Taken from PhotoAnswers.co.uk

Next came Christmas, and while we were all excited to see what Santa had brought us, I didn’t think too much of it. Being 22, Christmas was becoming more about family than presents.

However, to my surprise, Santa delivered, and boy did he deliver! Unwrapping a big box from Amazon, I found myself with the 550D and the kit 18-55m lens.

Having never used a DSLR before, it was time for me to start reading, reading and more reading. I wanted to become familiar with the camera, understand how to use it and start experimenting with photos. Now the first mistake I made, was buying more lenses. As most photographers will tell you, don’t buy anymore lenses until you fully understand the current lens. The first place I went, eBay…

Canon 55-250mm IS f/4-5.6 Zoom lens

Taken from Product Wiki

This was the first lens I bought, the Canon 55-250mm Zoom lens f/4-5.6 with Image Stabilisation. I bought this lens for its zoom functionality. (Not to mention it makes me look very professional with the lens hood!)

Canon 50mm FD Lens f/1.8

After spending a bit of time reading around different forums and blog posts, I came across a lens which was frequently mentioned, the ‘nifty fifty’. This is the 50mm FD lens. It has a high aperture of 1.8 which allows for great control over the depth of field and creating some nice ‘Bokeh‘.

I found this lens on eBay for as little as £25. However, I also found myself buying an FD to EOS EF mount adapter. Considering the crop factor of my camera and the crop factor of the adapter, this caused the lens to behave like a 100mm.

I’ve not really removed this lens from my camera yet. I find it is great for normal shooting and I love being able to manually control the Focus and Aperture. However, I’ve still got a lot to learn about it.

My first session…

We decided to venture out on a Sunday morning to Greenwich park, and thankfully the sky was very clear. I took all of my lenses, but found myself using the ‘nifty fifty’ the most. Overall, it was a great day out and it gave me the opportunity to have a real play with the camera.

Here are some of my favourite pictures from the day:

Underexposed, would look great with stronger colours.

Playing with the 50mm

I like the composition, maybe a tad underexposed.

You can find more of my photos on my Flickr or Google+.

Links

A few links which I thought people would find interesting, I’ve spent a fair bit of time reading through these articles/forums and found them very useful:

The Photo Forum

A great forum I have used to get ideas from other people and also a place to receive constructive criticism.

31 Days to a better photo

This was one of the first blogs I read and gives a great introduction to a newbie DSLR user.

Please feel free to comment on the photos in this post. I welcome comments and criticism as I am still learning!

Unseen University Librarian

I decided to come back and continue with my blog. However, the content is going to slightly change.

I’ll discuss more about this in my next blog, but as a taster…

“Application Developer, Photographer and big Football fan”

Check back soon!

Initial Impressions

Apple iPhone 4 - Property of Apple

One of the main reasons I bought the new iPhone was down to the aesthetics of the  phone. After purchasing a Uni-body Macbook Pro, the iPhone 4 looked very sleek and more modern than the previous models. The antenna around the outside added to the looks and the glass front and back made the phone feel very nice, but very slippy!

The way the new OS deals with multitasking was also very interesting. Apple claimed that the user would not have to care about what apps were running, but would easily be able to continue from where they left off. So after clicking the home button twice, I was able to see which apps were running. And although there aren’t many apps which support multitasking yet, it is very nice to easily switch from app to app.

Also:

- The camera is extremely good with video and picture quality being very high.

- The screen, probably the best bit of the phone. So clear and crisp.

- Playlists in iPod, I haven’t really used this feature yet but a nice idea.

- Control iPod and lock orientation – a nice feature to the left of the multitasking bar

But what’s missing…?

Although iOS4 has some interesting features, it also seems to be missing some key ones…

• Status Notifications
  When you iPhone is asleep and you go to wake it up, you are presented with the lock screen. Which means in order to see how many SMS, Email or Facebook notifications you have, you must swipe in. For me, this is a massive flaw. It would be much easier to just press the home button and to see my ‘notification status’.




• Close all apps
  At the moment, I am slowly getting fed up of closing each app that is running. Now I know that they are not technically ‘running’ but I can’t help but feel the need to close them! Would it not be easier to have a single button which could close all open apps? I would without a doubt pay for an app that could do this.




