Note: If you'd rather not read all this and move directly to the photo gallery, please follow this link: photo.michaelper.com

Phanfare going down the drain.

So I lied to you guys, I haven't quite maintained this blog as I promised. It's been more than a year since my last confession. I probably wouldn't even add this post if there weren't for the changes with phanfare. Apparently, "smart" people at phanfare decided that social networking is "it" and are changing their service to get a piece of that pie.

The new business model is based mostly on their customers "inviting" their friends and family to see their pictures by giving phanfare their friends' and family's email addresses. Phanfare then creates accounts for those folks and the vicious circle of spam begins. Why accounts, you ask? Well, phanfare "protects" its customers by allowing only registered users access the albums. So unless you have a phanfare account you can't see your friend's photos. So, you see, the dirty trick is that you want your friends to see your photos, you "invite" them and phanfare gets them on the hook. Viral marketing at its worst. In addition to this madness phanfare stops allowing custom domain names and slaps its banner on top of every page.

As a sane person I find this changes unacceptable and I'm currently looking for a new place to host my pictures. SmugMug and Zenfolio are in the running and I'm open to other suggestions, so if you have any, please let me know. Phanfare site, however, should keep functioning in its current unmutilated form until June, so I have some time to do proper research.

Obviously I can no longer recommend phanfare for hosting your photos, so if you looked at my site and thought that you'd like to create your own, slow down, don't go the phanfare route, let me figure out what the options are.

Till then, cheers.

How we got here...

What happened to the good old michaelper.com, you might ask? Well, to tell you the truth, I just got tired of maintaining it. See, I never actually finished coding it the way I envisioned and I finally realized that it would never happen as I have less and less time to work on it. It looked ok, sure, but was a pain in the ass to add new pictures or manage captions. When I started it back in 2001 there were virtually no alternatives but to create the site myself. Now there are quite a few hosted solutions to choose from with good set of features and the ease of use I've been looking for. Also, I've been abusing the kindness of my friend and web provider Elliot Goykhman for way too long. I've been taking tons of disk space on his servers and I don't even know how much bandwidth. Thank you, Elliot, for these wonderful years.

So here's the new plan. I moved all the pictures to the phanfare site photo.michaelper.com (still have to move the captions) so please feel free to go and check them out. Actually, while I'm at it, phanfare is really cool. It gives you unlimited disk space, no ads, hosts full size images and integrates with online photo printing services. But the selling point for me was their client software that makes the site management a breeze. Check them out and if you decide to sign up let me know, I could earn a free year of service if you mention me as a referral (wink, wink).

I will also maintain this blog to let you know when I post new pictures or videos or if I just have something interesting to share.

Well, that's about all for now. Let's get this thing started.