I guess you could say that I’ve been blogging on and off for around 8 years, maybe not today’s classic reverse-chronological blogging but through various methods over the years I’ve shared my thoughts with the Internet at large. In that time I’ve kept an eye on my page rankings and have figured out enough to help ensure that my content gets seen as often as possible by the right sorts of audience. I should say up-front that I don’t always follow my own advice since I tend to flit between projects and often don’t have as much spare time as I wish I had but I keep trying different things until I learn a thing or two.
So, since the web is all about giving and sharing (with a sprinkling of lolcats) I felt that now would be a good time to post a few tips to help other bloggers make sure their voice gets heard. I should stress that these tips are not designed for commercial ventures nor to produce stupid volumes of traffic, I love the Internet and I’d never condone the so called black-hat SEO usually employed to peddle crap and generate more ad clicks. Anyway, on to the tippage…
Tip #1: Produce Good Content
This may sound stupid but the one of the most important factors used by search engines to choose which pages appear above others is how popular the page is based on links from other sites. People aren’t going to link to your content if it isn’t any good and besides, if you’re not producing decent content you’re probably not doing what you set out to in the first place (unless you were aiming to be rubbish). It might sound daunting at first but all you have to do is produce content that might be useful to people, either because they’re well researched opinion pieces, reviews, tutorials, etc. Just share your knowledge and experience and someone out there will find it useful and if you don’t feel that you know enough – do some research and share what you learn.
Tip #2: Produce Plenty of Content
It’s worth bearing in mind that search engines chiefly index the text on web pages which is all well and good if you’re a writer but if you’re mainly posting photos and videos it’s worth making sure you include a certain amount of test along with the post, ideally a synopsis of the video or a description of what you feel the photograph shows, how you went about taking it, etc. If you want to start your blog off with a big bang you should write a good 5-10 posts before you ‘launch’ as well as having populated your profile or about pages, having a reasonable amount of text on day one will really help you get on the major indexes (Google, Yahoo, Bing) as early as possible.
Tip #3: Promote Yourself and Get Involved With the Community
You don’t need to go off at the deep end and remember that what you’re trying to do is make your content known to the target audience, the aim is not to mass-market yourself but to make sure you get found. If you’re blogging in a particular niche then get yourself involved in the community, join forums, comment on blogs, etc. and you’ll get your name (and your blog) known, as well as finding out a little more about your audience and what they might want to see. I don’t mean that you should join a forum and spam it with all of your posts – remember you’re goal shouldn’t be to self promote but just to get involved. It’s also well worth using social networking sites wherever it makes sense, make sure you’ve got a presence on Facebook and Twitter as a bare minimum and consider other sites such as Myspace and Bebo if they cover your target demographic.
Another method of promoting yourself is to use paid advertising, it’s a good way to get an initial influx of readers to your site – this might seem a bit daft if you’re building a personal blog but you can quite often get free trials with various online ad agencies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Stumbleupon (also see my Stumbleupon Ads review).
Tip #4: Tune Your Links
I said earlier that the most important factor search engines use to rank pages is the number of inbound links, this is mostly true but I’d add the proviso that they need to be good quality links. In this case ‘quality’ is affected by a couple of major factors, the PageRank of the source (links from more popular sites help more than links from less well known ones) and the relevance of the link text (the text of the link should relate closely to the content on your site). This is particularly useful whenever you’re crafting links back to your site in forum posts or comments on other blogs, for example – if you are writing about exploring abandoned mental hospitals it is much better to link using relevant text (e.g. Abandoned Asylums) than it is to just post the URL (e.g. http://www.sickbritain.co.uk/2009/08/top-10-abandoned-asylums-in-the-uk/) since the text gives the search engines a way to understand what it is you’re trying to say.
It’s also easy to forget but search engines also evaluate your outbound links, the Internet is a network and you should always make sure that you’re linking out to other great sites (for example, see Brent Ozar’s WordPress SEO post). You might think that posting lots of outbound links would cause your readers to jump ship and look elsewhere but actually the opposite is true, the Internet is full of both good and bad content and people need help to filter that so if they find a site they like and trust that helps them find other good content they’ll keep coming back to see what else you’ve found.
