The Digital Photo Guy

The Digital Photo Guy Blog Gets a Facelift

This is the 6th year for this site. During the first 4 years, it was a static site that was rarely updated because making changes was excruciatingly slow, complex and costly. In 2008, I resolved to fix the problem and commissioned a web developer to develop a new site that I could easily and quickly update myself. He recommended WordPress and the initial implementation took just 6 weeks. As soon as he was done, I started making changes and quickly learned how to do just about everything by myself. I’m no rocket scientist but WordPress makes everything simple and straightforward.

Now, a year after the initial launch, a new static home page has replaced the previous dynamic home page. A dynamic home page was fine in the beginning but, now, with so many articles and posts, it was quickly becoming unwieldly. Readers couldn’t easily find the information they sought. A static home page can act as ”street signs” to help point readers in the right direction. As you can see, some of the signs are still not working. That’s because all the MMTs, posts and articles weren’t always correctly or fully tagged.

Tagging the material at this time would be counter productive because each update would generate an e-mail notification of an update and readers wuld be innundated with e-mails.

Starting in 2010, I’ll be more careful about tagging each MMT, post and article so readers can quickly find all material pertaining to Cameras/Lenses/Gear, Photo Editing and Photography.

In the meantime, the existing tags (right side of main blog) can help you find specific articles or MMTs. You can also use the Seach box along the right side of the main blog.

A website is a never-ending process. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment here. Good light, good memories and good luck in 2010.

Another major milestone in making my website easier to use and maintain. The bottom line benefit to you, the reader, is that I can spend more time writing useful and fun things for you instead of futzing around with techie, geekie things.

In a previous post, I explained what RSS does for you and how to subscribe to my blog via RSS. At that time, I had to use a manual subscription process because the automated system wasn’t working quite right. Well citizen, it’s now fully automated. Sure, you’ll still have to make a few decisions like where you want the articles to show up but, for the most part, it’s a matter of clicking the RSS icon on my Home page and selecting the RSS reader you use.

In the top right corner of my Home page, you’ll find an RSS icon like you see to the left. Clicking on that icon will bring up a page with the latest articles and a dialog box in the upper right corner that looks like the image below.

If you don’t see this, click the link that says, “Show All Subscriber Options” and that will bring up the Subscribe Now! box. Notice that 2 of the choices are My Yahoo! and Google. Since most people already have Yahoo! or Google accounts by virtue of having an e-mail account with them, this is probably the path of least resistance. If you use Microsoft Outlook, you can drop down the menu titled (Choose Your Reader) and select Newsgator for Outlook. For this, you need to download and install Newsgator Inbox. 

Now that you’ve successfully subscribed to my feed, add My Yahoo! or Google Reader to your favorites and check for new posts whenever you like. Any site that displays an RSS icon can be added as a subscription. Let’s assume that, along with photography, you have an interest in gardening, drag racing, military history and pregnant toads. You can add all these sites to your reader as long as they offer RSS feeds. Think of RSS as a way to create a custom newspaper. Only the news that interests you will be displayed.

But, I Want It Automagically!

What if you’re waiting with bated breath for every pearl of wisdom that flies off my keyboard? (I wish!) Seriously, what if you want to know the moment new material is posted? That’s pretty easy.

On My Yahoo!, you’ll find a set of 3 icons along the top right of each feed, as shown below.

Click the center icon that looks like a gear and select Alerts and then click Add an Alert. That will give you options for being notified via e-mail, Yahoo! IM or a text message to your cell phone. I use e-mail to my Yahoo! account but if you use IM or text message to your cell phone, consider yourself promoted to full blown Geek or Geekess.

The point to all this is that you’re automatically notified when a blog is updated. You can set up different schedules for different blogs. On my blog, you might want to know as soon as new material is posted. On other blogs, you can set it to notify you once per day.

Repairing the RSS link on my site was made possible by Amin, a really, really smart guy who publishes a blog for WordPress users titled Tips and Tricks. If you’re considering your own WordPress blog, you should check out Amin’s blog.

Please try setting up your RSS reader because I’m going to drop my e-mail newsletter as soon as most people have switched over.

Does anyone remember the unfulfilled promises of the “paperless office?” Do you recall how life was supposed to be in a world where all communications and information would be electronic and paper would be forever banished to the dust bins of history? Well, citizen, it ain’t working out too well. If you’re like me and get most of your information from the web, it’s getting more and more complex to find the right information at the right time in the right format. You can simplify some of this by using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which “pushes” only the info you want to you as it is posted on the web.

