MCP Actions Magic Blogit Boards

Published by Cris Mitchell

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, and for the latest in How To Articles for the Professional Photographer be sure to check out ProPhotoResource.com. This Message will disappear after your third visit here.

If you are looking for a way to spruce up your images for presentation on the web or your blog, Magic Blogit Boards are the Magic Bullet you’ve been looking for.

Blogit Boards are a collection of actions for creating display boards with 2 – 16 openings in mere seconds. The even have support actions for allowing you to drop you logo in to keep your images completely branded with your studios logo.

Magic Blogit Boards come from ProPhotoResource.com contributor Jodi Friedman of MCP Actions. Jodi has a boatload of Photoshop actions that make can make complex tasks in Photoshop a breeze but so far my favorite is her Magic Blogit Board Actions.

I’ll be honest I’m not a huge Photoshop Action guy but I was totally impressed with the speed and ease that I could create great looking photos for delivery online either on my blog or Flickr etc… It is literally a drag and drop solution and presto you have a presentation board with several images and your logo.

Power Tip: If you are a member of Model Mayhem or any other site that only allows you a limited number of images, try using the Magic Blogit Boards to create a singe image consisting of multiple smaller images. Now you’ve just turned your 20 image account into an 80+ image account. How cool is that!

Check out the Magic Blogit Boards and all of Jodi’s other very cool actions at www.mcpactions.com.

1 Comment . Jun 02, 2009
Filed under: BLOGGING, WEB DESIGN, WEBSITE SOFTWARE, , , ,

iDrive - Online Cloud Backup Done Right

Published by Cris Mitchell

Ok I’ve been testing online cloud backup solutions for the past few months and they either fall into two camps.
1. Difficult to use
or
2. Expensive.

I was becoming increasingly frustrated with all that was out there until I stumbled upon iDrive.com. iDrive.com simply does online backup right. Their system is a breeze to use and is available for both Mac and Windows.

iDrive.com also allow you to backup multiple computers under one account, something almost all of the competitors either charge for or don’t even offer and their pricing is totally affordable. A 2gb account is free allowing you to backup, up to 2gigabytes of information, once you exceed that limitation they have a host of other plans, but the middle of the road package which is perfect for most small business and home users gives you 150 gigabytes of storage for $49.95 per year or $4.95 per month. That is a small price to pay for peace of mind in my book.

Setup and Configuration is drop dead simple.

1. Download the iDrive application
2. Install iDrive
3. Specify folders and files to backup
4. Specify Backup Times
5.DONE iDrive takes it from there

Every night at 9pm iDrive backs up my client files to my account onto the iDrive.com servers. The first time you run iDrive it does a complete backup which takes some time depending on how much data you are moving up after that it just does incremental backups based upon new or edited files and should go fairly quickly.

Another nice feature of iDrive is their web accessibility called iDrive Web Access. Simply login to your account on the iDrive website and you now have access to all your backed up files from anywhere in the world, so the next time your traveling and forgot that super important file, if it’s backed up you have instant access to it. How cool is that.

I could continue to go on and on about how cool iDrive is but I say check out the little demo below or head over to iDrive.com and get the full scoop. If you decide to sign-up for an account please do me a favor and use our affiliate banner link or click on the demo below so we get credit. It’s very rare when we stand behind a product enough to promote it so you can rest assured that iDisk is a keeper.

If you have recommendations for other cloud backup solutions please let us know in the comments we’d love to hear them and even test them out for future reviews.

4 Comments . May 21, 2009
Filed under: INTERNET TOOLS, , ,

What is Your Websites Grade?

Published by Cris Mitchell

I know Twitter can be an information overload at times, but every once in a while I catch a post by one of my followers or someone whom I follow that catches my eye. Yesterday fellow photographer and Twitter user Seshu posted a link to websitegrader.com, a site that lets you analyze and grade your blog or website.

Now I was nowhere near the poster child for the public education system, so every time I see something that smacks of a report card it brings back some of that ol’ childhood anxiety. However what I found with websitegrader.com was a really useful tool for telling me exactly where my website or blogs shortcomings were.

My first spin through the site yielded me a 91/100 for photographershandbook.com, not to shabby and certainly better than I ever did in grade school. It also gave me tips on certain areas that could be improved, such as lowering the number of keywords and shortening my blog description. After making a few changes I quickly upped my score to a 94. I’ll continue to fine tune and see if I can get my grade any higher, but frankly I can live with a 94, if only i could have achieved such excellence as a kid.

Not only do you get the full report emailed to you, you can create a badge you can proudly display on your site or blog, yeah I know it’s essentially a free banner advertisement for websitegrader.com, but I’m proud of my score so I’ll display it on my site the internets equivalent to my parents refrigerator.

websitegrader.com was developed by the folks at HubSpot.com and have several other grading programs. If you jump over to Grader.com you’ll find other tools for grading your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as Press Releases and a Personality Grader.

Grade your website or blog and post the results with links to your site in the comments, I’d love to see your site.

2 Comments . May 01, 2009
Filed under: REVIEWS, WEBSITE SOFTWARE, , ,

One-Click Ping to Get Your Blog Noticed

Published by Cris Mitchell

So you’ve just spent a half-day writing your latest and greatest blog post, you hit submit and then wait for your throngs of blog fans to come racing to your site to read it… and … nobody shows up.

