In our case we plan to publish many of them on more than one website.  For example, we may have a Serigraph published by Tewa Enterprises.  We will talk about it and others in our collection like it on TewaEnterprises.com.  When and if we decide to sell it we will list it on NativeAmericanArtsAndCrafts.com.  There may be some months between these two event so we need a minimal effort system that lets us track this.

“Real” stores all seem to use SKU’s (Shop Keeping Units) so we tried doing that.  It became apparent very quickly this is labor intensive and prone to errors.  In effect you are building a large database system.  I have had enough experience with those to never want to go near one again.

We eventually realized the camera assigns a unique number to each picture we take. We understand that this number may repeat when the camera counter rolls over at 100,000 images, but don’t expect that to be a problem.

We use the Picasa program, downloaded for free from Google, to track our pictures.  We also assign keywords to pictures as we use them.  Since Picasa includes Google’s search power that works well.

For example, using the situation mentioned above, we might take pictures of a Harrison Begay Silk Screen published by Tewa Enterprises.  We would have one picture that showed the entire Serigraph, another that shows the signature, one that shows the written description, etc.

In Picasa we would add TewaEnterprises.com as a keyword to each of these pictures.  When we uploaded the pictures to the website(s) we would make sure the file name is included.  Sometimes this is automatic.  Some of the software we use for site building doesn’t change the file name.  Some other programs do change the file name so we have to make sure the original name is included somewhere associated with the picture.

For example, we will include it in the product description which is part of a PayPal button.  This way when the notification of a payment made arrives from PayPal it includes the file name.  We can do a quick search in Picasa for the file name and immediately see exactly which item we are talking about.

The other side of this issue is that the actual items need to be marked with the file name too.  How this should be done depends on the kind of item we are dealing with.  Some things, like our Erzgebirge Smokers are best marked with a hang tag.  Hang tags don’t risk pulling paint loose when they come off.

We bought a label maker which includes a variety of sized adhesive ribbon.  This works well for glass items where we don’t worry about adhesives drying and causing damage over time.  Many items can just have the label dropped inside them.

We are still working on how to organize these things around the house. We don’t have a shop and like to display as many of these collectibles as we can.  That means we need a system where others, such as our kids, would be able locate things as they sell.  We are still testing ideas for how we might accomplish this.

It’s been fun, but now it is time to organize and document what we have and think about selling some of it.  This post is the first of what we expect will become a series of post about how to do this.

At the present time much of our collections are in storage.  We know that eventually we will probably want to sell them online so we will need pictures and descriptions which include as much specific information as possible.  Since we are talking about several thousand items this becomes an interesting management challenge.  So, an initial requirement is to develop a system that connects pictures to each individual item.  The connection must be obvious enough that our kids or hired assistants could make the connections without help from us.

I think collectibles sellers on Ebay miss a huge opportunity when they delete their item descriptions and photos as soon as an auction ends.  Their only opportunity to profit is from the actual sale of the item.  Since I already profit each month from informational websites I wrote years ago I am not willing to do that.  I want a system where those pictures and information stay around and generate ad clicks and/or other income on an ongoing basis.

One way to do that is to build website(s) which include the pictures and descriptions of items we plan to sell.  Our inventory if you will.  When we sell something we add the sales information to the website and leave it visible.  New visitors to our website see and learn about it and can also see how well it sold.

In the beginning we don’t know for sure what we want to sell and are not always current on how they should be priced.  So we need a way to organize things online to show off what we have or had, while not offering it for sale immediately.  It should also be easy to transfer the pictures and content into an auction format with a minimal amount of work.

We want to achieve all of the above goals in a way that maximizes the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of our content.

We will share our plans for doing this in future posts.

WP Twin launched recently and purports to do an exact copy of your old WordPress site, including themes & plugins, and let you upload them to a new server.  It also claims you can upload a site from one domain to another and it will correct all the links to work on the new domain.

We are especially interested in getting off of our old servers and on to different ones.  In addition, the idea of easy, regular backups is attractive.  If WP Twin works as advertised you can easily make a backup before you update WordPress and/or you plugins.  Then, when your update fails for some reason you can use the backup to immediately revert to your old setup.  If you have ever had an update crash your system, you know how valuable that is.

I immediately bought a copy of WP Twin and tried it out.  Unfortunately, our old sites are running at a hosting company using a DirectAdmin control panel (NOT CPANEL) and suPHP.  WP Twin will not work under these circumstances, which was a real letdown.

We now have to evaluate more difficult solutions.  What you see on PaulAndErik.com now is the result of upgrading our WordPress install on the old host.  We had to do that to get the Import/Export feature of WordPress.  We used that to export the old site and then imported the site to a new host running CPANEL.