Tip #5: Find Your Niche
If you’re just starting up your blog you may not have settled on a particular area of speciality, it’s absolutely fine to have a general “this is what I’m up to now”, or “here’s something I found interesting” type blogs (in fact you’re reading one now) but if you want to build traffic and obtain regular readers it’s probably better to stick to one topic. This makes most sense if you’ve got one clear hobby (e.g. running, or urban exploration) but if you’re anything like me your hobbies might be a bit random (photography, travel, video games, Apple products). If you struggle to find a personal niche you could always take a more professional angle and blog about your area of work, whether that be as a blacksmith, a nurse, a teacher or a more techie discipline such as IT Security, Business Intelligence or programming. I’ve already mentioned that it’s links that are important, picking a niche will not only help build your readership it will also help make sure that your inbound links are relevant since all of your content is clustered around one subject area.
Tip #6: Monitor Your Progress
It’s all well and good to follow all of these tips, but how will you know what’s working? If you’re using a hosting company there’s a high likelihood that they will provide some sort of stats package to go with the hosting, you can get great information from sites like these but they’re often a bit fiddly and sometimes too detailed and you can’t see the wood for the trees. The best solution I’ve found (not least because it’s free) is Google Analytics, I’ll write about this separately at some point but there are plugins for most common blogging engines and CMSs that collect information on which pages are being visited and allow you to see not only the number of hits you’re getting but also where traffic comes from (referrals, keyword searches, direct visits, RSS feeds, etc.). If you use Analytics and have an iPhone you have to check out one of my favourite applications Google Analytics app for the iPhone, it’s been on my front-page for over a year and I use it almost daily.
Tip #7: Be a Good Citizen (a.k.a. don’t be a jerk)
Simply put – you just won’t become successful as a blogger if you act like a jerk. Don’t get me wrong, if you are a jerk and that’s your thing and that’s part of your blogging style then I guess you might as well go for it but what I really mean is that you should be respectful of your readers and your peers. One of the worst possible things to do as a blogger is to rip-off other people’s content, it’s fine to reference and quote other people’s posts but don’t copy & paste wholesale and especially don’t try and pass the idea off as your own: plagiarism is not cool – give credit where credit is due. My other major piece of advice is not to take self promotion too seriously just focus on good quality content – don’t spam forum and comment threads with links to your site, don’t write posts just because you think you’ll generate more traffic, don’t write crappy little posts just to get your post count up, etc.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Bing, blog, blogging, Google, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO
 Whilst I’m mildly reluctant to admit it, I was one of those sad people so excited by Apple’s scheduled July 27th announcement that I stayed behind at work so as not to miss the Engadget live-blogging coverage and despite the fact that every man and his dog will be blogging about the iPad over the coming weeks (and yes, dogs blog), as bonafide Apple fanboy I thought I couldn’t resist tossing my opinion into the fray.
My first sight of the thing was of Steve Jobs holding it up and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was about the size of his head, 10″ screen and bezel included. I appreciate that this is an odd feature to look for but many of the rumours I’d read were touting a 7″ screen which to me (more later) would have been utterly pointless but 10″ is a good approximation of a page from a book or a small magazine. Sadly, along with this first sight came the bitter realisation that the thing was to be called the iPad, something I’m really going to struggle getting used to since it’s a crap name – please excuse my use of ‘the thing’ when referring to the new device.
The design is very similar to that of the iPhone, except with a proportionally much larger bezel, making it look a lot more like a digital photo frame and though I’d bet money that this proportional imbalance will be reduced in future versions I also acknowledge that it may be intentional since you’re going to have to rest your thumbs somewhere whilst you’re not pawing at the capacitive screen. The weight is hard to gauge from presentations and so on but 1.5lbs seems weighty but maybe appropriately so, since you’ll want it to feel solid in your hands, I look forward to getting my hands on one to see what it really feels like to hold.
 In terms of actually using the device, the demo shots of browsing the web, watching films and thumbing through Google maps all look absolutely superb, very slick, very iPhone, very Apple. I was especially impressed by the look of the calendar since the iPhone has been a godsend in terms of managing my personal life and anything that can help me remember where I’m supposed to be and when is a real boost for me! Despite being a gamer I really wasn’t that interested in that part of the presentation, there seems to be an obsession with trying to present the iPhone and now the tablet as hard-core 3D gaming platforms when I’m quite sure that they’re both rubbish for racing sims and first-person shooters. I’m not saying that games don’t have their place in a mobile lineup but the physics-based genres are far better enjoyed on the XBox 360 or PS3, the real strength of a touch-screen mobile platform is for genius-like casual games such as Geared, Wurdle and Flight Control. I’m also not really interested in drawing, writing or doing spreadsheets on the thing since I can’t draw and I’ve got a proper (read: desktop) computer for doing that sort of thing.
