Motivation from the past
Posted on 23 August 2006
What is your favourite photo on your blog? Link to it here in the comments section, and I’d love to hear why!
I usually don’t have time to look through the archives of my blog at my leisure, but while working on Google sitemap stuff I found out that Google had discovered a number of 404 “file not found” errors on my blog. A number of them were due to my changing URL format way back in November. I used to have a redirect in place but it disappeared somewhere!
After fixing that little bug I took a look around at some of the old photos from 2005 and was pleasantly surprised at my own reaction. I haven’t see most of these photos in several months so I had forgotten about them and here I am, saying to myself, “I took that? That’s a nice photo!”
Self praise is no praise
as they say but I liked what I saw and that fills me with renewed energy and enthusiasm for the sometimes daily slog of posting a new picture every day. So what if I’m no Chromasia or Daily Dose of Imagery or Thomas Hawk! We do what we do and do the best we can.
So, go look up your archives and be happy!
After that rather rambling monologoue, here’s something useful for all you blog owners. I changed the format of my URLs after a discussion with Tom Raftery. In the course of conversation Tom told me that he used the domin.tld/post-name/ format for his blog instead of the usual domain.tld/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/. In that way, the all important post title is snuggled up next to his name in the address of the post! Good for search engines, good for finding information.
I did the same here, but I had posts already written in the old format. I needed a mod_rewrite rule to redirect those URLs to the new ones! Here it is, in all it’s glory! Add this to your .htaccess and it will transform http://inphotos.org/2005/10/08/into-town/ to http://inphotos.org/into-town/
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/(.*)/ /$4/ [R=301,L]
That bit of code adds a “Permanent Redirect” to the new location. There may still be links pointing at the old URL but Google should hopefully know that it has been moved.
10 responses to Motivation from the past
Two favs Donncha
http://inphotos.org/children-wait-in-line/
can find the other one but I know I saw it here “boy in Patrick St”
Thanks Pat, was it this one?
I hoped people would link to photos from their own photoblog, giving them a free link there, but hey, readers of this blog mustn’t be very vocal!
I’ll take you up on the offer so Donn.
I don’t have to go too far back. Sing us a song Sultan shows the shenanigans that the Sultans of Ping get up on stage. I like it cos it shows the before, the during and the reaction of the event.
Going back in time my favourite photo is the picture of a Lahinch Sunset. It was taken at the end of a long day travelling up from Cork through Killarney to go to the Harley Owers Group Rally where I took hundreds of photos. Good end to a productive day photographing.
Sorry I’m late with this.
From the general blog: Man and Boy which was one of the earliest photographs I put up on the blog
From the extreme sports blog: Hanging
In truth, I’m not really sure what my favourite photographs are any more – both of those are fairly recent ones. I have two film shots that I really couldn’t decide between.
Thanks Donal and Treasa for commenting
i kinda like this one. Why? it’s one of the earlier shots that i took – and despite being really raw at that time (i still am), it was a faithful capture of what i essentially wanted to capture. I’ve been told that it’s a bit too dark – but you know what? Thinking about it, i actually prefer it that way!!! The perspective and the darkness just combines to bring out the shot… Or maybe i’m just delusional.
Another one that i like is this action shot. Is it too dark??? I dunno. Tried brightening it up, and it spoilt it.
Nice blog and stuff you’ve got going on, btw – keep it up!! I’m now subscribed via RSS, and will carry on reading your stuff…
Thanks Jeff for commenting! I left a comment on your action shot. I think it needs to be composed differently to be more effective.
thanks, Donncha! I saw it… Will reply on that photo page instead of here (to keep the “flow” proper). Regarding my first pic, any comments?
Hi,
I stumbled onto your blog… not sure how. I think via a blog awards site for Irish blogs. I’m really liking this and am finding it excellent inspiration to try more street photography as well as continues my drive to move to Ireland next year.
Thanks!
I think this is my favorite pictures. it was serendipity finding that spot.
Thanks for the tip. I also recently removed the date from my URLs (because I am not writing “daily news”), but I didn’t realize it was so easy to fix the resulting broken links.