Jim Doran

I am in the process of completely reworking this site. WordPress 3.0 has brought with it a bunch of new features, and I’m taking advantage of them. As such, I’m also doing a little house cleaning elsewhere and thought I should explain why.

tumblr.

A little over a year ago, I set up an tumblr account on a sub-domain here (random.jimdoran.net) as an experiment and also to have a place to post junk that I didn’t want to post on my “real” blog.

Tumblr is amazingly easy to use, and very friendly. I didn’t mess around with customizing themes much, but that is also easy to do. I enjoyed using it, especially the iPhone app that let me post images immediately. I published almost 400 post in the past year. I much prefer tumblr to blogger. It’s good stuff!

My experiment is concluded and I’ve removed my account and subdomain. I’m contemplating importing my tumblr posts here. I will continue to share nonsense, just not on tumblr.

flickr.

I don’t do much with flickr anymore. The recent redesign has disappointed many of its community members. I’ve been watching the forums and the staff  at flickr seem a little squinky, giving paying members “time outs” for expressing  overly negative opinions. If  the majority of your community stands up and tells you they don’t like the “improvements,” then they aren’t improvements. I think the user feedback is more than just resistance to change.  I’m also indifferent at this point.

Like tumblr, flickr makes it easy to back-up photos from an iPhone. Tagging is wonderful, and the interface was pretty straightforward. When I started the sketchbook swap, I thought a lot about whether to use flickr, blogger or WordPress.com. I choose flickr because it inherently lends itself to presenting images, and that’s what we were doing. The ability for community members to interact with each other (and here I mean the sketchbook group) was great. There are image editing tools available, so my new participants and less technically inclined artists would have easy access. The process of using flickr/posting images is very straight forward and thought out. It’s linear in many respects.

Google recently reworked their image search results pages to keep pace with Bing, and it’s an improvement.   I think  flickr could/should implement several things:

• The ability to favorite entire sets
• The ability to favorite other user’s favorites. Favorites are basically sets, so why not?
• Improve the speed. I can regularly count to 15 before the page loads, which is crazy.
• The ability to revert to and keep the older layout, or customize our own. Having to click several times to get “Show All Sizes” is a drag, and I prefer having the image title at the top after years of it being there.
• A “find similar” feature. Google has done amazing work on this – keep up, Yahoo?
• A better Yahoo ID system

WordPress supports tagging, publishing from an iPhone and has some great image presentation/editing features. My intention is to recreate a similar experience here, minus the community members. Sorry community members.

I will keep my flickr account, but will thin out what’s posted there.

More as it follows.