For technical reasons that we don’t need to get into them here, it just won’t load on a PhotoShelter page viewed in Firefox. Here is how to make Symbolset work with PhotoShelter (requires Manual Customization mode).

The Fix

Add the following code to your .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|ttc|otf|eot|woff|font.css)$">
  <IfModule mod_headers.c>
    Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://YourPhotoShelterUsername.photoshelter.com"
  </IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

AddType application/x-font-woff woff
AddType application/x-font-ttf ttf
AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject eot
AddType image/svg+xml svg

Replace YourPhotoShelterUsername.photoshelter.com with your PhotoShelter website address (not your CNAME). You can find it in Website > Customize > Website Settings.

Simple.

**********************
UPDATE – 26 April 2013
**********************

Adding a second webfont (from another provider) wasn’t working so well. Despite have included the above code it simply wouldn’t load on some of my PhotoShelter pages.

The solution was to add the CNAME as well. Notice the switch from set to add. You can use both and set might be best but add worked better for me.

<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|ttc|otf|eot|woff|font.css)$">
  <IfModule mod_headers.c>
    Header add Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://dbrabyn.photoshelter.com"
    Header add Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://archive.davidbrabyn.com"
  </IfModule>
</FilesMatch>

How To Get Symbolset To Work With PhotoShelter from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

As you may know given the right information Google will highlight authors in it’s search results. The good news is you can make that happen for your PhotoShelter galleries by adding a snippet of code to your manually customized PhotoShelter pages (you will need to have access to your code) and tweaking a few simple settings. This is ideal for photojournalists of course but I think it is also helpful for non-press photographers.

Google Author Information in Search Results

I’m sure you have seen these little headshots popping up in search results. Notice the additional byline links? All this connects the search result to it’s author.

Author information for one of my PhotoShelter galleries as it appears in a search result

That matters because you want your content to stand out from other results, because it makes your results more recognizable as yours and because Google is developing “AuthorRank” which basically boosts content produced by well-received and popular “agents” in results.

An additional advantage of authorship details are the bonus links that appear when you click on a search result with authorship markup and then return to the search results after reading the article, Google will display three additional links below the result. Some people say it takes two minutes away from the search results for the links to appear once you return but in my experience it takes longer than that.

Additional links appearing under my gallery listing in search results

Get a Google+ Profile Page

You should already have one (if nothing else, it’s a great directory to be listed in) but if you don’t, go ahead and sign up. It’s easy to do and totally free. Make sure that the image that you pick for your Google+ profile photo is recognizable and works well small as that is what will be used in the search results listings.

Associate Your PhotoShelter Gallery With Your Google+ Profile Page

There are two ways to verify authorship of your content but only one will work for PhotoShelter galleries. Normally you would be able to link your content to your Google+ profile by verifying your email address but to do that you would need an email address with the same domain as the content page, i.e. xxxxx@photoshelter.com.

Fortunately for non-PhotoShelter employees there is an alternative option: linking your content directly to your Google+ profile. Add a link to your Google Profile your gallery pages: Gallery Display and Gallery Image Display. Use your profile URL and name obviously:

images by <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/109561171699460530358" rel="author">David Brabyn</a>

rel=”author” tells Google that I’m the creator of the page. On my Gallery Display page I added “images by David Brabyn” after my image counter because I think it makes sense for a byline to appear there but you can add the link anywhere you want. On my Gallery Image Display pages I added it right after the caption.

Once you’ve linked your gallery to your Google Profile, go to your Google Profile and add your PhotoShelter archive URL to the contributor links section.

That’s it. Simple. Check what Google is seeing with their useful structured data testing tool.

Of course you can link your portfolio and blog content in the same way. This time you probably have an email address with the same domain name as the URLs to those pages so you can simply verify your email address. You only need to do this once. Your email will appear in the Contributor to section of your Google+ profile.

Watch Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson discuss how to connect authors with their content using authorship markup:

Add Your Author Info To PhotoShelter Galleries in Google Search Results from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Some argue that providing your visitors with a list of links to interesting sites is a useful service. It helps build the community spirit that fuels the blogosphere. It allows you to thank other site owners for their content or any other reason by giving them exposure. It demonstrates generosity and knowledge of your online ecosphere. It gets you noticed (blog software notifies you of incoming links). It supposedly helps your Google ranking by encouraging reciprocal links.

Blogrolls certainly haven’t disappeared. Some very big photography sites still have them including The Lens, Lightbox, Vincent Laforet’s and John Harrington’s blogs. I’m pretty sure Chase Jarvis had one too but it seems to be gone. A few clients have told me early on that they had planned to include one.

I always advise against it. There are many reasons to avoid blogrolls.

