The History of Online Photo Sharing: Part 2

If you missed Part 1 of this history, you can find it via the following link…

The History of Online Photo Sharing: Part 1

If you’ve already read Part 1, let’s step forward into the mid noughties…

2004

It was in the wake of Photobucket’s arrival that ventures such as ImageShack and ImageVenue followed – also offering free hotlinking to big sharing platforms (i.e. the forums). Indeed, 2004 brought a wave of these new, free, image publishing hosts into being. ImageShack became a huge player, but it was Flickr, born in mid February 2004, that really took things to the next level…

The Contact Rant

“Why do we do it? Why do we allow random strangers to contact us via the Internet? We’ve learned in the offline world that no stranger ever knocks our door because they want to do us a favour. So what are we expecting when we establish a presence online, and then essentially invite a bunch of grasping commercial psychopaths, bored cyber-vagrants, and certified, flat-out weirdos to get in touch?

How To Correct Unsharp Images on WordPress.com

As a photographer, one of the things that’s always irritated me about the WordPress.com blogging platform is the way it handles images. Post a photo on Flickr and then hotlink it into a WordPress.com post, and you’ll see a really nice, sharp image, that scales down with good definition as and when necessary. But upload a photo directly to WordPress and you’ll very often end up with quite an ill-defined result. It probably looks acceptable to the average visitor, but it doesn’t look spectacular, and when you spend time making sure your photos are perfect, that’s annoying.

The Dangers of Deleting Tags on a Blog

It’s a pretty simple matter, right? You’ve put tags on your blog posts, and now you want to delete them. Well actually, it’s nothing like as simple as it sounds, and it could cause you major problems. But before we delve into all that, why would anyone want to delete tags?…

Top Ten Best Ever Free WordPress.com Themes

Although this is a list based on personal opinion rather than actual popularity stats, it doesn’t come without a lot of experimentation and use. With new themes arriving all the time, it’s getting harder and harder to unearth the real gems among the baffling range of options, and there are plenty of great current themes in this rundown. But the post shouldn’t be read purely as a “what to use” guide. It’s really a celebration of ten design icons from the full history of WordPress.com.

Three of the celebrated themes are no longer available for new blogs, but they were true greats in their day, and they add historical interest to an otherwise contemporary collection. The rest of the list comprises themes which any WP user can select straight from their Theme Options screen at the time of writing.

REDOABLE LITE

Why You Shouldn’t Care About Blog Followers

Do you know, or can you guess, what a ‘content slave’ is? If not, you may actually be one. But before I explain, I want you to ask yourself how important blog followers are in your blogging regime. If you regard followers as the be-all-and-end-all, you may, without realising it, have fallen into a trap which has enslaved you to your keyboard, and prompted you to work much, much harder than was ever necessary.

Twelve Tips For Lasting Success With Tumblr

You know your blog is happening when businesses start contacting you with observations that you’re outranking them in search, and with offers of work. But even an optimist like me didn’t envisage such success using Tumblr. When I signed up to Tumblr in 2011 I experimented for a very short time, scratched my head, thought to myself: “Nah, this is rubbish”, and immediately went back to WordPress and Blogger.