The result is:

• The theme did not transfer.  What you see now is the default WordPress theme
• Askimet was the only plugin to transfer and I had to re-enter my API key
• I have no idea if the changes will impact any SEO related features

Since PaulandErik.com is just a personal blog where we occasionally write about our work, none of that is a really big deal.

The more difficult question is if this is an acceptable way to transfer sites that have significant income and/or ranking.  Some of the factors to consider would be:

• Is the old site/design doing the job?  In our case our interests have changed.  PaulandErik.com was written when we thought we wanted to grow a web development business.  For a variety of reasons, we have lost interest in that.
• While we hate to just throw away a well ranked and indexed site the reality is it needs significant editing to reflect our current interests and plans.  It would require a lot of work to edit the old content to fit the new situation.  To the extent that new pages were required that would dilute old SEO in any case.
• We have learned a few things since we built this site.  Starting from scratch we would build a more tightly focused site and make some changes to the technology.
• Our old site had our about page as the home page.  I thought this helped visitors understand what we were all about.  Unfortunately, it also made it look as if our site never updated because the home page was always the same.

I have decided to leave the site as is, not worry about the plugins that grouped and categorized our posts, and publish this post at the top of the home page.  As time goes on I will be directing links from our other sites, which I used to point to PaulAndErik, to other places.  Over time the rankings of this site will drop and at some time in the future it will gradually fade away.

Can you tell I like new things

I went to their site, and while it is informative, it’s hard to tell much about a complex software system by reading a feature list and the vendors sales literature.  At that point I usually do a search for “software name review” in hopes of reading about the software from people who are actually using it.  Lately that has been really disappointing.

Almost all the results of a search for reviews bring up sites that are really thin affiliate sites whose only purpose is to get you to buy the software using their link.  Few, if any of them, have actually  used the software.  The “content” is carefully designed to make it look like they actually know something and that their review has substance, but that’s not the case.  It’s very frustrating.

An in depth review of a complex software system is a lot of work!  You can read all the sales materials, run a few text cases, and get some sense for what the system might do.  However, the only way to find out how it really works is to actually use it in a real work environment for a while.  Only then will you find the subtle constraints imposed by the underlying design concepts.  You will also find places where features you originally thought were  essential are not needed.

In other words it take lots of time and use to really be able to write a good review.

AuctionSounds looks like it might be a Ebay selling system that would help fit Ebay sales into our activities with our network of websites.  We plan to document our findings in a series of posts on our Selling Stuff website.  As we learn how the software works, run auctions, manage sales, build lists, etc. we will be posting about what we find.  Hopefully, that will help others determine if the software would help them.

Our websites have done well with nothing but organic traffic from search.  In fact, we don’t have any products to sell so a list just hasn’t seemed important.

For some reason I recently found myself asking “If we lost our presence on the search engines where would we be?”  The answer is not attractive.  We could sell stuff on Ebay or one of the other auction venues, but life would look much better if we had a list to work with.

Fortunately, while we have procrastinated, the tools for building lists have gotten much better.  They are more powerful and easier to use.  We recently discovered AuctionSound.com which combines Ebay sales management with list building and consignment sales.  We are testing it now and it may be the tool that finally turns us into active Ebay sellers and list builders.

Unfortunately, when we came back from our Arizona desert wildflower trip with 3,400 pictures to process some of the strengths of Lightroom for workflow management became apparent.

Lightroom3 beta was available now so I installed it.  I find it incorporates some of the watermarking capability it previously lacked.  This is good because I like to watermark my images before I publish them.  Even more important is that Lightroom supports virtual copies.  You can make as many virtual copies of an image as you want and treat each of them differently.  With Picasa I would have to undo the changes and re-export for each set of changes.  That means I would have to remember what I had done and/or where I used the exported picture.

I think Picasa is the tool of choice for most people.  It really is easy to use and understand and it’s ability to add captions to pictures is much better than Lightroom.  I assume that is, at least in part, because Adobe is trying to preserve the Photoshop niche.  Virtual copies and more powerful organizing tools require me to use Lightroom.  You can probably see where this is going…

I’m going to have to use both for at least a while.

The reality seems to be something different.  I have had my Canon T2i for about a week now.  I set it to record the largest possible images (18 megapixel) plus RAW.  On a sixteen gigabyte memory chip the camera said I had room for about 415 images.

I went around taking pictures and everything seemed fine.  Then I tried to load the pictures into Picasa via an SDHC Class 6 memory card reader.  The pictures loaded, but all the Camera RAW images were weird, distorted and had a violet/pink cast.