They provide almost no value to the visitor

By far the most important argument against theme is that they provide almost no value to the visitor. Listing a website without providing any context or justification for the recommendation is pretty much pointless. It tells visitors “You should click on this link” but without explaining why or what is to be found on the other end of the link. A fundamental rule of good UX in web design is that a link should leave no room for doubt in the visitor’s mind as to its destination. No-one will click on a link to find out where it will send them simply because it’s there.

Even if your visitors hold you in great esteem and follow your advice religiously you are still leaving them in the dark about why you think this site is so fantastic. In fact they don’t even know if you think it’s that fantastic at all. Maybe you included that link because the site’s owner is a friend or because he links back to your site. Maybe he even paid you to be listed.

If you genuinely recommend a site to your visitors write a post about it explaining why you think they should pay a visit, use their services, hire the owner, etc. Now that’s a useful service for your readers.

I don’t care that you feel the need to thank that site owner

Who doesn’t like incoming links? Dishing them out is generous, no doubt about it. The problem is your site has an audience and that audience doesn’t care and shouldn’t be expected to care about your wish to thank X, Y or Z. It’s simply irrelevant to your visitors.

It can be bad for SEO

Google doesn’t like site-wide links much and blogrolls – at least on traditionally formatted blogs – blogrolls tend to appear in the sidebar or the footer which are displayed on every page. In addition links in blogrolls will frequently be reciprocated often artificially, some will be purchased, both of which will hurt your SEO. In all cases they are low quality links and Google knows that.

And there are still more reasons to ditch your blogroll. They take up valuable real estate particularly on a minimalist site, as a photographer’s website should be. They require you to keep checking the links to make sure the sites are still worthy of your recommendation or simply still active. They can upset the owners of sites that have been left out. They belong to the Web 1.0. They are ugly.

For or Against Blogrolls on a Photographer’s Website? Against. from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

I see these comments on sites all the time and you probably have too but may not have noticed anything particular about them. They look more or less normal. They’re always positive, often enthusiastic even. And who doesn’t like to see that someone out there enjoyed your post so much they felt compelled to respond?

Problem is they are total baloney. They are not genuine reactions to the contents of your post but generic comments that aim solely at driving traffic to the commenter’s website. They don’t even need to include a link in the body of the text as the commenter’s name will be linked. The logic is that at least some readers will click on it and thereby drive traffic to the intended site.

Fake commenting used to be a way to simply accumulate inbound links, which are per se perfectly legitimate tools of SEO. But nowadays almost all blogs add nofollow tags to comment links so that Google ignores them. Backlinks in comments have lost a lot of their SEO appeal. Unlike genuine commenters who can rely on quality content to generate interest (and clicks), spammers have to rely on volume which they achieve thanks to automated comment writing.

So how does one recognize fake spammy comments? There are 3 key giveaways and they all need to be there.

1. Generic content.
   The comment can be rambling or short but it will always be nonspecific to your post. They have to be since no-one has actually read your post. And don’t be fooled by the automatic insertion of your post title in the text. It’s just a robot doing its thing.
2. Written by a stranger.
   Spammers stay anonymous. Acquaintances don’t.
3. They include a link (or dozens).
   Either in the body of the text or attached to the name of the commenter or both.

Just occasionally you will get a generic comment that will include a link from someone you don’t know and it will be genuine. The only way to recognize those false positives is to checkout the website that they link to. Most spammers promote fake handbags or viagra sales. In my case I know that my audience is one of professional photographers – a status which I can verify with a glance to the commenter’s website.

You don’t need to actually click on the link to verify it. First thing to do is to read the domain name. Spammers’ sites often have totally obvious URLs. Secondly, at least in WordPress, hover over the link in the Comments page in your admin and a preview of the site will popup.

If this is all new to you, go take a look at the Comments section in your admin page and run through the list. It will be an eye opener.

Recognize Fake Comments On Your Website from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Former homepage

The existing website was getting old. It had been built in-house using iWeb and, while it didn’t look that bad, it certainly looked out-dated and lacked many of the functionalities that are now commonplace.

Harold Feinstein’s career – think Photo League, Jazz Loft, Coney Island and Korean war – is long, rich and on-going. It was obvious they had a ton of content to share with their visitors. It quickly became clear that this project would be a perfect match for the WordPress + Slideshowpro + PhotoShelter combo that I recommend for most photographers.

1. It allows the client to easily edit both static pages (About, Contact, Books, etc.), posts and portfolio slideshows (through SlideshowPro Director).
2. It enabled us to build a homepage that would please Google (rich text content) and engage visitors by offering them multiple entry points.
3. The addition of seamlessly customized PhotoShelter-powered archives suddenly makes it much easier for the client to manage the licensing of Harold’s massive photo collection.

New homepage

It turns out that the recommendations, explanations, tutorials and support that I always provide alongside the designing and building of a new site were a key part of the project. Judith and her assistant Cherie know all about fine art prints and the photo market but they needed help understanding exactly how much can be done online nowadays and how to get the most out of WordPress and PhotoShelter.

