QandO

May 26, 2004

Blatant Commercialism
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There's a reason I haven't done much blogging this week. I'm working full-time on a new project. And, because I'm a raging capitalist it's designed to make me money.

Those of you who are regular readers of The Review know that I do Web Hosting, and, what may be less known, I do the web hosting for this very web site.

For the last several days, I've been building a new web site, and because I'm a raging capitalist, it's designed to make me money. Eventually. Maybe.

But this isn't a commercial plug for it, as much as it is a little bit of catering to the geek-interest crowd. I'm building this site as an ASP.NET e-commerce site to sell high-res pictures on the web. For those of you who do web design, you know that finding royalty-free pictures can be a pain, unless you're willing to shell out $500 to photos.com.

So, I've been building this site. It's all ASP.NET with a SQL Server back end. It allows users to browse photos by category, or to search by keyword.

I don't have a lot of pictures up yet, only about 120 or so, but it's enough for you to see how it works, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

All the photos were taken by me, or by my significant other, The Lovely Christine.

By the way, I just picked up the new Sony DSC-F828 8-megapixel Digital camera. It takes MemorySticks or CompactFlash cards, and has the new RGBE color chip. You can get 261 photos on a GB CF card. I highly recommend it, if you're looking for a very nice digital camera, but aren't willing to shell out $1500+ for a digital SLR and a couple of lenses.

The 828 has a 28-200 7x manual zoom "Carl Zeiss" T* lens, and has a digital zoom that goes up to 31x at lower resolutions.

Photography has long been a weakness of mine, and over the last 20 years, I've collected enough cameras and equipment to choke a horse. It's jones worse than China White. When I was a young A1C in the Air Force, taking home a grand total of $741 per month, I still managed to pick up a Yashica FX-7 and a couple of lenses (which I still have). No electronic stuff, no autofocus. All manual.

I used to go out with 36-exposure rolls of film, and a notebook just to take pictures of stuff, and note the shutter speed, lens, f-stop, etc.

Fortunately, The Lovely Christine is a bigger shutterbug than I am, so I can get a photo safari going at the drop of a hat, simply by mentioning the possibility to her.

Anyway, all the pictures on the new web site are pictures we've taken, and we're undercutting photos.com by 50%.

Of course, they have about 500,000 photos to our 1,000 or so, but, maybe this'll add a couple of bucks a month to the bottom line.

Anyway, the web site is still in beta. It consists of only about 6 pages:

The default page (default2.aspx)
The Category Page (photos_categories.aspx)
The Search results page (photos_keywords.aspx)
The photo Details page (photo_details.aspx)
an Error page (errorpage.aspx), that comes up when there are no photos in a search or category
A Fulfillment page that delivers pictures after you return from the credit card processing routine.

I'm very happy with the way it works. Now, all I have to do is edit another 1,000 photos, and add them to the database. Yeeha.

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