Congrats fotoblur...we're making our mark!

Since March 10, 2008:

• 50 days online
• 68,990 visitors
• 124,989 page views
• 271 registered members
• 719 images

A few new features have come online the past month. Heres the quick list: rss feed for features, search (yehaa), automatically convert urls to clickable links (thank you regex!), and emoticons (thank gchat for the inspiration).

There have been a few issues concerning voting that I'd like to address. FAQ will contain more detail about voting soon, but for those that will read this blog, you'll be first to hear it from me. Negative voting! Yes it sucks to get negative votes...what does it do? Is it meant to tell someone their image sucks so bad that they need to quit photography? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Is it meant to tell someone that they need to do better, work harder, learn more before submitting the next time? YES! But as most of us know, negative reinforcement is not always the best way to learn. So I ask you to be responsible with your vote before you make it. Ask yourself, why am I giving a negative vote? Should I also add a constructive comment about why I'm leaving the negative vote? Is the image taken in bad taste? Is it offensive? Does it lack artistic merit? Obviously a negative vote is cast based on a subjective opinion and should be taken with a grain of salt by the artist. I have yet to see the voting system abused and I have faith that as a community we'll have enough sense when to demote the appropriate content without the need for special requirements for doing so. Please, vote responsibly.

Lately we've had a few successes to brag about. A few images have been added to reddit, digg, and stumbleupon which have gained fotoblur some notoriety and sometimes amazing amounts of traffic. This kind of exposure helps out the entire community because people come to see many of our work and link to it on social bookmarking sites and blogs...so keep up the great work! (Victor J. Palagano III's American Babysitter received ~45,000 image views since landing on reddit and digg)

Today I'm happy to announce that the message center has been updated with delete capabilities. You can now delete all your messages that have been piling up in your message center. In addition a support page has been added to the site which will allow you to contact me regarding a variety of requests. Another feature recently added is a mature content thumbnail for images that fall into the mature or artistic nude category. All visitors and members are automatically opted out of seeing uncensored thumbnails and soon an option will be available in user account settings for opting in to such content. Due to the fact that many of us view fotoblur at work, at school, or sometimes in front of children, mature content images may be inappropriate. I hate to add any form of censorship to artistic material but many employers frown upon such material at the workplace. I'd rather protect fotoblur viewers first by giving them a heads up on what content they are about to open so they may do so at the appropriate place and time.

Recently a few people have wondered why fotoblur has a file size limit. I want to first express my regret for introducing such constraints on the community...I hate having them too. One of the primary reasons for the restriction is funding. Because fotoblur is new and relatively unknown, we don't have sponsorship, advertising, or any sources of revenue at this time. Currently, all costs incurred by the site are covered by me. In contrast, many other photo sites don't have file size limits and are free. Well, actually, relatively free? These sites force feed you ads if you open a free account which help to sponsor your relatively free bandwidth and relatively free disk space. So until fotoblur finds some sponsorship we'll have to deal with a few constraints. For those who do not wish to wait for such sponsorship or be subject to viewing ads, you'll have the option of purchasing a premium account where supported file size will be much higher and the maximum file limit is lifted.

This entry wouldn't be complete if I didn't thank my good friend Bernie from DeviantArt (foureyes) for his recent plug for fotoblur. His work is outstanding and it means a lot to fotoblur to get an endorsement from such an amazing artist. I'd also like to thank Jules and Meridith Kleiber who have been working diligently on a fotoblur faq for everyone. Coming Soon!

The launch of the public beta has been truly exciting. On fotoblur's first day we received 70 new members, over 100 images uploads, and over 5,500 page views. We very much appreciate your support.

Currently the main focus is getting the message center in order and allowing user to track their comments. I'll be adding a new section to the message center called 'Threads' which will help you track replies to comments you've made thoughout the fotoblur gallery. I've also added a comment count for images displayed on the front screen. This will help you quickly identify how many comments have been added to your image after you've uploaded it.

A bug was reported recently involving fotoblur and IE6 which I was previously aware of. Long ago I decided not to support IE6 due to its lack of support for web standards. IE7 is far more compliant. Officially fotoblur supports IE7, Firefox, and Safari. According to google analytics most of you are using Firefox (75%), then Safari, then IE7.

Also, remember this is a public beta and bugs are still lingering so if you happen to find one please forward it to me immediately so I may resolve the problem here bugs1@fotoblur.com.

The latest update has included the 'networks' section of the user profile. The 'networks' section turned out to be a very simple design with a rather interesting twist. The interesting twist being that you could follow your network by clicking on the network count links of each member leading you to a number of potential discoveries (Six_degrees_of_separation). Of course this will get more interesting as internal networks grow and strengthen. I'm interested in seeing if this keeps like minded members together in comparison to the usual category/tag systems.

In addition, some rather interesting things have made it on the front page:

One, instead of getting a massive bombardment of messages in your message box or email, like many current image sharing/networking systems, you can quickly view your personal network images by clicking the network tab. You may promote or demote these images. Therefor users in a network are voting on a subset of images on the system, and hopefully will be ones that interest them. The interesting side effect here is that the largest network of individuals may be the deciding factor on what gets shown on the front page.

The second addition is the 'recommended' images. This set of images are from those members not currently in your network, but whose work has inspired another member already in your network. This feature hopefully will allow you to discover new and interesting work that is pre-filtered by members of you network.