• Signal Flaw
  I didn’t really want to mention the signal flaw in this blog, as it isn’t directly related to the iPhone 4. However, I am holding out hope that the flaw is software related and that Apple will release an update which focuses on the calibration of the signal and the methods used to choose which signal.




• 12 Apps per folder
  For me, this isn’t a massive problem. I cannot really see myself wanting more than 12 applications per folder. Having more than this would mean multiple ‘pages’ of apps per folder.




• Mark as Unread
  The lack of ability to mark all messages as read, REALLY frustrates me. Especially when I download quite a few messages. If Apple want the iPhone to also focus on business users, surely this feature is key to Mail? Imagine coming back to your phone and finding 65 unread messages and not being able to mark all as read.




• Delay in opening folders
  It seems as though there is roughly a 1 second delay from when you press the folder button to when you see the actual contents. For someone who is used to apps and folders opening really quickly on my Macbook, I find this to be a big flaw and one that should be looked at.

I hope I haven’t overlooked certain features of the iPhone or the new operating system. If you know that the features above do actually exist, please do let me know as I would love to use them.

Also, if anyone else can suggest anymore features which you think are missing from the iPhone or the new OS, don’t hesitate to comment.

Jack

The sites purpose is to allow people to write about what they ‘spot’. Whether they are walking through a park and see a squirrel or witness a major political event, i-Spotted allows people to inform the world of their encounters.

The site is live now and will gradually be getting better, with comments being added and various other features.

So spread the word and lets see what happens!

This is my first blog since early September. I have had a lot going on with University and website design and have been unable to post. This made me think, how often should I post a new blog entry?

I wanted to be able to post entries on a regular basis. The only problem with this was that I saturated all of my resources early on, making it much harder to keep up with my schedule of a new entry every 1 – 2 days.

How did it affect my traffic?

Whenever I write a new blog entry, I always try and submit the article to around 8 – 10 social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Delicious and Technorati. It helps to get backlinks (of a low quality but nevertheless a backlink) and also helps to drive traffic to your site. I have had great success with DZone where one day an article hit rank 2 in Google’s SERPs and drove around 500 unique users to my site in the space of 10 hours.

On a normal day where I wrote an article, posted a few comments on blogs and forums, I would receive around 100 unique visitors per day. Personally, I think that is an acceptable level of traffic for my first few months of work. However, as soon as I stopped writing articles for over 2 weeks (my current situation), the traffic would drop down to around 30 – 40 visitors per day.

So how often should you actually write a new article?

I think the key to this is to not saturate your resources. Don’t go out and write 5 articles in the space of 3 days if you then have no more articles to write. I am now going to TRY and write 2 – 3 articles per week, as well as keeping a journal of what other articles I could write in future.

You may be sat there writing one article and suddenly think of a great name for another. Note it down and write the article another day.

10) Blogged – Chatter

Similar to Twitter, the chatter page on Blogged allows anyone who is following you to see what you are “chatting” about. Great for those who are following you, not so great if this is a low number! I prefer Twitter just because of how well known it is.

9) FriendFeed

Another one like Twitter, FriendFeed displays any messages you post to your “friends”. As I said before, I do prefer Twitter for the larger audience and the use of Trending topics but in saying that, I haven’t had change to use FriendFeed that much.

8) Twitter

Twitter is a great place to announce any new blog posts. Whoever is following you can see the tweet and is then able to click on the link. The only problem here is getting people to follow you. In order to announce your article, you have to actually have people following you. I try to use Twitter on a regular basis for new and old articles – while trying not to spam and annoy those following me! The trending topics in Twitter are good to use because the tweet is published to a large audience.

7) Stumbleupon

This site has been built based around a great idea. Articles are randomly (Or so I believe) chosen and displayed to the user. This gives your article chance of appearing to a great variety of users. However, with the number of articles on there, the probability is low. Nevertheless, still submit!

6) Delicious Bookmarks

Delicious is a site where you can add your favorite bookmarks. It is a great way to share your articles and anything that you find interesting. Delicious allows you to see how many others have bookmarked the same address. Similarly, you can see who has bookmarked the site.

5) Propeller

Similar to Digg and other article sites, Propeller allows the visitors to decide which articles get more publicity. The user can either “prop it” or “drop it” where “propping it” will raise it’s position and “dropping it” will lower it’s position. From looking at the home page, you only need between 10 and 20 “props” to appear on the popular stories. This can be great for traffic and for gaining subscribers to your blog.

