Re: Petzval lenses, Bigger is better
I have Wordpress installed under my own domain. Dead easy - the only hard part was choosing/modifying the graphic theme.
Dan is right about the work: if you want a conventional blog you need to keep it current, chatty and up-to-date (even if it's about 150 year old lenses). My blog isn't like that. It's more of an essay collection with a *very* spotty publication schedule. Using blogging software still makes sense though because it automates a lot of the tedious admin, and the search engines (for now) crawl all over blogs in ways that they don't for static pages of text and images. I get a lot of traffic to single blog posts drawn by the image titles and captions.
Integrating a Wordpress blog with your regular site is as easy as adding a few links - there are standard ways of doing this in most Wordpress themes. If you use Wordpress' servers, which is easier, you will need to make sure that things like hotlink protection on your main web server is set correctly if you want to inline images from your site. Not a biggie.
Re: Petzval lenses, Bigger is better
thanks guys.
i do not really care if i get chatty interaction etc etc. basically i want them to come up in search engines. i want people who are looking for info about various lenses etc etc to have my stuff pop up so they can fine the info.
i got like 5000+ images of various antique lenses and info for them. i would like to be able to get that info out and searchable......under MY name....:) so people can find me if they need more info etc etc.
thanks
eddie
Re: Petzval lenses, Bigger is better
With a blog you get a structure of categories and tags for free, and a mechanism for sorting them. A viewer who came to a specific, say, Hermagis lens via a Google image search would easily be able to find lists of your other Hermagis posts, or Petzval posts, or whatever. Assuming of course that you create and use the category/tag structure with logic and common sense.
I've ended up on the first pages in Google image searches for several of the artists I have featured as illustrations in my blog, despite not having many (any) incoming links for them. These are not minor artists either: they include Paul and John Nash, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There is much better information about these artists out there from an art perspective, so I can only assume that something I have done tickles the fancy of the current Google algorithm.
As far as I can make out, the secret trick is 1) use good source images of a reasonable size (not excessive, but not thumbnail either). 2) Write descriptive captions, in my case with links to and citation of the source. 3) Surround the pictures with text, real text not lists or boilerplate. All three should be easy for you.
Re: Petzval lenses, Bigger is better
PS: I meant to say that the downside of a blog is that things can get lost once they have dropped off the bottom of the first page. Categories can help, but it can also be worth creating static manual pages with an index or greatest hits list. These can be linked from the blog, or elsewhere.
Re: Petzval lenses, Bigger is better
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Struan Gray
PS: I meant to say that the downside of a blog is that things can get lost once they have dropped off the bottom of the first page. Categories can help, but it can also be worth creating static manual pages with an index or greatest hits list. These can be linked from the blog, or elsewhere.
I agree, and make sure you have well written meta tags. If you do that you are almost guaranteed decent positioning on search results considering the nature of the subject.
Re: Petzval lenses, Bigger is better
I think that image-examples from these lenses would help, as well. Though that could be v. time consuming and economically all that viable. True, I often see really cool lenses, but one starts to wonder....what sort bokeh is this capable of, bla bla ?
Les
Re: Petzval lenses, Bigger is better
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Struan Gray
PS: I meant to say that the downside of a blog is that things can get lost once they have dropped off the bottom of the first page. Categories can help, but it can also be worth creating static manual pages with an index or greatest hits list. These can be linked from the blog, or elsewhere.
thanks. good point. that is one of my concerns. i want people to be able to easily find the info or more info once they arrive at the blog. thanks for the tips.
eddie