So I think “Maybe the free Picasa program can’t  handle the RAW files properly.  I should try the expensive ($200) Lightroom2 program from Adobe.  It will no doubt do better.”  Wrong! Lightroom2 churned around for a while and then told me there were 72 files that had problems and it had skipped them.  Those were all the Camera RAW files of course.  Unfortunately, it didn’t even see the 72 associated jpg’s!

I hopped out onto the web and did some Google searches.  I’m not the first person to ask the question of what is going on and here is what I found.  The camera manufacturers change the codec every time they manufacturer a new camera.  You can think of the codec as a map to the image data on the memory chip before the camera software processes it.  Until they publish a specification or someone reverse engineers the data structure none of the current software will be able to read the camera RAW files properly.

What really surprised me, and prompted this post, is that apparently no one really cares about this and the lag between time first sales of a new camera and availability of  software with an updated codec is likely to be three to six MONTHS!  To me that screams “NO ONE CARES!”  If a lot of people used camera RAW files there would be actual demand for it and the new codec would be available immediately.

I am left with the feeling that many semi professional and professional photographers think camera RAW is important, but few of them actually need to use it immediately after a new camera comes out.  The reality is so few people are interested in actually using camera RAW publication of a new codec is very much a back burner issue.

We have learned to be skeptical over the years because so often the advice is trivial, and sometimes dangerous.  Google, for example, is not very forgiving if they catch you using “black hat” techniques to improve your rankings.  Still, there are people and companies who have been selling their SEO services for years and seem to do well with it.  Presumably they have happy customers who give them good referrals.

We have come to realize these systems have two universal themes.  “With our system it’s easy”.  “With our system you won’t have to write lots of original content“.  Original writing is hard.  You have to do research,  you have to educate yourself, you have to organize and summarize your reference materials.  Then you need a good command of the English language and writing skills to craft well written, entertaining, educational articles.  Sure, you can try outsourcing your writing needs to India, but it won’t work.  Content “Spinning” software may create text that will fool a search engine, but it will not impress a human reader.  The technical requirements have gotten easier but if you realistically hope to stand out from the crowd, it is going to take work.

This post was triggered when I saw a video by a guy being touted as “one of the best SEO’s in the world”.  One of his solutions for creating the content needed to grow your website was to subscribe to RSS feeds from 20-25 related websites and write a 200 word “review” of what they said.  With practice that would take about five minutes so by investing an hour a day you would add 200-250 posts a month to your site.  He seemed to think that kind of “content” would be sufficiently interesting for people to link to your site.  I am doubtful.  I know I would keep looking around until I found the site(s) that were doing their own work.

This aversion to writing creates, in my opinion, a real opportunity for writers. Writing is hard work and writers are poorly paid for what they produce.  Unfortunately, many are also computer illiterate or phobic.  If writers could conquer their fears of technology they are ideally suited to develop profitable websites.  They already know how to do research, how to interview people, how to write entertaining articles, etc.  These are all skills the tech heavy online publishing world is weak in.  The out of pocket cost of a domain name and website hosting is almost nothing.  Readers will give you immediate feedback on what they like or don’t  like; you don’t have to wait until the book is published.

In fact, stock photography will now embark on a More’s law descent based on the rate of change in camera technology.

I think this presents an opportunity for photographers willing to grasp the new technology and move quickly.  I plan to start making this size images available on my own stock photography sites and will be publishing as many of them as I can as quickly as possible.  It should be an interesting time.

I did some checking into requirements and it will take more than just buying the camera to make a system selling these large images function.  Canon estimates you will be able to get 40 images onto each gigabit of memory chip capacity.  In other words goodby 1, 4, even 8 gig chips.  It will be the same thing with hard drives.

The new cameras will let you make both a jpg and a camera raw copy of your image from a single “exposure”.  I suspect that cuts that 40 picture estimate by at least a half.  However, it also means the originals can be kept completely untouched.  Buyers will know they are getting every pixel possible in it’s original condition so they will be able to tweak them to their specific needs.

The new camera will also do video with an external microphone.  There is a button on the back of the camera that lets you switch from stills to video and back without pause.  Should be a fun time.

I really do think this will open the door so a lot more small time photographers will be able to compete with the big stock photography houses and profit from selling their pictures.

As people discover what they can do with WordPress they think of more and more features it “would be nice to have.”  Thousands of plugin developers have been happy to meet this need.  So, today, the typical WordPress install consists of the basic WordPress core code plus five to twenty plugins that add specific features needed by a particular application.

A programmer typically gets involved when:

• The user can’t find a plugin that does what they need.
• The user notices page loads have become unacceptably slow.
• Website users begin to complain they can’t connect and/or get error messages.

All of these are symptoms which will probably require a programmer to fix.  We will be publishing a series of posts with specific details about some of these problems as well as potential solutions.