with 68 stories and so much action our bandwidth allotment was exceeded for the first time. We have no intention of slacking off on the first but we hope we have resolved the second for October.
WE APOLOGIZE for the bandwidth issue. We had a week's notice from our service provider and, as we mentioned, took some measures to prevent both extra charges and any drop in service.
That helped but we didn't realize the big offender was paying no attention to our request that everyone knock it off for a week. They wanted to be addressed personally. And boy have we. So October should be no issue.
According to a couple of watch dogs we queried, the site did remain accessible despite being blocked, although our full text search was indeed blocked. Otherwise our RSS feed was working and pages served.
But the problem did skew our readership numbers (way up), so we'll forego reporting it was our best month ever. Let's just say it was business as usual.
It's really a blessing to have a software developer in the same room as the editor.
THE SITE got a little sprucing up, too, with a logo (an abstraction of a photo corner created in CSS) we've put in the top left corner of every page. And since we had a logo, we also made a favicon, which we put on every page, too.
To do that on the over 1,100 stories on the site, we wrote a Perl program. It scoured the site for stories, opened each one, put the logo in the corner and the favicon in the title bar and even cleaned up an old errant but harmless call on some of our oldest stories. In about a minute.
It's really a blessing to have a software developer in the same room as the editor.
To relax, we wrote some custom error handling pages for the site. We hope you never see them but they're there if you need them.
ON THE EDITORIAL FRONT we published our first Horn story with a photo in it. And two days later, we published two Horns in one day for the first time.
That may not seem worth mentioning but it matters to us because it shows our publishing system responds to the news. It doesn't restrict our reporting (like every other CMS we've used).
Great to have an editor in the same room as the software developer.
PHOTOKINA was the story of the month and we weren't going to ignore it even if it took place halfway across the world while we were sleeping. Instead, we used the drone approach, following developments from afar and reporting the more significant ones in our Photokina Clippings.
The breakdown for our 68 stories was interesting, too. We ran 13 feature articles, 31 news stories, 17 Editor's Notes (including 60 items of interest), three reviews (triple our usual number) and four Site Notes.
The top news story was the Fujifilm XT100T announcement. Our Photokina stories followed closely and, depending how you count (since we published more than one a day), even exceeded everything else.
But ranking nearly as high as the Fujifilm announcement was our free camera case story. And just behind it, our Indiscretion. We have to confess that we often left the corrected image of that lovely woman on our screen. The color was just so lovely, we couldn't dismiss it.
Our tribute to Lida Moser was another surprisingly popular feature (but it probably shouldn't have been a surprise). And both our matinees and Friday slide shows again ranked highly.
We don't mention the Horn articles in this roundup but they always rank well, too. You will invariably find stories in them that will appear on other sites in a day or four. And we hope the unusual mix of topics always make them worth a peek.
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