The Digital Photo Guy

Keep That LCD Monitor Dust Free

If you’re like me, the sight of dust bunnies, lint balls and cat fur on your monitor is like the screech of fingernails across a blackboard. In other words, it’s enough to drive you up the wall. The only thing worse is trying to keep it clean. Well, for all your dust-o-phobes, I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is that I’ve found a solution. A 4 inch Kinetronics StaticWisk removes all dust, lint and fur using static electricity. Of course, this does not remove the little spots left behind by your sneezing cat or the coffee stains when you open your brother-in-law’s latest non-PC joke while drinking your morning cuppa joe. I bought the SW-101 with a grounding strap but that’s probably not necessary for most people. The photo of Tylor is simply because she’s so cute. Who wants to edit that photo while looking through dust, lint and fuzz.

Now, the bad news. The Kinetronics people are complete incompetents. I ordered through B&H who doesn’t stock these but has them drop shipped by Kinetronics. It took Kinetronics over 6 weeks to fill the order. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend dealing with such incompetence but, bottom line, the product works. My advice is to search the web for a company that has them in stock.
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E-Mail Notifications Not Working

I just discovered that my e-mail notification system hasn’t been working since around April 20, a month ago. I haven’t made any changes to the system so either my host has made changes or something else is intefering with the e-mail system.

If you’ve been receiving e-mail updates over the past month, please let me know. Obviously, if you haven’t been receiving updates, you’d only know that if you happen to drop in today.

Temecula Western Days

I was in Temecula, CA on Sunday, May 17 for the 2010 Western Days and Chili Cook Off. My intent was to photograph some of the High Noon Shoot Outs and sample the chili but, in photography, flexibility is imperative.
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I Hate Being a Webmaster

Over the past week, a perfect storm of self-inflicted disasters as well as junk from all the creeps in cyberspace has left me with with anger management issues. If I had a tactical nuclear weapon, I would be inclined to turn parts of certain countries into large, glass parking lots.

A few months ago, I noticed traffic from Russia, China, Ukraine, Nigeria and other unsavory places had increased noticeably. After watching the trend for a few weeks, I went searching for an answer. There were many snake oil remedies as well as a few legitimate sounding fixes. After reviewing about a dozen solutions, I selected what I thought was the most rational sounding. Blockacountry.com is a service that allows a webmaster to block whole countries based on IP addresses. As soon as I applied their solution, my site traffic dropped by 40% which worried me  since I wasn’t sure it was only blocking Russian traffic. Click to read more

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.