[geeks] Photo "sharing" site recemondations please.

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 28, 2008, at 06:45 , Phil Stracchino wrote:

> Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> On Apr 27, 2008, at 21:03 , James Fogg wrote:
>>>>> My wife would like to be able to post photographs to a web site  
>>>>> and
>>>>> have her friends and family be able to download or view them. It's
>>> not
>>>>> for the general public, but I doubt there would be anything that
>>>>> she would want to hide.
>>>>
>>>> Is there any reason not to go straight to flickr?
>>>
>>>
>>> There is now. I'm a Flickr fan, but it's a Yahoo property, which  
>>> means
>>> it'll be a Microsoft property in about a year.
>> They also started putting in video services, which I think sucks.
>> flickr has always been great precisely because it didn't do  
>> anything else, and try to be an idiotic everything site like the  
>> rest.
>> The video stuff can't be easily disabled, and site performance has  
>> been down ever since they turned it on.
>
> Performance is one of the things I dislike about Smugmug.  I know  
> quite a few people who host photos on there, and the vast topload of  
> Javascript slows my browser to a crawl and bogs down the entire  
> system.  Come on, people, all you're supposed to be doing is  
> displaying photos -- *I* can do that without using Javascript at  
> all.... what's your excuse?

But, but, but... it's Web 2.0 man!  Gotta love it!

(grumble)

Most use of Javascript is not necessary, and can either be eliminate  
or done with CSS.

Also, I can't figure out why people think every web page, even for  
critical applications, has to look like a combination of a television  
and a newspaper.

For example, when I am doing online banking, I should see *NOTHING* on  
my web browser except the banking application.  It should look just  
like they did 20 years ago.

What the hell do I need with a list of every service they provide,  
pictures of someone they hired to pretend to be one of their workers,  
and advertisements?

When I'm going work on an application, I only want and need to see the  
application.  I think this is probably the primary problem with almost  
all websites today: they make every page look like a newspaper layout,  
even if it is an application.

I can understand (some of) that for text information, but once you get  
into an application, it seems it should minimize the presentation of  
unrelated information and focus on the work.

It's amazing when filling out a simple form, a 100% text based task,  
brings a quad-core Mac Pro to its knees.

NOTE: I like some Web 2.0 apps like Google Maps, where it is clearly  
necessary to have JavaScript, and they seem to have done a pretty good  
job with it.  Google Maps requires less memory and CPU power than a  
lot of simple forms on other websites.  However, I still rather have  
native applications, and I only want to see something like "Web 2.0"  
when absolutely necessary.

The information S/N ratio gets worse daily.

NOTE2: I have started using Rapidweaver on the mac to create websites,  
and while they won't display great on a text-only browser, by default  
they make little or no use of Javascript, and still look pretty good  
with just CSS.  The only thing I can't figure out is how to eliminate  
the CSS menu system and go with a plain link-based menu system.  I  
guess I'll have to figure out their template system.  I just like it  
because I can get things done so much faster than doing it by hand.   
RW produces fully compliant HTML and XML far faster than I ever could.



-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com