4) Reddit

With a Google PageRank of 8, Reddit is a great site to submit your articles to. Popular articles will appear high on the home page while a list of categories allows the user to browse articles relating to their interests. The submission of an article is extremely easy with Reddit and I have never had a problem with them. I highly recommend submitting here.

3) Technorati

Technorati has a PageRank of 9 and is a great site to submit your blog to. You can see straight away from the Home Page that the intention of the site is to discuss what people are saying in their blogs. Articles that are submitted to Technorati will appear more often if they get more attention. Therefore you need to get some visitors to begin with in order to get more visitors – as usual. I have always submitted to this site and will continue to do so.

2) Digg

I am sure everyone knows what Digg is. An extremely popular site to submit articles to. Article sare ranked on whether people “digg it” or dislike it. Recently, Digg have changed their position on links so that they are “no follow”. Not a problem if you are not after “site juice”, the traffic you receive will still remain the same.

1) Dzone

My favorite at the moment is Dzone. Dzone advertises itself as “fresh links for developers” which is great for my blog because it is website-development related. I have received a lot of traffic from Dzone and it always appears on my top list of referrers. I recommened a submission to this site!

Now, this is not a difinitive list. This is my list. I will submit to these 10 submission sites – and more – once I have written an article (as with this one!). A great way to do it if you are using WordPress is to use a simple plugin. The one I use is “Add to any” which places a button at the bottom of my articles. I simply click which site I wish to submit to and the plugin does most of the hard work.

I hope you found this useful. Do let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Regards

It acts as the “splash page” for any incoming visitors or potential customers. The first page they see cannot be boring or plain, it has to stand out. Information has to be easily accessible and not 3 – 5 clicks away.

So to try and retain those visitors and lower your bounce rate, I’ve suggested a few things that you might like to include in your homepage!

5) Contact Details

Someone may have simply typed your name into Google when trying to find a phone number or email address. Why not make it easy for them to get it?

A simple telephone number, email address and actual address in the footer of the page can help. It may increase the bounce rate (which you don’t want) but it will increase the contact you receive!

4) Latest <Insert Here> and Updates

Update your content! Search engines love it. On every site I create, I always try and include a dynamic element on the homepage. Here is a small list of suggestions:

• Latest News
  Just a snippet of the latest news article. Invites your visitor to learn more about the company and browse your site.
• Latest Update
  Enables your visitor to learn what you are currently involved in.
• Latest Blog Entry
  Great for keeping the updates content-relative. Your blog will be relevant to your site and so displaying the latest blog entry opens up a whole new area for the user to dive into.
• Rotated Feedback
  Show the visitor how good you are! Using a rotated feedback system can show your visitor why people have chosen you in the past (Just don’t lie!)
• Tip of the day!
  If the genre of website allows this, do it. Visitors will like the suggestion and it will be encourage them to read more.
• Latest Vacancy (If applicable)
  If your company has vacancies, the homepage is a great place to advertise.
• Latest <Insert> For Sale
  If you’re selling or hiring something, let the visitors know. Once they know that you have 1 item for sale, they will want to see other things for sale in case there is a bargain to be had!

This list isn’t definitive but is just an idea of what can be included.

3) Links (Depth 2- 3)

Links on your hompage are a necessity. Without links, the user is stuck and will more than likely leave, something that you obviously do not want! Links help by guiding your visitor to other pages of your site, areas they may not know about.

Do not confuse these links with the main navigation links. The depth of these links can range from 2 – 3, meaning to get there without using this link, the user would have to click 2 – 3 other links.

For example, you have posted an article in your blog about the “Top 10 ways to grow cabbages”. For the user to get to this article, they would have to either:

Click Blog -> Scroll and Click the article
or
Click Blog -> Click Category -> Click article

Wouldn’t it be easier if the user could click once and be straight there?

Of course, this cannot be the case for every article or page you have but it is a good technique to use to a certain limit. Some suggestions are:

• Links to popular articles
• Links to new articles
• Links to categories

Once again – this list is by no means definitive, just suggestions.

2) Relevant Content

Your homepage is going to get crawled by all of the search engine bots out there. You need to let these bots know that the content of your site is relevant and up to date.

