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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.
May Archived
1 June 2015
All 80 stories in Volume 4 Number 5 of Photo Corners have been neatly archived into a tidy table of contents. That's a new record.
The editorial balance included 20 Features, 33 commented news items, 23 Editor's Notes (including at least 88 items of interest in our Around the Horn articles), three reviews and one Site Note.
It may seem like this is old news by now but before the daily whirl of the Web, this was the schedule print publications (and their readers) lived by.
We continue the practice because it keeps our original material before your eyes. And we're proud of that stuff. We have no intention of hiding it away. The Archive page has every headline we've published.
But a little guidance on using it may be useful.
Read all the Features, they never get old. Scan the headlines in the News section for anything of interest. If you want a little inspiration, click on a few Horn articles. Read the reviews that interest you.
You can easily return to the right section of the Archive from any article simply by clicking the archive link at the very top of the page. Clever thing.
Site tweaks were all behind the curtain this month, primarily introducing new efficiencies for less-used but complex tasks, but they were significant.
OUR MOST POPULAR STORY was The Split Toning Solution with nearly twice as many readers as the second place finisher, a news story on Apple's Raw Update 6.04.
Following those by a good margin was something of a four-way ties between our reformatting of Mike Johnston's sale items, our Kickstarter: Alpine Labs Wireless Timelapse Device story, Leica And Apple And DNG! Oh My! and the Hightail Launches Beta Collaboration Service announcement. And our review of Martin Evening's Photoshop tome was not far behind.
We look at that as a nice mix of news and commentary.
And that's just the top of the list. Well above our normal readership levels were two matinees (we won't tell), the Friday slide shows, a few tutorials and a number of news stories.
At the bottom of the list we find what we usually find: the most recently published stories. About a third of our readers keep up with us on a daily basis, it appears, while the other two thirds take a week or so to take it all in.
READERSHIP was harder to tally this month because our service provider didn't record stats for a day and a half between May 24 and 25. The problem didn't affect site access, just the accounting.
Some stats, like Pages Served, nevertheless exceeded last month's and if we fill in the blanks for the missing day and half, we set a record for unique sites, among other things.
That's good news.
SITE TWEAKS were all behind the curtain this month, primarily introducing new efficiencies for less-used but complex tasks, but they were significant.
Unlike a WordPress site which relies on a database to dynamically display information to readers, Photo Corners is a static site. When we publish a story, it's an HTML file (with links to some CSS, JavaScript and image files) not a record in a database that has to be retrieved, formatted and sent on to you.
As a static site, Photo Corners is very quick. That's the advantage for you. And it's very easy to maintain, which is the advantage for this one-man band.
It's also more secure than a site that relies on a content management system because, well, there's no code to corrupt. David Walsh has explained all this and more in An Introduction to Static Site Generators.
When we take a break from commercial software development, we like to enhance the software we wrote that converts simply marked-up text files into the HTML pages you see on the site. Those enhancements give us some markup options for fancier formatting.
Sometimes they're as trivial as adding an option to use a black border on images that have a white background. Other times they're as complicated as automatically creating a table of contents or previewing the HTML output without triggering the publishing routine.
But they all make our job easier so we can spend our time focusing on what's going on and what it means.
Which, after all, is why we're here.