It has been some time since I posted on this blog. Summer was a very creative period with a lot of studio photography. I was working on my Couples and Mature women series and I am trying to find the time to come up with a definitive selection of what I have done so far. A hard thing to do while both series are still growing.
I photograph mostly in the weekends or during the evenings because the models I work with are not professionals. They have their daytime jobs. That leaves me plenty of time to work on the websites, although I still have my doubts about the new AmeaNet site I promised to finish before the end of this year.
The last year has been difficult for AmeaNet. First there were some major difficulties getting a new payment processor and we ended up finding one for Amea Movies that takes a huge percentage on every single payment. While this was happening the dollar went down and a recession unfolded. It was visible in our stats. Credit cards were declined more often than ever. In the end AmeaNet became a site to worry about.
I am not just blaming the economy. After 15 years my enthusiasm went downhill too. I have considered killing the project for a while, but could not do so in the end. There seemed be just one way out and that was to build a new AmeaNet portal with a different concept.
As it is, the main AmeaNet site is way too static. The Internet today relies heavily on social networking. A site without member interaction is not interesting. Unless you sell a niche product, of course.
So, I started participating actively in social networking sites to see what could be done for AmeaNet. In the end there were two software packages left that I wanted to consider as an interactive backbone. Elgg and Buddypress. I played around with both and they seemed too unstable to withstand the amount of visitors AmeaNet still is attracting despite the very few updates we had in the last year.
Testing Elgg resulted in a site called The Lab. Although Elgg is pretty stable, robot registrations have already become a menace, so the site is currently “by invitation only”.
Buddypress is very promising too but in an early stage of development. Buddypress is based on the multi user version of my beloved WordPress and fooling around with that combination has not yet delivered a test project worth linking. I want to wait a while for upcoming software upgrades.
Testing the many plugins of WordPress was so much fun that I ended up building a site about photography on the old Camdogs.com domain where we used to run a video sharing site that became a real problem, because it was way too expensive in data traffic.
The deadline for the new AmeaNet portal is now January 31, 2010. Meanwhile I hope you will enjoy the new photography site:
AboutPhotography.Net – News, Reviews, Featured Sites, Member Galleries
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