Hans van der Kamp

The last two weeks were eaten away by installing a Linux backup system for all AmeaNet sites. With the help of a real Linux engineer we finally got it going, but not without a lot of stress in what should have been a lovely sub-tropical week in Amsterdam. Often I pictured myself sailing off in a ship to… Well, to quote the late Chinaski: “Who cares where it is, as long as it is somewhere away from here!”

In the last two years, I have learned that social networking sites as a way of promoting your work can be highly effective. I have often asked myself why and I have come to the conclusion that a regular portfolio website attracts random visitors. On a social networking site however you can choose the people who you want to show your works by befriending them through a geeky link as: “Add as your friend”. You create targeted visitors to your page. Communicating through the “Send Message” options on these site is more effective too, because your e-mail will not end up in a long list of SPAM e-mails.

Most of you already know this, but for me it was a revelation, because I had always laughed at sites as MySpace.com or that horrible Dutch clone Hyves.nl. I thought of these sites as yet another progressive step in a society that longs for a virtual economy, virtual money, virtual friendship and virtual happiness. I still look at it that way and I can hardly stop laughing when a complete stranger on a networking site approaches me in a PM with the line: “My dear friend!”

But it works.

There is one big disadvantage for people like me who photograph people as they are/ Without their clothes on, I mean. There are highly complicated rules about depictions of nudity. A nice male ass is fine, showing male nipples is okay too, but showing female nipples will get your page deleted. To fully understand what was done and was not done on these sites I had to go back to my childhood memories of a huge sign with rules and regulations hammered to the wall next to our one and only local swimming pool. (But I kept wondering why a naked male behind was not censored.)

I could not handle that. I saw an artist with 1049 friends/subscribers who had his page deleted by a desk clerk. The work was perfectly harmless. I have no idea how much time he spent whoring himself to get to that amount of connections but it broke my heart to see him restore that same page and censoring his own images only to have this new page deleted once again a month or two later.

So, I looked around for open source code, did some designing and in a few days my Networking Site For Photographers, Artists, Models, Collectors and Friends will see the light of day. Being quite busy with photography lately I wonder if I can find the time to actually promote the site, but I will do my best.

By the time I was finished building the new Amea Vintage Movies site, I had seen so many Burlesque Queens of the 1950s that I could recognize Virginia Bell just by the shape of her pubic hair and I only needed one close up of a nipple to see that the breast belonged to 1950s Playmate Elaine Reynolds.

I was also amazed how large my collection of vintage movies had become over the years. It made me wonder where it all started. Somewhere around age 10, I guess, when I fell madly in love with Betty Boop.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Didn’t I promise some time ago that this weblog was never going to be a video blog? I just could not resist it, I guess.

Yes, I made it. AmeaMovies.com is now live. The old AMEA movies site was a project I have regretted for a long time. The site was a pain in the neck to update and the members were rarely very pleased with the site. For some time now, with an ever expanding AmeaNet and more photographic work, I find myself in the situation of my father who once bought a house that was too big for our small family. He had promised himself to redecorate the place in his spare time. When he finally finished the last room, the first one was on top of my mother’s list to be redecorated. It was a painful circle that only ended when he sold the house.

For three years now I have been showing quite some discipline when it comes to updating, rebuilding and restructuring sites, although it is never enough for the members who do not fully understand that I am a one man’s band as far as the technique, the design, the graphics, the server and most of the content are concerned. The old portal may look the same, but the code behind it has completely been altered at least twice. The same goes for the Vintage Photographs site and The Hidden Archives. The BDSM site has not been upgraded yet, because the site is fairly new.

All this time I was ignoring the movies site, because I knew it had to be rebuilt from scratch and that is a lot of work, but in the end it just had to happen. I have not been very successful in building video sites. The first one, AmstelVisie.com was a complete disaster. The second one CamDogs.com needed a complete make-over before it became half a success, without making any or very little money, so I had to delete it eventually. So, obviously I was quite insecure about building yet another movie site.

Although I am quite chaotic, I do have a planning. Actually Karin, my partner is my planning. I walked up to here and said: “I think it is time to build that new movies site.” She was skeptical at first. She showed me how many subscriptions we had sold for the old movie site. That was quite depressing. I told her it would take at least a month of working 7 days a week to build the new site. She was relieved, thinking that I always produce a site in half the time of my original planning. Once I start fiddling around with code and design, I can not stop. Not because I like it, but because I want to get it over with as soon as possible. After that I usually fall apart for a week or two. It is not a healthy attitude towards work, but this is how it has been since 1995 and I still do not see how I can change that routine.

“I really need that month,” I said. “It is not the coding, it is not the design. It is all those videos that have to be converted and rendered. Computers can only work as fast as their processors are.” She still did not believe me, so we made a bet. She figured the site would be ready mid November and I aimed for December 3rd. I won. But I am really sick and tired of hard drives making these funny noises when 2 Gigabyte video files are rendered in two or three hours. In the end I had two computers simultaneously rendering and converting video. I would even get up in the middle of the night to start new conversions, so that no computer time was wasted during the 4 to 6 hours I tend to sleep.

But now that the site is finished, I do not even feel like falling apart. I am not stressed. I love this site and I know it is going to be a success. Third time’s the charm.

Yesterday I sent out the mailing to most of our members and in the middle of the night I sat behind my desk, staring at my screen waiting for new subscribers, but nothing happened. I finally went to bed in one of my worst moods to wake up a few hours later with a luminous idea. Maybe I had changed the e-mail address for incoming payments? Yes, I had. When I opened my other mailbox I could not believe my eyes. This site is a bigger success than any other member site I have ever built.

Tonight I am going to walk to the bar on the corner and wash away a month’s worth of designing, coding, converting and rendering — and feel good about myself for a change. If I can still see straight when I return home, I am going to pretend I am a member and log on to the site to really enjoy all the marvels I have posted there.