Blog on Photoblogs » blogging software

PicLens: Possibly the coolest plugin?

brett — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:05:26 +0000

If you have your own photoblog and/or enjoying cruising the ‘net looking at other peoples work and haven’t heard of PicLens at this point, all I can say is where the heck have you been?

If you run your own photoblog why not consider extending it with PicLens? There’s a Wordpress plugin available for all you WP junkies, and you can also extend PixelPost.

If you would like to see PicLens in action, I recently extended my Behind the Lens photoblog.

Lightroom – must have plugin

brett — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:10:33 +0000

If you’re using Lightroom, and you’re not using the Export Flickr Plugin, all I can say is why the heck not! I recently discovered it and it’s great. Grab yourself a copy of the plugin, and get uploaded to Flickr. It’s super easy to install, and even easier to use.

Try it out, you won’t be disappointed.

Picking the right photoblog platform

brett — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:30:02 +0000

In my opinion this can be one of the toughest, and most important decisions that any new photoblogger is going to have to make. Once you’ve made your decision switching to a new platform can be difficult (trust me, I have done it), and is something that I wouldn’t advise anyone to do.

As far as I am concerned regardless of any type of blog you’re trying to create you have one of two choices.

Wordpress, or
Pixelpost

I know that there are tons of other packages available, but in my opinion the two packages mentioned above are the most flexible and easiest to use.

Deciding on which one to use for your blog depends on what your ultimate goal is. The way I see it there are two targets for your photoblog,

Other photographers,
Potential customers

Other Photographers

Even though other photographers still enjoy viewing your work, their main reason for visiting your photoblog is to learn a new technique and gain some inspiration for their own body of work. So lots of information about how you produced the image (i.e. in-camera, and post-processing) is important. Therefore, if I was building a photoblog for other photographers my 1st choice would have to be Wordpress. I just find that Wordpress really excels at managing articles, and with the SEO plugins that are available for it, you can rank quickly!

Potential Clients

If you’re building a blog in order to sell your work, then my pick would be on Pixelpost. I run my blog Behind the Lens on Pixelpost, and it’s easy to learn and extremely flexible. Potential customers are more interested in looking at your work so you don’t really need all the functionality that comes with WP. Basically, go for bigger images and less words!

More to come on using your blog as an income stream coming soon!

So there you have it, my quick overview of which packages I like, and the logic I used when decided which package to use where.

Defensio and the fight against spam

brett — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:06:03 +0000

If your photoblog is anything like mine, it just gets swamped with spam, I literally get hundreds of comments a day, 99.999% of which are spam. But I am actually starting to win the war, thanks to a great product from the folks at Karabunga Inc. They have created a product called Defensio, and released it to the world as open-source (meaning it’s free!). Defensio integrates nicely with my favourite photoblog software, Pixelpost, and has all but eliminated the spam problem I was having on my photoblog – Behind the Lens. I highly recommend that you have a look at this solution and get it installed and configured today.

By the way, it works great with wordpress as well – I use it on my other blogs as well.