 The biggest leap forward provided by the iPad is by far and away it’s use as an e-book reader and for reading newspapers, whilst the rest of the features are stunning by themselves the real revolutionary change that this device (and devices of it’s ilk) will bring is in how we consume ‘print’ media. Steve’s presentation really made me feel sorry for Amazon’s Kindle, seeing a photo of the chunky white keyboarded 1980s-style device followed by as shot of a Jonathan Ives masterpiece must have ripped the heart out of the Kindle team at Amazon. That’s not to say that Amazon as a whole lose out here, their app will most likely work on and compete with Apple’s own iBooks offering and that sort of competition can only be good for end users – my only big worry with the e-book future is that so far all of the major stores are using DRM, meaning that if you bought a book on one store you won’t be able to transfer it to another.
The price is an open verdict still since I’m in the UK but the dollar prices look pretty reasonable in my opinion, $499 for the 16GB WiFi version seems like a steal, though I’m sure I’ll end up getting the $829 64GB WiFi + 3G model since I’m highly likely to stick a tonne of video on it. If the UK pricing ends up being towards the harsher end of the scale (the British always get screwed but it’s usually by our own government so we’ve no-one to blame but ourselves) I may be tempted by the $699 WiFi-only version since I’m pretty sure I’ll be using it primarily at home.
 So, what’s the point of the iPad then? I’ve heard a few people saying that they really don’t see the point and that’s it’s nothing more than a big iPod and to an extent they’re absolutely right, it’s not portable like a phone and it’s not as functional as a laptop. I don’t even think Steve’s cheap shots at the netbook market were quite warranted since I’ve no doubt that the iPad would be useless if I were trying to work remotely from a Starbucks typing emails and using a VPN client to remote control my work desktop. This is something I have done on little Dell Mini 9 many times and it really does work, the tablet market isn’t meant for people who want a laptop and it isn’t for people that want a netbook.
The iPad is for people who want to grab their tablet off of the coffee table, quickly check their emails, see what’s in their calendar for the weekend and maybe pop open IMDB find out whether the guy in the film they’re watching is the same guy that was in Black Hawk Down and Enemy of the State*. A lot of people still have a PC situated at a desk which may be upstairs in a barely used room and unless you’ve taken the step yourself it’s almost impossible to express how your life can change when you go portable. It may sound overly dramatic but my life literally changed when I bought bought my Macbook, having my laptop constantly on standby down the side of the sofa means that any time I’m at home if I have an idea I can execute on it it, I can answer a question, book some tickets, contact my friends, etc. Through having the Internet by my side I’ve ended up in all sorts of adventures including Storm Chasing in the Midwest, discovering new music, attending festivals, going to gigs, exploring abandoned buildings and even meeting my girlfriend.
Most people, especially families, warrant having a desktop – there are times when you need to sit at a desk and write essays, edit photos, etc. and because they’ve already got a desktop many people are put off buying a laptop as well and this is where the iPad comes in. Sure, you could have a laptop but this will be better at its core functions without any need for the complicated side of using a PC such as installing software, worrying about viruses and spyware, etc.
* Tom Sizemore BTW.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Amazon, Apple, Dell Mini, dog blog, e-book, ebooks, Internet, iPad, iPhone, ipod, Kindle, netbook, Slate, Steve Jobs, Storm Chasing, Tablet, Tom Sizemore, Urbex
Have you ever wanted to keep a particular window on top of the others? I often want to watch video whilst I’m doing other things, either in Quicktime or more often a web video from YouTube or Vimeo – and thanks to Afloat I can (in fact I’m watching a Bruce Schneier talk right now). I first discovered Afloat quite a while back but when Snow Leopard was released it caused issues with PlugSuit, I just checked back (because I wanted to watch the Schneier video whilst surfing) and now there’s a Snow Leopard version as well as the old version for anyone still on Leopard.