There is an often-overlooked step in the blogging process that will help drive traffic to your blog. You need to notify the various blogging search engines that you have new content waiting to be indexed. There are probably at least a hundred different blogging search engines but really only a handful of them you should concern yourself with. Even if you pick the top 20-30 manually updating each of them can quickly become a pain.

I come bearing a solution.

Read more…

2 Comments . Apr 30, 2009
Filed under: BLOGGING, INTERNET TOOLS, SEO, , , , ,

Twitter Unfollow - Getting Rid of the Dead Weight

Published by Cris Mitchell

What I love about Twitter is it’s ability to have almost near instant two way communication with a network of your peers. I love to hear what other people have to say or what they are tweeting about, which is typically why I reach out to follow them in the first place. However call it greed, self righteousness, or simple Twitter etiquette when I follow someone, I’d ask for the same courtesy in return and would expect to have them follow me back, after all this is a two way street here, however in reality this is not always the case.

To break through the Twitter 2,000 rule you need to have 2,000 followers before you can follow more than 2,000 people, so from time to time you might find it necessary to clean house and get rid of some of your Twitter dead weight.

It can be a daunting task to go through your list and manually un-follow the people in your list that are not following you back, luckily there is a new online tool to make quick work out of removing these ingrates (just kidden of course) They may very well be nice people, probably not but I’m gonna give them the benefit of the doubt. ;-)

Enter TwitterKarma TK is a flash based web application that allows you to see all your friends and then sort them out by people who you are following but are not reciprocating. You can go through your list and check all the folks you want to ditch from your list and then click Bulk Unfollow. Whoala, GONE!

There are a few other apps out there but I’ve found that TwitterKarma seems to work the best for the price. FREE. Plus I love the big WHACK button ;-)

If you have other tips or tricks for un-following twitter followers I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

4 Comments . Apr 29, 2009
Filed under: INTERNET TOOLS, SOCIAL MEDIA, , , ,

Photography Websites - What Every Photographer Needs to Know

Published by Cris Mitchell

My friends over at Photoshelter.com one of the coolest resources for template based photography websites with complete eCommerce backend solutions recently published this video based upon their findings from a  questionnaire that went out to over 550 photo buyers.

If you are in the process of building your site for the first time or thinking about taking on the daunting task of a rebuild, this is a must watch before you write one line of code.

Visit Photoshelter.com to check out some of their affordable and robust website packages for your next site.


Photographer Websites: What Buyers Want 2009 from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.

Post a comment . Apr 29, 2009
Filed under: UNCATEGORIZED, , ,

Loose Those Crazy Website Backgrounds

Published by Cris Mitchell

More and more these days i see photographers stepping out and over the line when it comes to making a splash when choosing a background for their website. Like everything in life sometimes simple is just better and you can’t go wrong with simple white, black or neutral gray backgrounds.

Subtle textures in white, gray and black are ok but try to stay away from crazy textures and wild colors as they will only draw your visitors eye away from your images.

Spend time looking through some of your favorite photographers websites. I know all my favorite shooters use simple design with minimal color and let their images steal the show.

Post a comment . Apr 28, 2009
Filed under: WEB DESIGN, , ,

WIX - Finally A Reason For Flash!

Published by Cris Mitchell

I know I know if you’ve ever heard me speak on the topic of web design and development you know that I’m rather vocal in my opinions against the use of Flash for websites.

Typically, Flash based sites if not built with a huge amount of forethought can be clumsy, cumbersome, difficult to manage and virtually impossible to SEO (Search Engine Optimize). Over the years I’ve spent countless hours talking clients down from the ledge and keeping them from committing CyberSuicide.

Have I painted a bleak enough picture for you yet? If Not Click to Read On…

Read more…

1 Comment . Apr 16, 2009
Filed under: INTERNET TOOLS, WEB DESIGN, WEBSITE SOFTWARE, , , ,

Bad Robot

Published by Cris Mitchell

If your like me, and you should be, you’re diligent about checking your website statistics to see the flow and trends of visitors coming to your site, all this data will help you fine tune your web efforts.

All sorts of insightful information can be obtained when viewing your website statistics including unique vs returning visitors, browser types, monitor resolutions, search terms, how visitors arrived at your site and on and on. If you haven’t spent some time looking through your server stats I encourage you to do so.

There are typically two types of server statistics you’ll use to provide you this information Server Logs and Google Analytics, there are others but these are really the only two I’d bother with.

Let me explain briefly the difference between the two. Read more…

3 Comments . Apr 01, 2009
Filed under: GENERAL INFO, INTERNET TOOLS, , , , , , , ,

Creating Image Reflections

Published by Cris Mitchell

I’ve got some more robust articles just around the corner but in the meantime I thought I’d share a nifty little online tool that will help you spruce up your website and blog images, by creating great looking reflections underneath the image.

Yeh you can do this in Photoshop fairly easy, but not as easy as you can with RelfectionMaker from the folks over at PopMinds.com. Besides RelectionMaker they also have a few other online apps for creating backgrounds and page tabs definitely work checking out.

Creating an image reflection is as easy as heading over to www.reflectionmaker.com and uploading the image you wish to add a reflection to. You can set the reflection size and the background color as well. Once you’re all set just click Generate and bingo your new image is ready to download.

It doesn’t get any easier than that.