If you’ve ever read newspaper columns like Ann Landers or op ed pieces by George Will or cartoonists like Scott Adams (Dilbert), you know how sydication used to work. In the good old days, a writer or cartoonist would produce a piece and send it to many newspapers for distribution. Each newspaper paid for the right to reproduce that piece. As you can imagine, managing all those subscriptions and sending all that paper and keeping track of all the payments and royalties was a real pain in the “you-know-what” (rhymes with gas). RSS is the same idea but at a much more proletarian level. Sure, there are big sites like CNN and MSNBC that use RSS but the technology is so simple that even numbskulls like I can deploy RSS.

There are two parts to RSS. First, you need an RSS-enabled site that publishes information that you want to see such as my site. After all you’re reading this drivel so you must be interested. An RSS enabled site will have an RSS symbol like this:

That icon tells you that you can subscribe to have the site notify you whenever new content is added to the site. Some sites have many RSS feeds covering different aspects of the site. For example, CNN might have RSS feeds for World News, US News, Politics, Sports and every other major subject they cover. Other sites, like mine, have just one feed because it’s not that difficult to keep up with everything that happens here.

The other half of the equation is an RSS Reader. There are many different readers so I’m only going to cover the 2 “biggies” and a directory of other readers. Google Reader and MyYahoo! are two ways to get feeds directly from my site. You need an account with either Google or Yahoo! to use either but most people already have a “junk e-mail” account with one or the other so that shouldn’t be a problem.

With Google Reader (below left), click Add Subscription (1) and type my URL http://www.thedigitalphotoguy.com to add it to your list of subscriptions (2) and show you the first few lines of each entry (3).

With MyYahoo! (above right), click Add Content (1) and the entire dark menu will appear. Click Add RSS Feed (2) and type http://www.thedigitalphotoguy.com/feed into the dialog that appears.

For those who want a stand-alone reader that doesn’t need a Google or Yahoo! account, check out this page for a list of 3rd party readers.

It may not be very useful if my site is the only one you want to track but if you’re like most people, you can add any site that uses RSS. All your daily info fix will be in one place. You can also make a Favorites entry so you can easily see all your feeds with one click.

Once most of my readers start using RSS, I plan to discontinue the weekly e-mail blast which has become a major PITA.

On Saturday, February 7, 2009 at 4:15AM PST, my new WordPress blog-based website was launched. The Name Servers at my registrar (the guys who took my money and told ICANN to save thedigitalphotoguy.com for me) were updated to reflect the new host (the guys who took my money in exchange for disk space and computing power on their servers). Now, I have to wait 1-2 hours for my DNS change to propagate (spread) throughout the Internet so anyone typing my URL into their web browser will be directed to the new site. Think of this as changing phone numbers and waiting for the new phone directories to be printed and delivered.

My greatest concern is, of course, that my e-mail links won’t work. In 2009, anyone who can’t communicate via e-mail is “out of the loop” and most businesses live or die by their communications. Therefore, anyone reading this is requested to go to the Contact Page and send me a test message. Thanks.

While I was writing this, my new web site has come up in another tab so it’s working as far as directing people to the correct server. My test e-mails to myself haven’t yet shown up so I’m a bit concerned but hope that mail server propogation is just a bit slower.

You can’t the swamp out of the animal. Just another way of saying a leopard never changes it’s spot or, in this case, once an engineer, always an engineer.

Earlier this week I was frustrated, annoyed, irritated, upset and generally mad about the complexity of modern software tools. Today, I am in harmony with my environment, my wa is at peace and the timbre about me is as still as Waldon Pond at midnight. For a brief, shining moment, I was transported back to those good old days of yesteryear when I was a 25 year old engineer on a mission! For just a few hours, I was that laser-focused, computer-for-a-brain engineer who could solve any problem created by another human! For half a day, I was once more an unstoppable force, powering my way through a problem on pure brain power!

I figured out how to put PayPal buttons directly on my workshop pages so a student only needs to click once to be taken directly to PayPal with all the infomation already in place and ready for his credit card. Over the past 20 years, I’d gotten rather lazy about solving technical problems. As a sales and marketing executive, my focus was strategy and tactics, not the minutia of bits and bytes. I was “The Big Picture Guy” and left the details to my staff to handle. But, deep down inside, I was still that geeky engineer who once told a customer, “This is what it will cost. If you want warm and fuzzy, it’ll cost you more!” as my manager sat in the back of the room and died a slow, agonizing death.

The point to all this is that, A) I feel great and B) Anyone can make this stuff work with a little patience and determination. Of course, all this effort has extracted a price. I feel like I just ran a marathon. I’m wiped out from the mental extertion and my brain will probably be mush for a few days. By next week, I’ll be back to my slug self and whining about dis ‘n dat.