I’m a Gawker Artist!

2008-07-20 Update: They upgraded the site and broke the old URLs! Here’s my new Gawker Artists page [1].

I have a page on Gawker Artists [2] now. The photo that got me in is The Rebel [3], one of my favorite portraits, taken for my now-concluded [4] black and white film [5] class. This means the image will appear occasionally on Lifehacker [6] and other exhibitors [7]. Quite cool. Sarah will be proud, if she checks here. She’s representing an entire movement of non-conformity.

[3]

I came up with a great summary of my photographic mission for the page [2]:

I’m an experimental photographer who’s been working in the digital medium for four years. I strive to capture nature in inspiring and unusual ways; while I take pretty pictures, they should always make you think. The same effort goes into my portraits and still life; I photograph whatever I like, and am known for forcing people to pose in crazy ways, or for spending hours setting up arrangements of marbles or ketchup bottles. I’m a believer in contributing to the photography community, so I write a lot of behind-the-scenes details and add tips for my fellow photographers to my website.

If you’re a photographer, isn’t that what your mission should be? To make people think. Anyone can do that. Anyone can do what I do [8]. But does that mean you do? For many of you, no. But I’ll do it for you [9].

In my spare time over the past few days, I’ve been working on the tech side of the site, instead of posting new material (sorry to my viewers). Some advances:

• My Twitter updates [10] are at the bottom of the first post on each page (Twitter tools [11], with modifications).
• The ads are inline with posts; see the top-right of the first post on any page, and the link ads after the 2nd and 7th posts. That was tough to figure out. Code like “<?php $postnum = 0; if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : $postnum = $postnum; the_post(); ?>” and “<?php $a = 2; $b = 7; . . . ” went into my Wordpress template’s index.php file.
• I switched to Google Custom Search [12] for my search engine (in the side-bar). There are extra ads when you search, which I make money on like the normal ads.
• I made the links below the banner nice, and cleaned up the sidebar, moving stuff to an Index page [13]. The cousin [14] and the father [15] have been demoted to there.
• All thumbnail links use Highslide [16] now, so if you have JavaScript enabled, click one and it will pop up right on the page. You can even flip through photos with the arrow keys. This is a big improvement from a plain link to a JPEG file, and was suggested by the author [17] of Post-Thumb revisited [18], the plugin I’m using to implement and manage it.
• I added a Contact page [19], with my info and an inline contact form (SCF2 Contact Form [20]).
• I switched over to WP Super Cache [21], from WP-Cache [22]. After some battling [23], I thought I had it so every page, except search, the shopping cart, add to cart, and random gallery, was cached and gzipped [24], from the second visitor every 24 hours onward. I was very proud [25] of it. It worked for a couple hours, but now only some pages [26] are zipped while other, more important ones [27] get nothing, and I have no idea why. I give up, I’ve spend enough time on this. If it’s not good enough for Steve Pavlina [28], then it’s not good enough for me. I gzipped the larger CSS and JavaScript files while at it (prototype.js is cut from 125KB to 22KB), and that sticks, fortunately.
• Comment previewing [29] is gone. I was revising the preview text, and then the text disappeared and I couldn’t get it to work at all, even writing the settings into the database myself. This isn’t an advance; I just gave up. Maybe it’s outdated [30], I don’t know, but that’s enough dealing with it. If your comment messes up, post a corrective comment, and I’ll fix it and delete the second one for you.
• Added “overflow: hidden” CSS class to the header (with the six random photos). So if you’re browsing in a window smaller than 1024×768, there is no ugly wrapping to the next line.
• I finally hacked WP-Print [31] to put the URI markers after the hypertext instead of before. So now I can print out wonderful articles like How to Brand Your Prints [32] and they can be read logically. If you print (”Printable View” link below any post), do it in Internet Explorer 7. Firefox is no good at formatting in print. Plus, I was sick of the line breaks in my awfully long Amazon.com affiliate links, so I changed the code so there are no line breaks for URIs, and Firefox deals with this by making all the text really small, while Internet Explorer forces a line break (nice).
• People have been signing up for thripp.com [33] despite my lack of advertising. I’ll work on the layout and features in July. I can’t get virtual subdomains like I want without upgrading to a virtual private server, which I won’t yet pay for, so you just get a name like thripp.com/foobar instead of foobar.thripp.com (which I know you’d prefer). Sorry for that. If you start blogging for some reason, I added plugins you can activate to multicast to Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter, and Xanga, like I do (see links in my footer). You’ll have to hand over your passwords, but they’re safe with me.

It’s good to know when to give up, as I did with a couple of the issues above. I enjoy taking, editing, and writing about my photos more than this stuff, but somehow I get engrossed in tweaking layouts and settings, which is never the most important thing. It was good this time, for the gallery features mainly, but I’ve had my fix, so I can switch back to the important stuff (publishing photos and writing to inspire others).

I also reached a milestone lately; I’m not in the hole anymore. I’ve made $19 from contextual advertising and $2 from print sales, while I only have $16 invested for hosting (till August when I’ll have to pay almost $10 a month). I’m never going away, even if I have to pay $50 a month and lose money. My art and writing must be accessible to the world, forever.