PhotoDude.com

Tue. Sep 16, 2003

A Brief History of PhotoDude.com

A Brief History of PhotoDude.com (subtitled, “Who Made This #@$%?! Mess?”) – It’s somewhere between an archaeological dig and rummaging through the attic. “I wonder what that was once used for? It seems so primitive today.” Items that were once dear creations, now tossed aside, orphaned, and kept mostly out of sight.

But you can’t throw them away. You have to carefully inventory, pack, and move them.

I started filling this attic in April of 1996, when I lived in a tiny 10 MB apartment (I keep it for storage, even today). It was from this meager first home that I published “The 1996 Olympics, through the eyes of an Atlanta photographer.” It was a day by day account of my Olympic observations and photos, placed online during the three weeks of the Games (today I think they call it “a weblog”). Something I assumed dozens of people in Atlanta would be doing in some way. But I was wrong, and as a result got a lot of ink in various places, from the Atlanta paper to USA Today. The entire process of going out into a “target rich environment,” observing and photographing it, then placing the results online was a total creative rush for me. The amazing amounts of traffic, e-mail, and other reaction was icing on an already delicious cake.

Having now fully guzzled a whole pitcher of the Web Kool Aid, I decided that while the apartment had served me well, it was time to be an owner. In January of 1997, I moved into a spacious new 30 MB home, and christened it PhotoDude.com. For three years that 30 MB on a machine four miles from my home served me quite well, giving me a new creative canvas on which to play, and allowing me to explore the form via things like Red Rock Road Trip.

Then in February of 2000, my web host informed me they were expanding my home by a factor of ten. I now had 300 MB of space, more than I’d ever dreamed, and surely, more than I’d ever need.

Silly boy. Because also in the year 2000, there came space sucking trouble in two forms: the birth of my weblog in July, followed quickly by the birth of a photoblog in September. Since then, they’ve gotten two new siblings, QuoteLog and Arbitrary Secondaries, plus PhotoDude Labs, which isn’t a weblog but is MT powered. Between the five of them spewing out all kinds of HTML documents, and the fact digital cameras make Reid take and post many more pictures than “In The Days Of Film,” pretty soon you find yourself saying….

“Damn! 290 MB?!? How the hell did that happen?”

Faced with my final 10 MB of space (ironically, the same size as the first small apartment), I looked at my viable options. [1] Buy more space … except Earthlink, my web host, wants to charge me $4.95 per month for 5 additional MB, so adding a mere 50 MB would cost me an extra $49.50 per month. [2] Hope that since it’s been over 2.5 years since Earthlink upgraded their hosting plans (no MySQL, PHP 4 added only recently) at all, and since they sent out a web hosting package survey I filled out three months ago, they are about to upgrade those packages. However, when asked about that directly, they refused to talk about the future with this customer of 7 years. Leaving me with option [3], pack up my 10,000+ files in dozens of directories and move them to a more responsive web host.

I repeat, Who Made This #@$%?! Mess?

Well, truthfully, so far things are going fairly well. I’ve had my eye on another host for some time, and I also own PixelPile.org, which has been ably hosted for over two years by A+ Hosting. A quick comparison of plans shows that they offer more than twice the web space, plus MySQL, plus PHP4 (and phpmyadmin, PHPNuke, phpBB), plus ASP, plus domain renewal for $20 less per year, plus 2 subdomains … for five dollars less per month. This will put me well in the black.

Buh-bye, Earthlink.

I’ve already detailed some of the prep for this move that I’ve done on the Earthlink server. Last night, I opened up a new account at A+, and have been working on prepping the new server. The installation of MT with MySQL went very smoothly, quite the contrast to my first experience (now that I think about it, much of the trouble then was getting FileDB to work). I’ve imported and set up two of the five weblogs with no unexpected problems. For various reasons, the remaining three will require more work to import, but hopefully I can get things done in time to initiate a DNS switch this weekend.

While it’s a lot of work to move, there’s also some pretty instant gratification. New functionality, and 675 MB of space in which to stretch and grow. Still, there is some small pang to this that can’t be accounted for by the palpitations the actual moving process has caused. I guess it’s a bit like leaving the home where you were born and grew up (in a domain sense, at least). That server a mere four miles from my home used to be owned by a company called Mindspring, a special place that made me a devoted customer. But it, and it’s philosophy of doing business, were swallowed by Earthlink long ago, and that “philosophy” was excreted not longer after that. Thus the Internet Decade (2.5 human years) of stagnation in their web hosting packages.

They’ll still get my money for a rockin’ DSL connection, but the over $2500 of cash flow they’ve gotten from me in 7 years of web hosting will come to a screeching halt on October 1. And you realize that you are moving out of the digital home in which you were born because the people who “raised” you have actually been gone for a long time.

Sniff

Well, enough of that. The grass on the other side is indeed as green as it appeared, so I can’t complain too much. Just understand that my meager brainpower is somewhat consumed with moving this week, so the pickin’s may be slim around here.