Be Excellent To Each Other

Whelp, I reckon I should make some sort of photo website as the next stepping stone on my road to total world domination. I'm currently altering my cobweb-shrouded dusty old Blogger account and working on that. Cream of the crop from Flickr will go up with background information. Reviews, wibble and the like will go on a seperate tab / page. If you can create tabs in Blogger, I've no idea.

The trouble is, what do I call it? Working title is Nervous Pete's Photoblog. Which sounds unpretentious and correct. I would have gone for the more pompous 'Peter Evans Photography' but some guy who photographs pregnant wimmin has taken that. Thoughts on construction, etc? My notion is to keep it simple. These two people seem to know what they're doing:

http://evanleavittphotography.wordpress.com/

http://www.beatricelechtanski.fr/

"Bloody good pictures"

What do you want to do with it, Pete? If you want to share your photography with as many people as possible, get a Tumblr with a nice theme, and put everything up there that you think is of interest. If you want it to be a portfolio that may lead to professional photography opportunities, then potentially get something professionally put together for you that you put the best of your photography on.

What Craster said. Tumblr has greater community engagement than either Wordpress or Blogger, because of the social networking layer. It's almost certainly the right way to go for audience building right now. It integrates well with flickr too.

Edit -- and there are a number of Tumblr themes specifically designed for photoblogs.

Edit edit -- e.g. my mate G's photoblog: http://photo.gesteves.com/

Edit edit edit -- some sample tags on Tumblr for photographs:

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/landscape
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/architecture
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/portrait
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/black-and-white

(you may need a tumblr account to see these, but you only need to supply an email address)

Hmm, Tumblr you say? You know, I've never taken a look at Tumblr before, but I shall do so now and see if it fits. As to my aims, well...

Basically to put photos up in as purdy, uncluttered and professional way as possible with a little background info and maybe ramble under each one. However, a side bit of rambling is also tempting. That mate of yours site looks good, DocG.



Short, to the point, direct? Oh shit!

Maybe a combo is best then. My existing blog for ramblings and the odd pic, Tumbler for pics. Hrrm.

This is my existing blog jazzed up and belatedly updated today. I think you're right though, a more minimalist tumbler thing might be better for my pics:

http://nervouspete.blogspot.com/

Reasonable start?

http://nervouspete.tumblr.com/

Lovely. The clean look suits your pictures, too.

So, I'm slightly all to seek on this Tumblr thing. Any recommended options / custom gubbins? Are you guys on it? What do you do? What the pissin' hell am I doing with this thing anyway?

Do you tweet? You can set it to tweet everytime you put a new photo up, that's a good way to drive people to look at your blog.

I do not tweet. No. I don't have a tweetable phone. And it seemed a bit rum to do it from my home computer.

Ooh! It shows what the dude you are looking at liked of other people's likes at the bottom of the page. This means that you can see what other people are posting! Very clever. Yes.

*Holds up joypad*

Now, how do you use this?

1) Find people's tumblogs you like and click "follow" at the top right. Then your Dashboard will present their posts in chronological order. When you see a post you like, click the little heart; the person will get a notification you liked it. You can also click "reply" and type a short text message if you please. Thus, you build social cohesion.

In http://www.tumblr.com/customize/nervouspete:
2) click Advanced and change "posts per page" to some number you are comfortable with
3) tick "enable high-res photos" to get an automatic lightbox
4) tick "use descriptive URLs" and when you write a post you can edit the slug (the text part of the web address)
5) tick "promote tumblr" to encourage people to follow you

6) you can add "Pages" which are static content -- like where you'd write a little bit about yourself. Most Tumblr themes will put permanent links to Pages somewhere in the navigation.

7) there are a wide variety of custom themes for sale, from $9-$49. Some of them are very nice and they do help your blog stand out, so they can be worth looking at. There are cheaper options too; for a round, see http://onefps.net/post/7772700226/premi ... heme-shops

(Bonus thing not related to photography but you'll like it: check out The Otlet's Shelf theme.)

Finally, let me know when you're ready, and I'll "reblog" one of your pictures. This means the picture will appear (still accredited to you) for all my followers to see, and I'll mention who you are and that they should be following you because you take awesome pictures.

Oooh, you're right! I do like that Otlet theme. I shall alert you when I have a few photos under my belt and feel ready. Thang yew!

The theme called Shelf looks very nice. $48 though?!

Now to search for people to stalk, I guess.