Needless to say, working on this project was particularly interesting. Not only are Harold’s images remarkable but his story and life experiences are fascinating. I am extremely happy to have been part of this.

We pressed the “Go Live” button for the new site a couple of weeks ago. The PhotoShelter pages will be visible once the full archive of images has been uploaded by the client.

www.haroldfeinstein.com

New Website For Legendary Photographer Harold Feinstein from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

In April London-based photographer Anton Hammerl was shot by Qaddafi loyalists in Libya near Brega.

For 44 days the regime told his family he was alive and in detention along with 3 other kidnapped journalists. The truth is he was left to die in the desert.

Anton had 3 children, including a newborn baby. Now they need our help.

With the very generous support of PhotoShelter and Reporters Without Borders, I put together a website using on the same model as Joao Silva’s: selling prints and collecting donations. But this time the prints are from work by other photographers.

Some of the biggest names in contemporary photography have contributed: David Burnett, Gary Knight, Kenneth Jarecke, Todd Heisler, Tomas van Houtryve, Greg Marinovich. And we have more coming.

Please buy a print – they look incredible, are affordable and make really great Xmas gifts – or make a donation:

www.friendsofanton.org

Friendsofanton.org: Supporting Anton Hammerl’s Kids from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

And quite frankly that difficulty often shows. A well-written artist statement offers wonderful insights but more often than not they are lofty, meaningless and self-aggrandizing texts that break all the rules of good online copy.

Fortunately there is a brilliant tool to make the process a whole lot easier: the Arty Bollocks Generator.

I think mine is spot on:

Easy Artist’s Statements For a Photography Website from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Yesterday Google released +1 buttons for use on any website. When a visitor clicks a +1 button on a page, he/she recommends that page to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time that visitor’s connections Google something, they could see the +1’s directly in their search results – and in ads – helping them find their recommendation from their social network.

If all goes according to – Google’s – plan, we will soon see photo editors and buyers recommending your work to each other like crazy.

Here is the quick Google video about this new tool:

An Easy Way to Let Your Contacts Give You Some Google Love

Adding a +1 button to your public PhotoShelter galleries makes perfect sense. We, editorial photographers at least, often use them to showcase stories. Even if you have NOT just returned from an assignment, the content of your galleries will probably have a coherence that is relevant to your wider brand. Think wedding, portrait session, stock theme, etc. The button will appear but not work on urls that are not public so don’t worry about this affecting your privacy settings.

Pick Your Settings

Visit Google’s dedicated page and select the options you need.

1. Size: your choice;
2. Language: also your choice but note that for now the annotations only appear in US English results;
3. Include count (in Advanced options): tick the box if you want the button to show the number of clicks it received. For small traffic websites I find this kind of counter only highlights how few people have clicked. I usually don’t recommend it but it is your decision;
4. Parse: keep the default setting;
5. JS Callback function: leave blank;
6. URL to +1:: this option lets you choose which URL the button will +1. You can’t enter a gallery URL here as each gallery has a different URL. Fortunately if you leave this attribute blank Google will use the URL of the page as found in the address bar (for the geeks: as defined in document.location.href). This should work fine on both public galleries and search results.

Grab the code

Scroll down and copy the line of code that reads:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

That line will load the necessary script from the Google server. Paste it into your Gallery Display page at the very end of the code. No need to paste the first line of code which is just a comment.

Then copy the last line of code. It should read something like:

<g:plusone count="false"></g:plusone>

depending on the settings you picked. That tag generates the button. Paste it into your Gallery Display page but this time paste it where you want the +1 button to render on your page. Again, no need to paste the first line of code.

When choosing where to render the button think like a visitor. Too close to your logo and it will appear to be related to the entire site. A good spot will always be near the gallery title. I chose to place mine alongside other social media sharing tools but clearly in a column that refers to the gallery.

Add a +1 button for your homepage as well

Of course you can just as easily add a +1 button that recommends your homepage. Keep in mind that for photographers seeking mainly jobs over stock sales, the homepage should be the primary focus of their SEO effort. It doesn’t have to appear only on your homepage. It can appear on other pages as well – by the logo in the header for example – but make sure to pick a location that leaves no doubt about what it relates to and enter your homepage’s URL in the ‘URL to +1:’ field otherwise Google will recommend the displayed page which might not be your homepage. In any case, having multiple +1 buttons does no harm.

To place a button on your homepage paste both lines of code into the homepage page.

To place a button in your site’s header or footer place the first line of code in your footer just before your closing body tag (should be right near the bottom of the footer’s code) and the second wherever you want the button to render.

The script only needs to be loaded once so if you have already pasted the first line of code into your footer you won’t need to also paste it in your Gallery Display page should you want to also show a button there.