As far as I know it will work with any application and it’s totally free – get it now and check it out.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Afloat, Leopard, mac, osx, Quicktime, Snow Leopard, Tools, Utils, Video
Everyone living in a shared house will eventually run up against the problem of sharing broadband, especially if you’re downloading music, movies, games and system updates. I live with my girlfriend and a couple of days ago she was working from home and I really needed to download some Audible books for a long journey I had the next day, unfortunately whenever I tried to do this it kept knocking her off of her company’s VPN connection. Now, I’ve seen download managers and bittorrent clients with bandwidth restrictions but nothing that would throttle a web browser so I did a bit of Googling and found this helpful post. Basically I’d worked out that at full pelt I was getting 135Kbps and this caused a problem with the VPN connection so I figured that maybe a third of that (45Kbps) would be a fair amount of bandwith to take, to do implement the bandwidth cap I had to…
- Open up a session on OSX as the Administrator (I did this in parallel to my existing login).
- Open up Terminal.
- Type:
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 45KByte/s
This sets up the rule limiting your bandwidth.
- Type:
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
This enables the rule.
Once you’ve finished the downloading you wanted to limit you’ll need to flip back into the administrator profile and do this…
- Type:
sudo ipfw delete 1
This deletes the rule.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. Please note that this only restricts Port 80 which is the general web traffic port, if you had other activity going on (Skype, Bittorrent) then you’d need to add a rule for each relevant port.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: bandwidth, darwin, Leopard, linux, mac, osx, sudo, throttle, unix
By happy coincidence at around-about the time I was asked to help build the Sick Britain UK Urbex blog I had been given a £50 Google Adwords voucher as part of a promotion and so I decided to try it out to help launch and promote the blog (my experiences will be summarised in a separate post). Once the money had started to dry up I considered how else to promote the blog and though I was primarily seeking free methods of promoting the site the idea of Stumbleupon advertising caught my interest.
For those of you that haven’t used it, Stumbleupon is a ‘social bookmarking’ site – kind of like Digg or Delicious but with it’s own unique mechanism. To use Stumbleupon you just select one or more topics in which you have an interest and then hit the “Stumble” button to be taken to a (theoretically) random site in that category, submitted by other Stumbleupon users. At the top of the browser window a small strip of controls is maintained as you stumble from site to site and for each page you can vote to say that you like or dislike a page or simply hit “Stumble” to move on.
From a user perspective it’s all pretty cool although it was the advertising concept that was interesting me – essentially you can pay to have your site inserted into people’s stumble path for a flat fee of $0.05 per pageview. I’m not sure how clear it is to the user (if at all) that they’re looking at a site that’s in their path because someone paid their five cents or because of recommendations and I must say that it did feel a little ‘ooky’.
Setting up a new campaign is pretty straight-forward, you select up to three categories in which you’d like your site to appear, put in your target URL and then hit the submit button. The problem here is that the setup is a little too simple and you don’t get any advanced demographic targeting (age groups, locations) until after the the campaign has gone live. The second irritation I had with Stumbleupon Ads was that each campaign has to be approved and you still can’t adjust the demographic targeting until the campaign is live which for one of my tests took almost 24 hours (the quickest was around 12hrs). Now I’m just a small time web developer and these timescales stink for me so I’d imagine that any serious hardcore web marketeers out there would balk at the idea of waiting anywhere near as long as this to get a campaign up and running, especially when competing ad networks can do this in an instant.
The final irritation for me is that when I decided to put the pedal to the metal and spend my whole £15 in one go I removed the daily dollar value cap and found that my entire budget was blown within a few hours. Now I’m fully aware that I had a small budget but I find the fact that Stumbleupon make no effort to smooth out traffic patterns quite disturbing. If I were advertising a commercial site I might want 10,000 hits in one day but I almost certainly don’t want them to arrive within a couple of hours as it could play havoc with my bandwidth and web application servers.
So despite my original excitement at the idea of Stumbleupon advertising (enough excitement to blow £15 of real cash) I’ve definitely gone cold and can’t see myself using the service again unless they address some of the key problems I found.
For users: http://www.stumbleupon.com/
For advertisers: http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/
written by thirtyfootscrew
After what seems like an age since the original announcement I finally managed to get into Playstation Home today which despite all the waiting is only in the Open Beta phase, basically if everyone loves it they’ll go live soon but if everyone thinks it sucks then they’ll keep in in beta and fix the dodgy bits.
So, what’s the verdict? On balance, it’s a definite ‘meh’ with a handful of annoyances.
