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You mean like a comments section, or a full forum like Cemetech?

Full forum. Today, almost everybody who start their own tiny blog/small website on Webs, for example, or even on other hosts, put a full forum on it with plenty of discussion areas, expecting to have activity. I don't see the need of such thing unless you really have a big project or something unique. That might be just me, though.

That seems fair, I can agree with you on that. It seems to me such people would be better off having simple comments sections, and if they want discussion and feedback, they're better off just coming to a bigger, established forum. The exception would be, as you say, if they have a big project or some unique feature(s) to offer.

I wanted a forum on my portfolio website at first. But I realized there are too many photo forums on the internet so instead of creating one I'd just find one. But the thing with photography is that all the conversations to be had are short. I literally have facebook messages that are five posts long. They ask a question, I answer and they say "Thanks!" then I ask to post the when possible then afterwards they tell me my advice really helped them or something along those lines.

I could get more messages if I critiqued or had a photo critiqued. Getting into detail about stuff and then a follow up posts with secondary details and ideas then perhaps more posts with re-edits or re-takes.

In light of the above, I haven't joined a real photography forum. I am apart of the photo community that is deviantART but even their forums suck.

If I post big projects I'd want comments on a blog anyways, not a forum topic. The comments would be nested - which I've grown accustomed to thanks to deviantART - and that way conversations would stay mostly on topic and when it came time to update, new blog post with new comments to be added. A side note here, tumblr doesn't officially support comments. You can answer "questions" that end short posts, however, but those answers can't be replied back to. I can let people "photo reply," however that would help.

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But a forum isn't practical. I've really got to look at the available blogging systems and go from there. I can even import posts from other services via Tumblr; Make my posts through WordPress and have Tumblr watch an RSS feed and post anything new that pops up there. I'd need a way to add a click through link if one isn't added already. I'll need to test that.

And that's what I had in mind when I said "psuedo-social." I want the site to use social technologies, but I don't want to be in direct contact with my readers (essentially feedback posts). If readers like it, they'll promote it be reblogging, retweeting or sharing a post. If they don't, they won't do anything and that's what I'm looking for. If they're interested, they can e-mail me.

To reiterate to everyone else why I chose monospaced, I wanted a consistently spaced theme. I want to emphasize space by using as much of my available room and keeping a tidy look. Font like Cemetech and the world in general uses is nice for a lot of things and working in a monospaced font is definitely new, different and potentially challenging.

By using a monospaced font I feel I can convey a since of organization, order and predictability. If the site was looser in regards to layout and space, a font unlike Courier could work.





If you want a easier way to compare, click each photo to view them on Facebook and click previous/next or open each in a new tab and alternate between tabs.

Anyone prefer one over the other?

I like the idea of clicking to advance, or even using the [<] and [>] arrow keys to move between photos, as I implemented in the Cemetech Photos Module, so that's my personal preference. :_)

There's a Cemetech Photos Module?

There has been for well over two years; I wrote it in 2008 and have improved it slightly since then.

Original Announcement: http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?year=2008&month=all&id=334
News About Upgrades: http://www.cemetech.net/news.php?year=2009&month=all&id=355
Photos Module: http://www.cemetech.net/projects/photos.php
Sample Album: http://www.cemetech.net/projects/photos.php?id=3717

If you look at the first screen shot, you'll notice a middle-gray set of three characters. These will control the navigation of the photos. Of course, I'd like to implement a "click to advance" feature, similar to what I had in the first iteration of my portfolio site and removed in the second version, but that isn't possible in Tumblr, nor perhaps in WordPress.

As much as I'd like the whole website to be managed through a system like WordPress or tumblr, some aspects of this site is seeming like it needs to be hardcoded. Which, I want to shy away from. I've hard coded everything into my current and previous portfolio versions and updating it with *more* photos is such tedious work, but to replace old photos isn't hard at all, I just overwrite two photos and it's replaced.

But here I'd like to include a description, details and other tidbits.

Unrelated, I like the new smilie ;_)

Then you could use some simple LAMP (well, at least the MP part) to build your own trivial CMS if you wanted; shouldn't be too bad. I and the other PHP/MySQL gurus would be happy to help, I'm sure. And I agree that hardcoding can be very tedious. Case in point: back when Cemetech was hosted on Geocities, I had to manually update the index.html and news.html pages each time I created a new news article.

Not too bad indeed. But why make my own when there are extensible CMS's already out there? The only thing I'd likely make myself is a HTML5 video player.

Of course you pick the hardest of the possible subproblems, or in other words the one with which I have no experience whatsoever.

What, CMS or HTML5? No worries regarding HTML5 or CMS's.

If I did make my own CMS, it'd be oddly familiar to tumblr in likes of the posting strategy: Text, Link, Quote, Photo, Audio, Video or Chat. And from there formats the posts accordingly.

I likely wouldn't need Audio and I could likely mix a few together (audio, video).

However, if I were to make a CMS, I'd need help there.

No no, I meant HTML5+creating a video player is the one thing with which I'm unfamiliar; I'm probably going to have to find a way to get my feet wet with HTML5 one of these days, even if it's doing something as stupid as reading up on the HTML5/JS Gameboy emulator and trying to build a similar TI-83+ emulator based on the concepts.