Over at learningphoto.com I’ve been making some slight changes, and noticed that for some reason, wordpress’s lame auto line break feature is borking my layout. I killed it originally, but I did update wordpress, so I guess it’s back. Gonna have to fix that again when I get home.
Seriously considering putting TechGoesBoom out to pasture. I have little time to maintain it these days, and there is essentially no ad revenue from it. Learningphoto generates about $10 a month with very little readership, and I would like to start putting some more effort in over there as it seems like it would have a much better ROI. Maybe I’ll just keep it around for my occasional geek screed, but it will probably be getting updated a lot less.
When looking for apartments, it might be nice to be closer to work for the sake of going home at lunch and having real internet access to work on the websites. I’ll have to keep that in mind.
My Portfolio website is now up, and I’d appreciate your feedback on it. It’s at isolatedinstance.com. Let me know if you run into any issues. Buy something.
Paypal seems to be having some weird authentication issues at the moment. Saying password is wrong when it’s not. Lame.
I’ve been thinking about an interesting pricing model for photography which is basically a sliding scale based on sales. All photos essentially start out priced at pretty close to cost, plus say, 10% margin. As prints are sold, the price goes up incrementally. So once 10 prints of a particular photo are sold, the price raises 1 dollar. Once a print hasn’t sold any copies for a week or so, the price drops a dollar. The amounts here are speculative, but you can see where I’m going with this. Consumers set the price by sales, and are encouraged to take chances on pieces they might not normally buy, but are really cheap. When one item sells a lot, you would understandably want to have a high end cap, but I suspect that the system would self regulate if prices got too high. People would stop buying and the price would fall.
The system has a lot of benefits. The seller knows very quickly which items are worth selling and which aren’t. It also provides a decent fair market value of each of the prints, which means you don’t have to guess when pricing prints. You may sell quite a few at a price lower than you’d prefer, but you may also get far more than you expected. The other benefit is that when the market slumps, say after the holidays, your pricing reacts quickly to give people reasons to purchase.
Because I’m dumb, I missed out on registering for our work’s little craft fair thing which I was planning on trying to sell some prints at. Boo. I really need to start hitting up the local art scene for some sales. I also need to start looking into pimping out the prints and getting the word out that they are available.
At some point I’ll probably get around to updating the Mac Mini that these sites are running on to Tiger Server, and lighttp. Things are fine as they are, but it would be a good geek exercise. Considering how much trouble my hosted friends are running into recently, I’m so glad to be hosting out of the apartment on relatively stable DSL.