My first annoyance started with the character creation screens, they give you endless options for customising the face but an absurdly small number of choices for clothing and hairstyles (most of which make you look like a weirdo or someone you’d love to punch). It definitely doesn’t have the slickness of either the Nintendo or Microsoft equivalents and Sony’s aim for a little more accuracy means that whilst my Mii or 360 avatar look kinda-sorta-almost-ish like me, my PS3 avatar just looks like somebody else. In fact I’d almost rather have a generic RPG character creation engine like the one in Oblivion, my PS3 guy looks no more like me than an Argonian.
On first entry into Home you’re put into you bland but theoretically swanky apartment, forced to endure a clunky tutorial (I’m not sure if it crashed, ended naturally or whether I quit) and left to explore. Here comes my second problem with Home, with the initial install (77mb downloaded at the PS3′s standard bitrate of 300 baud) includes only your apartment so when you come to explore you have to choose which ‘area’ you want to go to and spend five minutes pacing the floor of your tedious apartment whilst it downloads. This is classic Sony, why make life easy when you can make the user do the work for you?
The areas available right away in the beta are a movie theatre, a bowling alley, a shopping mall and a central space through which you can access the other locations. I had a little wander through all of them and I think the one I most enjoyed was the central square, it’s quite a good place to meet-up with people and in the background there are some giant billboards that play trailers, this might seem like ramming ads down your throat (it is) but it works and can be enjoyable – I loved the Loco Roco 2 trailer.
Once I’d watched all of the trailers I thought I’d try and chat to someone, the problem is that I (like most people) don’t bother with voice chat on the PS3 and (like most people) don’t have a keyboard plugged in. The result of this is that you’re stuck with the pre-canned phrases or using the on-screen-keyboard, I tried this but whoever I spoke to got fed-up of waiting for me to type and wandered off. I wasn’t that bothered really as I doubt most people in there are worth talking to, I was in the public areas of Home for no less than three minutes before I heard one avatar asking another “can I touch your nipple?”. Nice.
Despite my criticisms the basic premise, structure and execution of Home are actually quite good, it feels like an MMO or at least it feels like Phantasy Star Universe without the gameplay elements. There are some teething troubles (choppy framerate in busy areas) and there’s nowhere near enough open space to hang out in than I’d expected. I also like the fact that you can customise your space but it’s absurd to make people pay for that priviledge, as soon as I realised that a yellow rubber duck costs £0.59 ($1 or thereabouts) I walked right back out of the store and thought “Not. Going. To. Happen. ”.
I’ll be very suprised if the micro-transaction route takes off, I could see bundles working (e.g. ‘Contemporary’ furniture pack or a whole wardrobe of clothes from GAP. But I don’t think the Second Life model will work so well. Personally I think that this whole consumer-gouging practice is counter productive, it would make more sense to me if companies like Diesel, DKNY, FCUK, Ralph Lauren, YSL, etc. actually paid Sony to give some of their virtual clothing to the gaming community for free – that’s how advertising’s supposed to work, it’s meant to be free to the victim viewer!
The big question is – what is it for? I can see friends coming in here to chat before playing games, although it could do with some kind of social networking component for that to become really useful. If I think about my own behaviour though the picture isn’t so rosy, I don’t play online (that what the Xbox 360 is for), will I buy furniture and clothes in here? No. Will I watch trailers in here? No, Gametrailers or YouTube are easier. Will I try and make new friends in here? Hell No. Will I go back in there before the next major content release? Probably not.
This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: , 360, Avatar, Home, Mii, mmo, nintendo, playstation, Playstation Home, ps3, sony, xbox, xbox 360
Today for the first time I used Apple’s Genius Bar, for those of you that haven’t used it (or don’t own a Mac) I’ll explain what it is. Essentially it’s an in-store helpdesk, if you’ve got any problems with your Mac hardware, software or accessories you can pop into the store and they’ll do what they can to help you out.
The other day the scroll-wheel on my wired mouse stopped working an (as I Twittered) it felt like having my arm cut off. I’m just so used to scrolling as part of my web workflow that everything felt so much slower without the ability to scroll up and down without moving the cursor. Luckily I had a spare Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo so I switched to that for a while but the ergonomics aren’t quite the same and I much preferred the plain Apple white mouse – I had to get if fixed.
So this morning after visiting a costume hire shop (my work’s Christmas party has a 70′s theme) I thought I’d pop up to my nearest Apple store and get them to have a look. I booked a slot at the Genius Bar on the web so that I didn’t have to wait around (it’s a Saturday leading up to Christmas, it’s busy), after wandering around the shopping centre buying imported American cereal, chilli sauce and cornbread mix I went to the Apple store in time for my 12:40pm slot.