Your current keywords need to have a high density within the page (I tend to use 3-8% as a guideline). Make sure they are placed well and not stuffed. Steer clear of black-hat methods like hiding keywords and stuffing, this will only work against you.

A good and relatively easy way of doing this is explaining to the visitor who you are and what you do. The keywords you have chosen are bound to pop up and with some careful consideration, can appear more often!

A good keyword density calculator can be found at www.seochat.com.

1) Links (Depth of 1)

Similar to the previous listing, but what I believe to be the most important part of a homepage are the first level links.

These are links that link to other main pages within your site. For example:

• About Us
• Contact Us
• For Sale
• Our Services
• Blog
• Other relative pages

These links should allow your visitor to access the other main sections of your website. They need to be visible and easy to find. What is the use of having a set of important links if the user cannot see them or know that they can click on them?

I find myself using navigation bars a lot of the time. They are simple to create, look good and do their job to a high level. They appear central and high in the page, just below the company name or banner. You don’t always have to use navigation bars.

There are hundreds of ways to link to other pages…

You could incorporate the links into your banner…
You could animate them to make them stand out…

As long as the links are clear, visible and stand out, your user should have no problem accessing them.

I hope you found this article interesting. There are hundreds of things that could be included on the homepage, this is just a list of the ones I believe are important.

I am sorry I mentioned links twice, but I believe both are important enough to deserve it!

Jack

Searching for “top website layouts” displayed my blog at about rank 2 in the UK and rank 6 on dot com.

You have NO idea how happy I was – it seemed all of my hard work was paying off.

I decided to leave it and come back later – just to see how many people would actually visit it. Around 6 hours later, it topped at about 350 and then began to slow down – I wondered why?

I checked the Google Search Engine Results again and to my surprise, not even on page 3! My blog post on dzone was there on page 2 but nothing about me. Why was this? From everything to nothing in about 5 hours? It slightly annoyed me but also put me in the mood to find out why – back to Google!

What I searched for…

“disappeared out of google search engine results”

and here’s what I found…

As we all know, Google crawls our websites and indexes the pages that we provide. We also know how big Google actually is and how many sites it has to index. This means that while Google crawls and indexes site, it cannot maintain a single index that is referenced when a user searches.

This explains why my site appeared for so long but then disappeared later. The server that was dealing with my requests may have had an “older” version of the index and therefore was not supplying me with the results I wanted.

I got this answer from a post found here: Google Answers.

is that it…?

Well we know that Google like to keep things under-wraps. This makes me think, are Google actually telling the truth? It makes perfect sense what is being said, but could it be wrong?

I decided to do a bit more searching and find out what other people thought.

I had read a post the other day regarding the so-called “Google Sandbox”. (The blog can be found here: Blog Business World)

I didn’t really know what was meant by the Sandbox effect (In general I do but not in Google Terms) so it was time to visit my good old friend Wikipedia.

The Sandbox Effect – Explains that the Sandbox is used for temporarily placing new domains at the top of the results page and to counter some techniques used by SEOs when promoting new sites;

…placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site…

It seems that there are multiple answers out there for why Google may drop new sites in and out of the Search Engine Results. Personally, I hope it is the earlier of the two because I will hopefully be back to my previous position (plus or minus a few places depending on other indexed sites).

Has anyone else found the same problem? Let me know – It would be great to hear of other peoples experiences.

Jack

Tools that can be used in Linux when designing Websites

I moved over from Windows at the beginning of my University life and I haven’t moved back. Ubuntu has everything that I need…

- Emails are read online at Gmail
- Music is Streamed from a radio station
- Open office is used to text documents
- Firefox for web browsing
- VLC for media

There’s nothing else that I really need to do…or is there?

What about designing websites – something that I have taken a great interest in lately and even begun part-time work around.
So – to help some people out there who may be thinking of switching over to Linux, I’ve compiled a list of programs that can help on your day-to-day design work.

PHP – CSS – HTML Editor

After doing a lot of Java Coding for a University Project and using the Netbeans IDE, I decided to stick with Netbeans and do all of my PHP/CSS/HTML coding with it. I haven’t looked back since.

Netbeans is a great development environment and can be used for a wide variety of programming languages. It has a built in FTP Client, meaning files can be right clicked and uploaded. There is no need to save, locate the file, move the file over to the server as Netbeans does this for you.

