FocalPower…the blog

[Syndicated from latoga’s Motion Blur photography blog]

This is an update to an earlier post that I made about Photo Spots: Sagrada Familia at Risk. That original post received a comment today from someone associated with the basilica. I wanted to call attention to that post since the basilica has a new website that is trying to Save the Sagrada Familia from the risk imposed by the (now approved) train tunnel.

Please check out the website and sign the petition if this story concerns you at all. Hopefully a outpouring of international concern will help prevent any damage from occurring to this UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Side Note: Why Yet Another Photo Place has a recent posting out that includes a photo of the Sagrada Familia.

Tonight we launched the FocalPower Forum, the local gathering spot for the FocalPower community.

We have two primary goals for the forum:

1. To provide a discussion channel between the FocalPower community and the FocalPower Team.
2. To offer a grass roots opportunity to build a new (maybe better?) photography community.

To start the Forum off, we created a couple of discussion boards focused around FocalPower Support. These are the areas of the Forum for the FocalPower community to ask questions, share ideas and thoughts about FocalPower and our offerings (currently the Random Photo Quote Widget).

You can sign up for a member account for free, just enter in a valid email address and confirm the registration email. Members can post, reply, view other members, and communicate with the community. Guests can always stop by and check out what’s happening as well! Thee is also a photography calendar…the FocalPower team will be posting interesting photography related items in there as we find them. Have an item you would like to post? Send us an email and we’ll get it up there as well.

The rest of the Forum is your blank slate! What do you want the forum to be? Here is a grass roots opportunity to define it. Tell us and let’s make it happen together!

After entering in a slew of new quotes into the Quote Database last night, today we learned a new limitation of our Random Photo Quote Widget. Unfortunately, the quote widget was offline for most of the day due to this limitation. While the widget was down, users of the widget just saw a blank spot on their website where the quote should have been.

The FocalPower team apologizes for this outage. As of right now, the widget is back up and operational as well as a fix in place to prevent the outage from occurring again.

Thanks for your continued support!

Tonight while finishing up some work, I glanced over at my bookcase and saw my collection of LensWork magazines. I suddenly remembered seeing some interesting photography quotes in some of the older issues. So, I pulled out the stack and started flipping through them one by one (luckily my collection only goes back to issue 46!).

I was right, there were a number of great photography related quotes that I re-discovered (including an entire multi-page article of quotes in issue 55, thanks Brooks!). Next thing I know, a few hours have passed and the official FocalPower Photography Quotes Database has grown to over 150 photography specific quotes. And there is still a huge back log of quotes to enter.

I thought I would use this opportunity to share the history behind the Photography Quote Database and Random Quote Widget. A couple of years ago, I wanted something simple: a random photography related quote to be displayed on my website. Every time the page would be reloaded, a new quote would come up. Simple right? Should be, but it didn’t exist. At the time, I just started writing down quotes that I liked in a spreadsheet on my laptop and put the random quote idea in the back of my head.

Once we started FocalPower, I saw the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: to give some back to the photographic community immediately (it’s a Zen thing…) and finally get my random quote thingy (over the last two years, the internet community has also come up for a name to describe my thingy…a widget). So, one of the first things we did at FocalPower was to put together a simple database and a Random Quote Widget. (I should also mention that FocalPower is just two of us right now and we are both working on this in our spare time…at least for now. Also, we have been keeping our focus on building out the infrastructure and coding up the first service offering to the photographic community.)

As I started sharing the Random Quote widget with other photographers, the initial comments were all the same: wow, this is so cool!. Usually followed by a bunch of suggestions. Well, I have been listening to those suggestions (please keep them coming) as well as working on putting up a forum on the website to make it easier to submit suggestions and archive them all. (Remember, spare time…)

Based upon the suggestions that I have received, I wanted to share with you some of the current future plans around the Photography Quotes Database and widget:

• A web interface to allow the FocalPower community to help submit their favorite photography related quotes. There are a lot of them out there that people want to see and share. We’ll need your help to enter them all.
• A way to explore the photography quotes database. We get a lot of “I reloaded your page a dozen times…”
• Some way to filter the quotes chosen by the widget based on category. I have been working on categorizing all the quotes as they go into the system. Some people have wanted a way to display different categories of quotes on different parts of their website.
• Ideally, I would eventually like to see a way for you to setup an account and build a specific set of quotes for the quote widget to display for you. There is more to this than what meets the eye at first, so no promises on this one.
• More places to use the widget. We know that it won’t work on some sites today. We are working on expanding where it can be used.

I can’t commit to time frames for any of this, but I’ll share news as it comes available. And if you would like to help by donating some of your time to the project, drop me an email and lets talk! I can be reached at greg at focalpower dot com.