I just walked right up to the concierge, she checked my time slot and summoned one of the ‘Geniuses’ over to help. We sat down at the bar (it really is laid out like a bar, complete with bar stools – no beer or free nuts though), I explained the problem, he tested the mouse on his laptop and then set about performing a strange trick with the mouse and a piece of A4 paper. Essentially the little wheel was gummed up with finger-grease (eeew) and after testing the up/down and left/right scroll capabilities we were all done.
In retrospect I could’ve tried that myself and considering the fact that I’m a techie (or ‘IT Professional’ in résumé-friendly lingo) I probably ought to be ashamed of myself. But I’m not – in fact, I’m kind-of pleased with myself. I’m pleased because I took that leap of faith in Apple, I had a problem with some Apple stuff so I took it to the shop and they sorted it out. This seems like a very simple concept but the fact that they’ve got a dedicated area of the store with dedicated staff just to help people out with problems to me seems brilliant. You won’t get that level of service with a Dell, an Asus or a Compaq that you buy from a regular high-street retailer – you’d be lucky if the Saturday jobber in Currys even bothers serving you.
Now I know that my problem wasn’t exactly quantum physics and I’m sure that these ‘Geniuses’ have their limitations but the fact that they’re there gives me comfort, especially as I tend to buy gear online. Knowing that theres someone in-store to help me out if I need it is great, especially given that many retailers have utterly disconnected physical and web presence. It’s absurd how many times I’ve heard something like “Oh, we can’t help you with that – you bought it On-Line, it’s a different department.”. Usually you’re asked to email something like: wasteofmytime@uselesscustomerservice.com and they get back to you with a within three working days with a ‘ticket number’, the whole thing ends up taking a pathetic amount of time to solve and often involves sending physical (i.e. snail mail) letters to confirm x, y and z. In this case I think that Apple have definitely got it right, my only criticism is that there aren’t that many Apple stores around the country and even I had to travel for an hour to get to my nearest – at least I got to play with the ‘shake’ functionality on the new iPod Nanos, damn they’re sweet.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Apple, Customer Service, Genius, Genius Bar, ipod, mac, macintosh, Mouse, Nano, Repair
More and more these days I find just surfing the Internet to be a little dull on it’s own, I’m sure this is another symptom of the Attention Defecit Disorder that modern technology provides but I always find myself needing to do something else beyond just surfing. So what do I do? If I can get hold of one of my friends on Skype I’ll do that but sometimes if noone’s available or it’s too late at night to be talking I’ll just fire up TWiT Live and listen to Leo.
For those of you that don’t know, Leo Laporte is a broadcast journalist who has had a long career in radio and television (see his Wikipedia page for more info) and who now runs a succesful network of podcasts spearheaded by This Week in Tech (other podcasts available here). A while ago Leo started moving from podcasts to doing live video with his TWiT Live initiative allowing viewers to watch Leo live as he records his podcasts. The clever part is that it goes way beyond just watching a guy wearing headphones talking into a mic, Leo has the equipment to have double-screen video showing guests both in and out of the studio as well as graphics, lower thirds, screen casting and so on. All of this adds an extremely interesting dimension to the video and give me something else to do, although I will admit that I don’t always watch the video (and Stickam provide a facility to pause the video to save bandwidth).
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Communications, Internet, iptv, Laporte, Leo, leo laporte, Media, podcast, This Week in Tech, twit
Having had my Canon 400D for around a year and a half now I no longer consider myself a beginner, I’d say perhaps that I’m an intermediate-level amateur and so I’d like to share what I think are my 10 top tips that I’ve learned over the past year or so. I appreciate that it can be a bit daunting going from a point & shoot camera up to a fully-fledged DSLR with interchangeable lenses and so I’m aiming here to provide a little bit of guidance that worked for me that said these tips might not work for everyone and you don’t have to do them all on day one, if you have any questions feel free to get in touch.
1. Don’t get disheartened – not all shots are good ones!
It’s easy to think that you’re doing something wrong, or it’s just too difficult but that’s most likely not to be the case. Photography is a learning experience but it’s not like learning your times tables by rote, over time you’ll develop a sense for what works and what doesn’t but even then you should push yourself beyond that and experiment as it usually pays off. Some days you’ll go out shooting and come back with loads of great photos, other days you’ll come back with a card full of average shots but don’t let that get you down – if you take 100 shots and only one of them turns out to be a ‘keeper’ then it was still worth the trip for that one shot. I’ve taken thousands of shots and I’d probably only pick out 10 that I really like, then again – they’re not the same ones that other people like so I guess it’s down to taste!
