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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 2017
We've just indexed Volume 6, Number 5 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 18 Features, 29 commented news stories, 25 Editor's Notes (which included well over 100 items of interest) and three site notes for a total of 75 stories. That would make a hefty photography magazine for the May issue but we would have had to cut down some trees.
While features are up, the review count is down (none last month). But it isn't for lack of trying. We have quite a few sticks in the fire including the DNP DS620 with the new WPS Pro print server, the Peak Design Everyday Backpack, Whitewall prints, a handful of books and, well, we can't divulge everything.
Quite a few things are worth an extended look, it turns out. At least the kinds of things that matter. We give these products as much time as they need so we can tell the whole story and you can get the complete picture.
WE RECALIBRATED our readership stats when we 1) made a few changes to who is allowed access to the site a few months ago and 2) started minifying our site code. And we're starting to see the effect of those restrictions. This month was a mirror of last month's activity, which is good news. We're serving about 20,000 stories a day, up a bit, with reduced bandwidth.
That's after restoring Google's access to the site, which at one point nearly shut us down. We're finding that Google gives a quick and nearly complete scan of the site while Bing doesn't return all the hits (more like half of them) and DuckGoGo has improved its hits too to our surprise. Mike's Method remains the slowest (a minute or two) but most thorough approach, recommended for scholars.
OUR OUR MOST POPULAR STORIES were a delightful mix of news, obit and matinee followed closely by two slide shows and three Horns. We're delivering an editorial mix you find interesting, in short.
We introduced a few site tweaks this month that didn't shake the earth but provide a few lessons.
A lot of attention is paid to metrics but we find them fuzzy stuff. We wish they were as precise as bank statements, but that just isn't the case. They promise more information than the data actually supports.
So we've done what we've always done: relied on our imagination to concoct the kind of site we'd happily subscribe to were someone else to do all the work. And we're glad to see we're not alone in our appreciation for the work.
WE ALSO UPDATED a few stories even though that's not something that shows up on the radar and therefore isn't measured by the metrics.
We got to the bottom of an idle sleep issue with macOS Sierra caused by the mere existence of a Wacom tablet with a wireless mouse on it. Take the mouse away and idle sleep is undisturbed. Leave the mouse on the tablet and idle sleep is immediately disturbed as soon as the state is entered.
It should embarrass Apple that its rewrite of its own USB drivers doesn't take into account the existence of a tablet mouse. The species has been around for years (and functioned for decades with the older system software).
WE INTRODUCED a few site tweaks this month that didn't shake the earth but provide a few lessons.
Our JSON feed was one of the first but it was served by the Apache installation of our service provider as a text file, not a JSON file so the only JSON feed reader in existence rejected it for a while.
We knew how to solve the problem (with one line in our .htaccess file) but we needed a little help from our service provider to put the .htaccess file in the right place for Photo Corners. Once we did that, it worked fine.
We like the JSON feed format just as much as we liked moving to JSON for the Calendar. And it makes a pretty feed, too. We're thinking of adding photos to it, in fact.
But the truth is that the RSS feed works just as well (in the RSS reader of your choice). It's just that RSS -- and XML with it -- has fallen out of favor among developers. We don't care. We're happy to provide whatever you need to follow us.
While we were at it, we introduced a Calendar event submission form so you can let us know about the great stuff happening out there. We're not aware of any other photography-related calendars out there (it's a lot of work) but we think it's important to show you important work not just stuff you can buy. And this makes it easier. We even used it ourselves to make an entry because it formats the data in JSON for us.
If it's good enough for you, it's good enough for us.