behance professional portfolio site

Just received this as a behance notification and it does seem worth sharing:

http://prosite.com/home

Admittedly, the price for this (11USD per month) is rather on the steep side, considering that you could get a fully hosted site for about half the price at places like Bluehost, or indeed that with a bit of ingenuity you could very easily set up a similar site right here on blogspot for free.

However, on the upside, you do get the considerable professional design expertise of the behance team in the shape of some beautiful and fully customizable templates, which could save a lot of time. And, probably most importantly, given that behance is one of the highest regarded design portals online my guess would be that having a site hosted by them would be likely to get you exposure you might not get all too easily through a standalone site.

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free flash photo galleries + free swf hosting

Just stumbled upon this:

http://www.flash-gallery.net/index.html

A lot of these are freebies and some of them could look really cool on a custom designed header, or embedded into a page post as a photo gallery.

In order to be able to do this you will need to host your swf file somewhere - unless you have your own server or a remotely hosted site, that is. Here are a couple of places that seem to do the job, for free:

http://megaswf.com/ 

http://www.novamov.com/

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finding the broken URL's on your site

If you have a big site with many pages, especially one with lots of images that you have linked to externally (or just a lot of regular links for that matter), it may end up becoming very difficult to keep track of whether everything is still in working order.

The free application below, developed by a very nice gentleman named Tilman Hausherr, does a scan which took about 5 minutes to complete for my HVC site, which has a huge number of links at this point. Found 2 missing images and one broken text URL. Of course, I had no idea that they were even gone! Very impressive!

Download, install and run to see how well you are doing with your URL's:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

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logistics: images - where to store them...

If you are using blogspot all the images that you upload into your blog will be automatically stored in Picasa Web Albums. Which is all very nice - except that Picasa only gives you 1GB of storage, which is large enough I suppose, but not infinite. A highly bothersome thing however, is that Picasa resizes your large images to fit their own standards. So, while it may be OK to use Picasa for smaller sized things, when it comes to larger stuff you need to look elsewhere.

Image Shack seems to be a decent enough place to store images, if you can live with the ads and popup windows that want to predict the day you die (absolutely no kidding!). I am linking the grass image below from there. A free account does not give you unlimited bandwidth, and there is a file limit of 3MBs per image. But it is free and I guess you get what you (do not) pay for in the end. Which is a nice full sized image, after all:

However, if you are creating your own images, then what I would most definitely advise you to do, would be to go via creative social sharing domains, which will give you not only upload space but also exposure: First, you can create a pro Flickr account: This costs 25$ per year, and gives you unlimited storage, even at ultra large sizes. Second,you can upload photos onto stock.xchng, which is free. Flickr, will give your work more exposure than stock.xchng since sharing on Flickr works through groups which will spread the word about your stuff very rapidly. Like most good things there is a price tag - but well worth it I would say... And then, of course, a third place is deviantart, where again you can create a free account and upload your work as well as share it with the deviantart community.

 (Tip:  And here is a word to the wise: There seem to be a lot of these free online storage domains around these days. Before you get sucked in with big promises and 10GBs of free space and so on, read the small print! The terms and conditions, in other words! Here is one called Cloud Experience. Sounds great, right? Well, read on and you will find out that all of the stuff that you put in there becomes their property!

grrrr...  ) 

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design + logistics: images - where to find them...

It is all very well to talk about nice background images, but where do you find them?

One obvious answer would be that you are an enthusiastic photographer and create your own content. Another one would be that you are a dab hand at image processing and assemble your own material on an image editor. (Which is, of course, a really cool thing to do and we will certainly be talking more about this later). But, let us say that you are neither - you do not take photographs and you do not make digital art either. In that case your best option is to look for online stock photography and vector art.

stock.xchng is a stock photography portal which makes its content available to you under various types of creative commons licenses. You first need to register and this is free. Once you are a member, the site gives you a brilliant advanced search menu through which you can find images which you can then also put under themed lightboxes, which hold up to 60 photographs each. Please make sure to read the terms and conditions of all the photos which you use. I actually went ahead and put together a few background image lightboxes for you, which you can look at also:

http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603779
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603775
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603769
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603757
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=lightboxes&lid=603753

You can obviously search for images on google. However, when you do so, be sure to apply the correct licensing filter from the advanced search page:
http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search

Another very obvious place to look for images is Flickr. If you do not already have a Flickr account, I would advise you to start one immediately. However, I do not think that you even need to be a member to find photos on Flickr. The thing to remember is that not all of the content on Flickr is free to use, in fact most of it is "all rights reserved". So, when you search, you need to go to advanced search, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and check the creative commons boxes. Flickr is absolutely massive and even with the cc restriction applied, it will give you far more results than just about any other photo sharing domain.

Above are two images that I found on Flickr, doing a creative commons search for "abstract background". Total search result was 11.211 btw. Certainly no shortage... One thing to be aware of is that some of these images are not large enough and so they may need some additional work in an image editor (more on what to do later) ;-)

A cool place to find creative commons images (and all sorts of other cool stuff) is wikimedia commons. These will be categorized under specific topics, so they may or may not be good for background images. However, if your site is on a specific topic for which wikimedia commons provides visual content, this may be a good place to look also. Going to the category for large images may find you lots of unexpectedly nice stuff:

The map is abstract enough that it could work with a lot of subjects. The ducks are more problematic, of course - but I can certainly see how a number of these old fashioned prints, nicely cropped and pulled up in random fashion (more on this later) could work with all sorts of subjects.

 (Tip:  Whatever you do as you are searching for visual material, do not use google or yahoo image search in their default state - but only with the correct licensing filters. You really have no way of knowing if the images you find are available for free usage otherwise. And there is certainly enough good stuff out there that you can use without having to resort to shady means.  ;-) 

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