FocalPower…the blog

The FocalPower website and services will have a short Maintenance Window on Thursday May 22nd from 11:00pm PST to Midnight PST.  One of our network providers will be performing maintenance on their switches and routers which will result in an outage that should last no longer than 30 minutes during this maintenance window.

The FocalPower Blog and Forum will not be affected by this maintenance window.

We hate when maintenance requires a loss of service, but it is needed at times to keep everything running smoothly into the future.  We appreciate everyone’s understanding.

The FocalPower team has started using Twitter to keep the growing FocalPower community aware of any support issues and updates in a more real time (and concise) fashion. You can follow our tweets using Twitter or look for the latest tweets in the sidebar of the blog (see “Support Update Tweets” to the right).

This will only be used for announcements of support issues with the FocalPower service or for announcements of new FocalPower releases/features. The service is still in closed testing.

Tonight the FocalPower team rolled out an update to the Random Quote Widget. Along with this widget update, we enabled a means to browse the Quote Archive–no more having to reload the FocalPower homepage 100 times to see what quotes are in the db! We also used this update to expand the Quote Archive, it now contains over 250 quotes that span three primary subject areas.

You can now browse through the Quote Archive by authors and subjects. The archive is the database of quotes that the Random Quote Widget pulls from. All quotes within the archive are organized into a primary subject that is related to photography as well as secondary subjects. The update to the widget adds the ability to filter the quotes that the widget randomly returns on these subjects.

You can find more information about the Quote Archive, the Random Quote Widget, and the code to use the widget on the new Quotes section of the FocalPower website. Browse through the various quotes, there is all kind of good stuff contained in the Quote Archive…

As always, drop us an email or leave a message over on the forum and let us know your thoughts.

We hope that these photography related quotes will at least help you think about photography every day!

provided by FocalPower

Based upon some user requests, we created a few new boards over at the FocalPower Forum:

• Post Production Skills group - A new group of boards focused on all the tools us photographers use in post production.
• Adobe Lightroom - board to discuss the new and evolving Lightroom (questions, tips, tricks, etc.)
• Adobe Photoshop - board to discuss Photoshop usage in post production (questions, tips, tricks, etc.)
• Other Image Processing Tools - board to discuss any other image processing tools that you use or have questions about. We might create new boards if the discussion behind a tool heats up.

Swing on by the Forum, sign up for a free account, and let the threads fly.

This morning we upgraded the forum software behind FocalPower Forum to the latest patch release. After initial testing, it looks like the upgrade was successful and no functionality was affected. If you notice any issues or strangeness with the forum, please let us know by contacting {support at focalpower dot com}.

This update was a patch update and did not affect any of the functionality of the forum. Because it was a patch update, no downtime was needed to perform the update.

We put together a quick video tutorial last night showing how to install the Random Photo Quote Widget on a blog hosted by Blogger:

This tutorial is being hosted on YouTube under the FocalPower Tutorials playlist. Since these are quite easy to create, we will be creating additional tutorials and hosting them on this playlist.

Need help with installing the Random Photo Quote Widget somewhere? Let us know over at the forum and we’ll help you out!