2. Learn how your camera ‘sees’ light.
This one is all about research, I won’t provide precise suggestions for where or how you do this but if go down to your local book shop or library you should find plenty of books that talk about photography in general otherwise you could always go on the Internet – remember Google and Wikipedia are your friends. In terms of what you research, you really need to understand how light gets into your camera and how that affects your photography – key concepts you’ll need to grasp are:
- Exposure
- Aperture an F-Stops
- Shutter Speed
- ISO and Grain
- Depth-of-Field
- Light Histograms
- Composition
- Rule of Thirds
3. Get used to Manual settings
Once you’ve done your research you’ll be in a good position to start using the manual settings on your camera, I strongly recommend that you immerse yourself in the world of manual settings (leave the lens on autofocus though) and completely ignore any of of the automatic or semi-automatic (Tv, Av, etc.). modes. At first you will find yourself being quite slow and you may miss a shot or two through fumbling with the controls but with practice you’ll be as quick as you like and you’ll really understand when to use the semi-automatic modes and when you need full control. From the moment I first bought the camera I pushed myself hard to understand the manual settings and it really paid off for me, now I spend 80% of my time on manual but I’m beginning to use the semi-automatic modes when I’m shooting in variable light conditions (e.g. tracking a flying bird).
4. Replace your kit lens
This tip depends on which lens(es) came with your camera but as a rule, the kit lenses are not the ‘best of breed’ lenses and usually compromise on both build and optical quality. A dead giveaway is to compare the ‘body only’ price and the ‘kit’ price for your camera, my 400D cost £500 with a kit lens but if I wanted to buy a body-only package it would cost £490. No lens that retails for £10 is going to produce great results! I replaced my 18-55 kit lens with the Tamron 17-55mm f2.8 and it revolutionised my photography, it’s probably the best £300 I’ve spent ever. My advice for you here is whatever you do, make sure your replacement lens is wide (goes down to 17mm or 18mm), goes up to a ‘normal’ focal length (e.g. 50mm) and make it at least an f2.8 – the Tamron is perfect because it is f2.8 at 17mm and 50mm.
5. Buy a tripod and a cable release.
One problem of shooting with the camera in your hand is that you’re limited in the shutter speed you can select, if you choose a slow shutter speed there’s a good chance that you’ll get blurring due to unsteady hands. In low-light conditions you can always increase the ISO but that introduces grain, a pretty simple and straight-forward solution is to buy a tripod to keep your camera steady. When you choose a tripod go for one as light as your budget can afford but you don’t have to spend a fortune to get the benefit, I picked mine up for £45 and it’s far from the lightest tripod out there but it does the job. Another addition to your kit is a cable release, I picked up an unbranded one on eBay for £10 and it does the job perfectly. Cable releases for DSLRs are not quite the same as on old film cameras, mine is a small thumb-sized box with a button and has a 1m cable that plugs into the side of my camera. This allows you to take a picture without even touching the camera which is important if you’re on uneven ground, also the button can lock down so that if you’re doing a variable ‘bulb’ exposure you can keep the button held down for as long as you like and you’re finger won’t get tired or slip off.
6. Shoot in RAW
Your DSLR will likely have several options of how to record your photos, shooting in JPEG (possibly with various quality levels), shooting in RAW and probably the option to do both (JPEG+RAW). So, what is RAW? Your camera has a digital sensor that captures light and records certain information about that light (colour & intensity), if you have your camera set to JPEG mode it converts this basic information into a compressed JPG file and discards the detailed data. RAW files on the other hand contain all of that detailed data and allow you to perform a much deeper level of processing after you’ve moved your photos to your computer, in many cases I have taken photos in RAW that look under-exposed but have been able to alter the exposure on the computer and turn a bad photo into a good one. The down-side of using RAW is that you must process them afterwards (most DSLRs come with sofware to do this), although it may seem daunting to have to process hundreds of photos a lot of the work can be automated and it gives you a good opportunity to review the day’s results.
