More Salt Lake Photos

Due to global warming, we've had some unexpectedly pleasant days this past week. Being a crass capitalist, I decided to exploit the unseasonable weather to take a few more pictures of downtown. (I know, I should have spent the day weeping and poking my Bush voodoo doll with pins).

I already have a ton of Salt Lake Photos. Most of them were from my older camera; So I figure that there would be no harm in adding new photos.

The Salt Palace featured some funky interior building drapes for the Novell Brainshare event. This is a leading event for open source and networking software. I also added pictures Salt Lake Gallery, and South Temple. I also added a few more pictures of Temple Square (which was in full bloom).

Adding labels to the pictures takes longer than taking the pictures. To make matters worse, in my first iteration of Protophoto.com, the program added all new pictures to the end of the gallery. I changed the program so I could chose to add photos to both the front and back of the gallery. The next step is to make a page that lets me reorganize a full gallery.

BTW, the intention of Protophoto.com was quite modest. A few years ago, I was working with someone to create a visual directory for towns (TownState.com). The basic ideas was that we would make two directories. The main directory would be a pay for inclusion visual representation of a town. There would also be a graphics free, all inclusive directory of everyone in town. A town has to have a free directory, because there's a ton of great sites that don't have an advertising budget.

Anyway, since I was trying to create a visual respresentation of an area, I needed photos; so I figure I would drop the photos in a gallery.

The funny thing, of course, is that the photo gallery gets about the same amount of traffic as the community directories. Protophoto has two types of pages. Each photo gets a page. I then group the photos into subjects, a picture can be on more than one subject page. The site has 534 subjects (some of these are empty) and 9364 pictures. I decided to split the subjects into groups that I called Context. Since I have all these pictures, I am slowly creating a visual database that shows how things are connected in the mountain west.

I did not have a grand plan for ProtoPhoto.com. It just feeds traffic into other stats. Last July, I decide to track what the site does; so I added a hit counter on the photo page. This counter just went over the 1,000,000 hit mark a few minutes ago; So, the picture page had a million views since 6/26/06. That is average of 3,790 times a day. The subject pages get viewed 1,580 times a day. In comparison, this blog logs 24 hits a day.

I don't put ads on the picture pages because there are enough ads in world. I do put ads on the subject pages. I currently get a dollar for every 1000 page views. Protophoto makes about $1.5 per day ($550 a year). It costs $100 in web hosting; So, I get $350 to spend on camera equipment. Whenever you have a process that makes a tiny amount of income it is worthwhile to ask if there is a way to turn it into a real source or income.

It is impossible to say from the statistics if there is any interest in this system of interlinked galleries, or if hits are all accidents or from people who really didn't find what they wanted in the site. BTW, the most popular picture on the site is of the Sacred Heart Statue on I70 outside Denver.