As Netbeans is coded in Java, it can be run on virtually any platform, meaning it can run on Linux (as it is doing now on my desktop!).

Although this is an advantage, it can also cause a few minor problems when running Netbeans. I have found that on the odd occasion it will crash, nothing serious but rather annoying.

Graphics Design

This is there area where a Windows or Mac machine may prevail over one running a Linux platform. The program that can be used for Graphics Design in Linux, GIMP, don’t get me wrong – is a great program, but not on the same levels as Photoshop. I have used GIMP to design the whole of my portfolio, however, after searching the web for tutorials, I have found myself looking to get photoshop. Photoshop performs better on Windows machines (you can use WINE on Linux but I don’t) meaning the options are limited for those of us running Linux.

However, there is an alternative. A Virtual Machine. If you have a copy of Photoshop, why not get a Virtual Machine setup and run it on there? (As long as you haven’t installed it anywhere else before – licensing reasons!) I use a Virtual Machine for a lot of work – including checking my websites work in Internet Explorer.

I use VMWare when running my Virtual Machines and as long as your computer has enough RAM to set asside and a decent processor, the VM should run fine. If you want any help setting this up – don’t be afraid to ask.

FTP Client

Having the ability to use an FTP Client when designing websites is essential. Moving images or files over to the web server is a necessity and has to be done quite often. Having a quick FTP Client that can establish a strong connection is a must. In Linux I tend to use the file manager (In my case, Nautilus). It allows me to type the address in “ftp://<servername>” and then I am prompted for a username and password.

The client is quite quick the connection only seems to drop if I don’t touch it for a couple of hours.

Whistle while you work…

I like to do something while I design websites. Whether it be browse my favorite forum, listen to Galaxy 105 or watch some tv shows or films. Either way, the ability is still there in Linux!

VLC Media Player can be used for music and videos. I tend to use it to watch films and tv shows.

I can stream my favorite radio station online using Firefox.

Let me know if you disagree with any. I would like to know what people think about the programs I’ve listed. It may help me with my work!

Jack

The Cost Per Click of adverts on the first page is as follows:

“website design” costs £15 per click
“web site design” costs £10 per click
“web site designers” costs £10 per click
“web site developers” cost £11 per click

Now to me, that is a A LOT of money. Out of the total clicks you get in say, one day, how many people are actually going to want you to design their website?

This is what set me about looking for alternative ways to advertise my abilities and so I decided to start my blog.

I had read a lot about blogs and how they can attract attention to your work. As long as I kept my blog on topic, Google would be happy and my rankings and backlinks would gradually increase.

But what other ways are there to advertise? Here’s a few that I think are worth it…

• Forums
  I am not sure how many of you will agree with me on this one, but if you use a forum on a regular basis, why not put a link to your portfolio in your signature? You are getting free backlinks from what is hopefully a respectable forum.
  Even if you don’t use a forum on a regular basis, there is no harm in starting.
• Blog Posting
  Make some friends. Get posting on other peoples blogs. If the posts are not spam and are relevant to the topic, the author will like it. Try not to just post “Thanks, great post”. Engage the author, ask them a question, show that you are actually interested. Who knows, if you do this enough, they might become a friend and link to your site (hopefully where you choose the anchor text!).
• Directory Submission
  An easy way to get your link over the Internet is directory submission. Most of these free directories are around page rank 3 – 4 and although they are not going to bring you massive amounts of traffic, they WILL help!
• Post good – relevant articles – OFTEN!
  Make sure you update your content. Get a blog – post on it daily. It only takes half an hour, do it before you get into your work of after your evening meal. If you do this, you will get good SERPS by Google and the search engine will begin to like you! After you’ve written the article, submit it to these:

  - Digg
  - Stumbleupon
  - Delicious
  - Propeller
  - Twitter (Get tweeting it!)
  - Linkedin
  - Google Bookmarks
  - Reddit
  - Dzone
  I have had quite a lot of traffic come from these sites and it is really worth taking 10 minutes and submitting to them.

Now I know most of these techniques are just SEO techniques but they are a must for advertising any website.

If you do want to pay, however, there are a number of other websites out there:

http://www.buysellads.com

http://www.botw.org

Yahoo Directories
http://www.v7n.com/forums (A lot of people will sell links here)

There are just a few websites that you can pay (sometimes a lot)  and get your advert displayed.

Thanks for reading,

Jack