7. Invest in software – Lightroom or Aperture
Most Digital SLRs are bundled with some software from the manufacturer, whilst it may be possible to get by with this software I would strongly recommend moving up to a premier photo editing & management tool, the leading packages are Adobe’s Lightroom (PC + Mac) and Apple’s Aperture (Mac only). Both packages have advantages and disadvantages but they both do a great job, if you’re on a Mac and have to choose between them I would recommend downloading a trial and using both. Personally I use Lightroom and have never used Aperture, whilst I’m on a Mac now I used to do all of my editing on a PC and just moved my Lightroom catalog over to the Mac. These tools allow you to organise your photos in a variety of ways (names, keywords, collections, tags, by lens, by ISO, by camera) and also to alter many factors about the image to really make your photos ‘pop’, amongst other things you can alter the white balance, exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation, correct for vignetting & chromatic aberation and alter the composition (through cropping).
8. Share your photos – join Flickr
Taking your photos and looking at them on your own will only get you so far, to improve your photography and your interest in photography you should share your photos with others. For months I have been sharing my photos with the members of a video-gaming forum who are also enjoy photography over at the Gamercast Network, following on from that I joined the massively popular photo-sharing site Flickr where you can upload photos and other people will post comments on your work. There are also Flickr Groups where you can find communities of people that are interested in the same thing and these range from broad subjects such as ‘Black and White’ to narrow subject such as ‘Graffiti’, or ‘Dogs’. In these groups you can ask for constrictive criticism of your photos and find tips on how to photography you favourite subjects.
9. Don’t be afraid to copy others
I just mentioned joining Flickr to share your photos but remember that sharing works both ways, you should explore and comment on other people’s photos and you’ll learn about the composition and styles that other people like and use. The best part of looking at other people’s photos is that they will often give you ideas for shots you could take and it can be a great inspiration, if you can’t get the same results as someone else then you can get in touch and ask them how they acheived a certain ‘look’.
10. Listen to the professionals
Now unless you come from a photographic family or know a professional photographer they’re pretty hard to come by and probably don’t have too much time to spend helping out beginners like us, even though many of them would like to. The solution that some professionals have arrived at is podcasting, if you don’t know what podcasts are they’re essentially like radio shows (although some include video) that you can download from the Internet and listen to anytime (and anywhere) you like, the most common place to look for podcasts is through Apple’s iTunes store and a perfect way to listen to them is on your iPod on the way to work. I’m sure there are many photography related podcasts but the two I’d recommend are This Week in Photography and Tips From the Top Floor, I listen to TWiP religiously and find it both entertaining and informative, they regularly have professional photographers on as guests and cover everything from tips, news and equipment.
Well that’s it for my tips, I hope you find them helpful – if you want to ask any questions or offer suggestions please feel free to get in touch. If you want to look at a collection of my photos please find my pages on Flickr
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: 400D, Adobe, Aperture, Apple, Canon, Digital Photography, DSLR, Lightroom, Photography, podcast, SLR, tips
I decided to install Drupal on my web server and instead of downloading the install files to my desktop, unzipping them and then uploading them back to the web server (which takes ages over ADSL) I thought I’d have a go at downloading them manually over SSH. In effect SSH is a method of connecting to your Linux web hosting service as though you were actually at a terminal logged in to that machine, in effect you have complete control over your web space with the ability to use the array of commands available to all Linux users. Most web hosting companies offer SSH access on their decent packages and I definitely recommend it as a shortcut for various things such as deleting files, setting permissions and editing config files (yes, I actually like vi). So, if you’ve got SSH access, how do you use it? First you’ll need to find out the Host Name, Username and Password from your hosting provider, then one of the following – depending on whether you’re a Windows or Mac user…
If you’re on a Mac running OSX you’re in luck, you already have an SSH client to hand, if you go to Applications then double-click on Utilities you get an array of useful applications – be careful here but the one we want is Terminal. Once you’ve launched Terminal type the following: “ssh username@system”, you will then be prompted for your password and you’re in!
If you’re on Windows then get yourself a copy of PuTTY, a small but fantastic little application that’s free for both commercial and non-commercial users. As an aside, the PSFTP client on offer there is also a great secure FTP client.
Now, if you’re not used to having command-line access to systems and especially if you’ve no Linux skills at all I’d suggest you read some good starter materials and learn more about Linux – messing with the command-line is very dangerous and there is no undo feature! I may start writing some posts about both the Linux and Windows command-line but in the interim please feel free to ask for advice, just leave a comment on this page and I’ll get an email, alternatively send me a direct message on Twitter.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: command-line, Drupal, linux, mac, osx, PuTTY, web hosting, windows
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