… Mike Johnston has been locked out of his blog site by rampaging anti-spam robots [but is] alive and well, so below is the latest word from Mike and how to find him…
As of about last Thursday, Blogger’s Spam-Fighting Robots… put The Online Photographer on lockdown, mistaking it for a “spam blog.” Evidently we triggered the robots’ excessively fuzzy recognition systems somehow.
Solution? There is none. You can’t get through to humans at Blogger, evidently by design (it’s a free service, after all). I’ve submitted a “review request” and now I get to…wait. And wait. Three days and counting, so far, and I’m told it could be as much as a WEEK before I’m let into the house again. In the meantime, the site will look like it’s frozen in amber, and there’s no way for me to even tell people what’s wrong.
So, to pass the time, I burned the midnight oil over the weekend and built an entirely NEW “Online Photographer,” using TypePad. Why TypePad? Because TypePad offers a little thing called “Customer Support.” Very Web 2.0.
Our new address will eventually be theonlinephotographer.com. If that doesn’t work for you right away, you may need to try http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com. The new site is looking pretty rough still, but I’m working on it. Please come over and have a look around, and let me know what you think.
When they let me in again over at Blogger, I’ll post a pointer. Until then, informing people can only be done by word of mouth. So if you can help spread the news around, please do, and many thanks. [The Luminous Landscape – What’s New]
The Online Photographer is on my regular “must read” list.
Hearing this story makes me a bit less inclined to let Blogger be my permanent host for my site when it moves – I’m getting more inclined towards using my hosting company’s WordPress and Gallery option.
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Sometime during the next few weeks there will likely be some rather major changes at this web site. I’m going to move to a new hosting service. I may rethink the way I store and present my photographs.
I may split the site into two separate sites – a blog and a gallery. The blog may end up as a blogger site, either the current mirror site or something different – or it may simply move to a WordPress blog at the new host. Some of these options will allow me to keep the blog at the current URL, while others may not.
I am still thinking through the logistics of online storage and presentation of my photographs. Recently I’ve been linking to copies stored at Flickr, and that seems to be working OK. I’ve also experimented with a gallery service through the new hosting company, and that option offers some advantages. Then there are the online photographers’ sites such as smugmug and pbase and the like. Too many choices!
If you follow this blog regularly and don’t want to lose track of it during the transition, I suggest that you also follow the blogger.com version at https://gdanmitchell.com/, subscribe to that site’s RSS feed, and watch here (and there) for announcements of changes.
One of the primary purposes of photography is to show us things and relationships we hadn’t noticed before. If the only thing a photograph has to offer is that it’s well composed, nicely printed and pretty, is it any wonder that we become jaded.
Does this mean, though, that the only alternative is to make photographs so odd, distorted, multiple exposed, muddy, unfocused, odd, even perverted that we can almost guarantee we haven’t seen this before (or at least if we have, we threw them out years ago as a bad attempt and wouldn’t in a million years have thought to submit them for publication)?
Does a photographer get credit for imagination without either purpose or execution? Seems like some editors think so.
Is it not possible to show a ‘rocks and roots’ image which is so well done that it takes our breath away? Should we all completely give up photographing the landscape becuse ‘it’s been done before”. Does this mean we don’t need any more war pictures or famine shots, portraits or nudes? Is it not possible to show us a photograph in one of these categories without covering the nude with post it notes, the landscape with ropes, the portrait with graffiti in order to make it new? God, I hope not.
(Follow the link to read the full post.)
I think creating a photo that relies on shock value is much less difficult than creating a photograph of a familiar subject that shows that subject in a new way or reveals something about the subject.
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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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