Yes, I know I went overboard about the auto show photos. One of the benefits of a digital camera is that one can take as many photographs as possible. I took about 75 today.
As you know, I ocassionally post photographs on my blog. It has been sporadic up to now but I plan to post photgraphs more often now. So I have a question for you: How would you like the images? I have been posting reasonably sized images on the main blog page till now. Another option could be to have a thumbail on the main page which you can click to open a bigger image in a separate window. Also what image sizes would you like? How many of you are on dialup connections? Any suggestions about blogging tools for images?
The size is OK, but if you have a lot of images, it does take a long time to load the page over my dial-up connection. If you are going to post a lot of photos, I would recommend setting up a second blog just for the photos.
As far as I know there’s no specific tool designed for photo blogs, but I know a lot of people who use MT to create photo blogs. As you know, my blog creates an archive page for each individual entry. Photobloggers use the individual entry archive page to display the full-size photo, then they put a thumbnail on the blog index page. I think there are some tutorials for creating photoblogs with MT.
Oh, is Haloscan acting up again? I had posted a comment to this but I don’t see it anymore.
Anyway, what I was saying is that the picture size is OK by itself but if you’re going to be posting a lot of pictures, it takes a long time for the page to load on a dial-up connection.
I’ve seen some tutorials on how to use Movable Type for a photoblog. Basicallly, you put thumbnails on the blog index page and save the full-size photos for the individual entry pages.
If switching to MT isn’t an option and you’re going to post a lot of photos, you might want to set up a separate blog just for the photos.
Switching to MT depends on time & money. How much time does it take to install, configure & import blogger stuff to MT? Can I get a resonaly reliable host for my blog for free? or real cheap? If I go that route, may be I should buy own domain as well.
Any idea how much it would cost? Any suggestions?
The domain name is a negligible expense. You can get it for less than $10 a year from a place like NameCheap.
The webhosting is a bit more expensive. I’m with DreamHost. It costs me $9.95 a month. There are cheaper webhosts but they aren’t necessarily that reliable.
Some people have successfully installed MT with the free hosting package at NetFirms, but it’s difficult to set up and they’re very strict on how much server resources you can take up.
MT is a very powerful piece of software. I’m amazed when I think about how much it’s doing to process everything I’ve got going. This also means that it can use up a hefty chunk of server resources. I really didn’t find anything for less than $9.95 a month that I felt would reliably run MT.
As far as the time required, if you spend time now reading the documentation and asking questions, you can get the software installed with a few hours’ work. Importing your posts from Blogger is easy. It shouldn’t take you more than five or ten minutes, especially if you’ve got a high-speed connection. The time consuming part is re-editing the posts. MT takes the first so-many characters of your blog entry to be the title, which may come out a jumble. But if you don’t mind it looking a little rough for awhile, you can do that a little at a time. Your posts will be there for people to read and link to, they just won’t look as pretty as you would like.
Basically I would say that if you plan ahead what you’re going to do, if you have a whole weekend to devote to it, you can have your blog up and running in MT and looking great. It is a lot of work but not an unreasonable amount.
Thanks, Al-Muhajabah for the info. I’ll probably switch at the end of the semester, depending on other factors.
Regarding photographs, I have found a solution that might work. I’ll put thumbnails on the main page and you can click on them for the full size images in a pop-up window. This should reduce the download time for the blog. I am too lazy to do this for the current photos, especially since they should be off the front page tomorrow.
Where an I get more (Good) infomation on this car?
Don: I am not sure which car you are asking about. If it’s about the Lexus, I haven’t seen any info online.