Tag: Blogging

Finding Free Quality Stock Images For Any Purpose

There are many times when writing when I want a decent picture to complete my post. A a photographer I tend to use my own images. I either capture a new one specifically for that post or I use one from my Lightroom catalog. However, occasionally I don’t have anything in my portfolio that meets my needs and I may not have the time to create one.

For many bloggers doing their own photography is a chore. They either lack the time or the skill to create an image that meets their needs. Some turn to sock photography web sites and are disappointed. Many stock photography websites are either too expensive or have nothing but images of staid looking characters in suits.

Inexpensive or free stock photography sources was a recent topic of discussion on the Desk community. There are a growing number of websites offering amazing free stock imagery. Someone started a list of sites that offer free stock images. Some sites on the list were decent but I found many lacking. I did my research and found several site that have free stock images that in my opinion are high quality. These photographs are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under Creative Commons, which means you can copy, change and distribute the images for commercial purposes, all without asking for official permission. Here’s my list.

Of course having access to multiple sources of good quality stock images present a new problem. Choosing. With so many images available it easy to get caught up in find the perfect image for your post. When I first tried using these stock image sites I spent almost 30 minutes looking for an image to use on a post that took me almost as long to write. That's not efficient. Why waste thirty minutes of creative time on a treasure hunt? First you have to search the online stock image archives, then download and image. Then you resize and upload to your blogging platform, insert image and publish. This takes time away from writing and increases time to get your writing published. So I came up with a strategy to help with that.

When you have time, when you are not writing, you can visit these free stock web sites and download some of the images that you find compelling. Don't worry at this point how you will use that images. Just download it to a folder on your computer. If you want to be really efficient, upload the images to the media library of your blog host. You might want to categorize the images and add ALT tags and titles. Then when you need an image for a post, choosing will be easier and faster.

There’s a lot of different licenses on the photos featured above. Make sure you understand what the restrictions are, and if in doubt just give credit. You can find my Creative Commons Zero images on my Unsplash profile

Old Posts

old_type_writer

Today's Desk.pm community writing prompt is "Do you go back and edit/update old blog posts? What is your philosophy or practice in that regards?"

Interesting because that's just what I did this morning. I reviewed some older posts and made some changes. Some of my older posts were not formatted correctly. They looked horrible with the current blog template. In my earlier days of blogging I did not do much spelling and grammar checking and it shows in my content.

Some of my image links were broken. I used to host my images on Amazon and when I moved away from that many of the image links were broken. The posts looked horrible. One post was about about a vacation I took two years ago with my wife's extended family. All the images showed up at blank spots in between the text.

Sometimes I go back to edit a post and update it with new information or with corrected information.

To quote Dan Langendorf:

Ten-plus years ago the conventional thinking was you should never update a blog. Write. Post. Leave the typos and content alone. If you have to make changes, use strike-through to note where changes were made.
That’s poppycock. And lazy. If you want to fix a typo or make a change, do it. You’ll look smarter and more refined, not like an ignorant schlep who doesn’t know the difference between affect and effect or there and their.

Patterns

I am taking part in an free online course to improve my writing and blogging skills. Today’s writing prompt is Write a post about what you discovered regarding your writing patterns and behaviour. What surprised you?

John asked a number of important questions that I'm not sure I know how to answer.

I do want you to write today though and it doesn't have to be much: Write a post about what you discovered regarding your writing patterns and behaviour. What surprised you? What was rewarding and revealing? What didn't you like about what you learned about yourself? And, what pruning activities did you begin and hope to continue to do over the course of this year?

And, perhaps most importantly... what will you be writing about now with all of this new information about your historical writing patterns? Will you continue as you were previously or will you be writing about new content... and why?

My self-hosted WordPress blog only has five categories -- General, Photography, Pressgram (a subcategory of Photography), Reviews and Tutorial. A few years ago I had many more but after analyzing what I had been posting about I settled on just having these few. Looking at all of my posts over the years it seems that most of my posts have been in the General category and Photography categories with tutorials and reviews a distant third. Frankly, I think I have written more tutorials than indicated. A few years ago I consolidated several blogs into one and I may have assigned most of the imported posts to the General category. I know that in my early years of blogging I wrote most technical articles but that in most recent years photography has become a passion for me. I started posting more images to the blog, usually accompanied by some sort of story. A lot of the images were from my Nikon DSLR but a fair number were also from my iPhone. I think the launch of Pressgram had a lot to do with that.

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Blog Categories. Pressgram is a subcategory of Photography.

I stopped using Google Analytics a while ago due to privacy issues. It really creeps me out how easy it is to use Google's free tools but not realize how much access you give them to your data. Quite frankly, I think Google is evil so I have reduced, as much as I can, the amount of exposure I have to their products and services. I've come to rely on the statistics provided via the Jetpack plugin from WordPress.com. I took a look at the data for the last few years and saw some interesting patterns emerge. These aren't patterns about my writing behaviour but about the website reading traffic.

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Page Views

My blog received more page views in the years prior to 2012. Page views are down 50%. Is that because I blogged less or because my content was less well received? I don't know.

Visitors to the web site spiked in 2013 and then dropped off by about 50% in 2014. What happened there? In 2012, the Raspberry Pi computer was released. There was a lot of buzz around the RPi. I managed to get my hands on one and wrote a blog post about my success in using it to control my Nikon DSLR for HDR photography. That post was linked to by a number of online magazines including spiegel.de and wired.com. That generated a lot of inbound traffic and even to this day that article in the number one ranked article.

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Number of unique visitors

Based on the comments it seems that the tutorial posts generate the most amount of conversation.

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Reader interactions

I still have to dig deeper but I think that I will continue with my current patterns of posts. I like writing posts with tips to address the questions that I am often asked by family and friends. I will continue to do that. I will continue to post my photographs to the blog. I have accepted into the Arcanum and I want to document my journey as an apprentice.

I want to post on a more regular schedule. I developed some momentum at the end of 2014 and I want to carry that into 2015. I also want to either blog more about my personal insight on photography and technology or incorporate more of my personal insights into my photography and technical articles. That will be a challenge for sure and I am concerned about being vulnerable.

Time to go do some pruning (of tags).

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