This is our new look, version 1.0. We're gradually converting all of
our articles to AOLserver Dynamic Pages with our own custom tags.
This way we can adjust the design and interface of the entire site by
changing a few lines of computer software. Our old friend from MIT,
Rebecca Frankel, has returned to do most of the heavy lifting. When
she, aided by some scripts, is done with an article, I go in to update
the text, removing recommendations of Kodachrome 25, for example. One
general rule is "if the product was discontinued more than 15 years
ago, stop talking about it." Expect to see more about digital cameras
and less about film and LP records.
The conversion process is starting with the Learn
section of photo.net, which we regard as the core of the site and
are hoping to improve.
Reduction in Advertising
I started photo.net as a personal hobby. From 1993 through 2000, the
site had zero revenue and no expenses except for my time. Busy
managing 80 people at a small software company that I had founded, I
spun the company off in early 2000 to some young folks bursting with
energy and fancy educations (two of them had MIT PhDs!). They
produced a beautiful spreadsheet showing that, within five years,
photo.net would generate more profit than Microsoft. How did the
actual results compare with the dream spreadsheet? photo.net would have gone
bankrupt in 2001 except that it didn't have enough money to pay a
lawyer to file bankruptcy papers.
Bob Atkins, Brian Mottershead, Rajeev Surati, and a crew of volunteers
nursed the site along for the next few years. In 2005, Google's
Adsense program grew large enough to lift overall Internet advertising
rates. Until Google, Internet ads were scattered more or less
randomly. Teenagers were offered pension plans and retirees were
offered college prep classes. People who wanted to buy cameras were
flooded with ads for cars while people who wanted to buy cars were
shown ads for camera phones. With Internet ads mostly falling on deaf
ears, advertisers were unwilling to pay big money for ad space.
Google changed all of that by reading pages before placing ads. If a
page had a lot of words about sailboats, the ads would be for
sailboats. Thanks to Google, our revenue went up from around $50,000
per year (enough to pay for serving housing and bandwidth) to around
$500,000 per year (enough to pay for some new content, an improved
design, programming, system administration, and database
administration). If we are to achieve our dreams of greatly improved
content, services, and software, we need one more big boost.
We have more than 60 million page views per month. Our average reader
is a 40-year-old gearhead with a $100,000 annual salary who plans to
spend $3,000 in the next 12 months on camera equipment. You'd think
that advertisers would pay for this audience. Well, so did the young
MIT geniuses who took the site over in 2000. We've experimented with
Google ads and ads from Gorilla Nation, whose staff pounds the
pavement and schmoozes advertisers and their agencies directly. We've
been disappointed with the quality and the variety of the ads. As the
Editor in Chief, it is my job to make sure that everything on the page
is interesting and relevant to the reader. We were getting too little
variety in the ads, which rendered them uninteresting. We weren't
getting enough ads that we thought were highly relevant.
We've raised our minimum price with both Google and Gorilla Nation.
That means that nobody can get a display ad to our readers without
paying more. Ideally, this should mean that we only get ads that are
in fact highly relevant to our readership. One positive effect is
that we've kissed the sleazy flashing ads goodbye. The big negative
is that, so far, few advertisers seem willing to pay this much.
We're experimenting with different kinds of ads, notably Amazon
shopping banners recently, but overall our response to the paucity of
good ads being available is to run fewer ads. We've pulled ads from
above the header of our pages and from the home page. We'll be eating
spaghetti and broccoli every night until we figure out some other
brilliant strategy for making money.
New Staff
We've brought in a lot of new staff members, mostly part-time
quasi-volunteers since we still don't have any money (see above). As
the author of "Learn
to Program HTML in 21 Minutes", I am a credible expert on the
state of the art in Web page development... circa 1997. In 2007,
however, we live in a Brave New World of Cascading Style Sheets and
Javascript on every page. Our new Director of User Interface, Julie
Melton, who is responsible for this page's design, is an expert in our
new world. I'm cutting myself back to taking photos and figuring out
what words should appear on the pages.
Our old customer service policy was like a sign in a barbecue
restaurant: "Once Upon a Time there were three little pigs. The End."
Folks sent us emails and we saved them on our hard drives. The End.
Josh Root, photojournalist and wedding photographer, and a long-time
volunteer moderator here at photo.net, has taken over as Director of
Community. He is responsible for making sure that people get what
they need out of the photo.net community. It could be as simple as
straightening out an account or as complex as clarifying a forum
policy and working with the forum moderators.
Jin S. Choi isn't truly new, since he worked on photo.net back in the
1990s, but he is back with a vengeance. Jin is the main guy behind
the relaunch of our site on ArsDigita Community System 3.4 and Oracle
10g. The programmers who worked on the site from 2000 to 2006 did not
document any of their work. They didn't write down what problem they
intended to solve or any explanation of what they'd built. A lot of
the code that we've poked into was pretty ugly, tended to make the
site freeze, and in many cases was more than 1000 times slower than
necessary. Rather than try to figure these things out, we decided to
throw out every line of code written between 2000 and 2006, save the
data, and relaunch the site on a fresh updated version of the toolkit
used to build photo.net. Our friend Neil said that no company can
survive a software rewrite of this nature and that we would go
bankrupt before we relaunched. To that I responded "But we already
went bankrupt in 2001 and we have Jin." We hope to prove Neil wrong,
but we haven't yet...
Photo.net is primarily an Oracle application, with every page drawing
content from the Oracle relational database management system. If
Oracle is down, the site is down. You'd think that, given how
critical, tricky, and arcane Oracle is, we would for many years have
contracted for professional Oracle database administration assistance.
Well, we didn't, but now we do: Dave Morgan. So far he puts up with
our "Caveman SQL Programmer" approach to life.
We've contracted out Linux system administration to Scott Blomquist
and Matt McKinnon of techsquare.com. Scott, the
former head of networking for the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, is
another photo.net recidivist, since he helped out quite a bit in the
late 1990s. Scott and Matt have been installing all of our new
servers and are responsible for monitoring, backups, updates to the
operating system, keeping email working, etc.
A complete list is available from our About Us page.
New Hardware/Sofware Status
One of my early programming jobs was on a system for Babcock and
Wilcox to automate the design of large steel structures such as
offshore oil rigs and coal-fired power plants. I was proud of what
we'd accomplished and showed a vice president what the system could
do. As I shifted the topic to what capabilities were forthcoming in
the next release, the Fortune 500 executive stopped me. "Philip," he
started. "Did you hear about the IBM salesman whose wife was still a
virgin after 10 years?" No, I replied, quite confused at this point.
He explained "Every night he sat on the edge of the bed telling her
how great it was going to be."
We thought we'd have the new hardware/software upgrade completed by
Thanksgiving. I guess we didn't say which year. One user-visible
improvement has been in the photo sharing system. We have managed to
replace a collection of older computers running older versions of the
Linux operating system and a variety of programs with a single 8-disk
machine from Silicon
Mechanics. We now have approximately five times the capacity for
storing photos. The site is more stable and manageable, with massive
undocumented C++ programs having been replaced by Jin's five-line Ruby
scripts, but overall I'm not happy with our track record of doing
stuff that is visible to readers. We are going into my seventh month
of running the site again and I should be doing better.
Thank you!
The goal of photo.net is to provide the best venue for peer-to-peer
education. To the extent that we have succeeded, it is because of
your efforts in helping out fellow readers. So thank you for
contributing to the site in 2006 and, for the old timers, sticking
with us since the mid-1990s.
Philip Greenspun
Editor in Chief