Let me know if you think of creative ways of using the button.

Add a Google +1 Button to your PhotoShelter galleries and website from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

One such tool is HyperImage (H/T Steve Skoll for pointing them out). From their website:

HyperImage is an industrial-strength tool for searching the web and downloading entire websites worth of pictures. Just enter an address or keyword, and watch as thousands of pictures stream down to your computer.

Unfortunately this is nothing new and there are plenty more besides HyperImage. They crawl up and down static links to all corners of your site (and to any other site you link to) and download any image that renders in the browser: logos and icons but also your thumbnails, large img files, background images, slideshow images, etc. I just downloaded 794 images from a photographer’s website. Took me under a minute.

Tweak Your .htaccess File

The good news is you can block them with an .htaccess file placed on the root folder of your website. This file will detect the unwelcome visitor and send them away. Modifying an .htaccess file is a very simple task BUT get it wrong and it can really mess up your website. So take the utmost care doing this – and don’t hold me responsible.

An .htaccess file is a simple ASCII text file that provides a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. It can do many things: password protect a folder, redirect users automatically, direct to custom error pages, change file extensions, ban or allow users with certain IP addresses, stop directory listings and use a different file as the index file.

Most hosting providers support .htaccess but some don’t publicize it much and some won’t allow you to use it at all. If your server runs Unix or Linux, or any version of the Apache web server it will support .htaccess, although your host may not. Search on their help pages or give them a call.

Watermark Your Images

Of course if you don’t have access to the server hosting your site as is the case with WordPress.com or PhotoShelter sites you can’t modify the .htaccess. The fallback solution is to watermark your images – something that should be done anyway for all archives images and possibly on portfolio images as well (more on that someday). You want HyperImage to download the watermarked image so your watermark needs to be part of the image itself, not overlayed by the browser. Thankfully PhotoShelter serves up ‘real’ watermarked images (PhotoShelter instructions on watermarking). Now not all photographers will agree to use watermarks and not all images can reasonably be watermarked. I suspect PhotoShelter will be taking steps to block ‘bad bots’ pretty quickly if there is enough consensus among users. The consensus is needed because these image harvesters are not actually doing anything illegal. They are simply extreme facilitators of copyright infringement.

Back to your server. Before you create a new .htaccess file check to see if you already have one in your site’s root directory on your server (make sure your FTP client is showing system files). You will probably need to edit the permissions for that file in order to edit it. Download it to your computer and place a copy on your desktop as a safety net.

Open it in a plain text editor that doesn’t use word wrap or in a code editor like Dreamweaver. You don’t want the application to insert special ASCII codes to signify a line break or save the file with any other extension.

In your plain text editor type the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^HyperImage 
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

The first line turns on the rewrite engine in Apache, this allows you to redirect the user’s request. The second line sets a condition using RewriteCond. In this case you want to detect visitors with user agent HyperImage. The third line sends a 403 forbidden error to user (F) and tells the engine to stop rewriting so no other rules are applied (L).

Save the file with filename .htaccess. If you can’t shake off an unwanted extension added by your editor name it htaccess.txt and rename it with your FTP client once you have uploaded it to the server.

Place the file in your root directory so that it affects your entire site. Change file permissions (CHMOD) back to 644 (RW- R– R–) or whatever it was originally (on my server it was 604) in order to make the file usable by the server, but prevent it from being read by a browser.

While you are at it you can deny access to many more unwanted visitors: email harvesters, offline browsing programs (site rippers like HyperImage), spammers. Typically they ignore robots.txt rules, which is plain rude, but also allows you identify and trap them. Identifying them by their user agent (as we have done for HyperImage) is less reliable as bad bots will often fake their user agent. Here is one list of bad bots and here is a discussion of the “perfect .htaccess ban list”. In the end choosing who to ban is a matter of personal choice.

Stop Image Harvesters Like HyperImage From Downloading All Your Images from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers

Don’t get me wrong. We ARE best friends from day one. My concern is that photographers seems to take an astonishingly lax attitude to password security. Yet as small business owners they have so much to loose should things go wrong. By using their wife’s name as their password, they are playing Russian roulette with their online photo archives, their client list, their website, their bank accounts, their reputation and more.

Put simply, family names, dictionary words, countries, “123456″, “password” and “qwerty” don’t make good online passwords. Even simpler: if your password is easy to memorize it’s probably a bad one. My advice: use specialized software to generate strong passwords and store them securely.

BRUTE FORCE ATTACKS

There are many technological and non-technological ways an ill-intentioned person can get hold of your login credentials. One of them is known as a ‘brute force attack’: an automated process of trial and error used to guess the “secret” protecting a system. Picture a powerful computer entering every word in the dictionary, every first name and then variations on them in your account login form. This is (probably) what happend to Twitter in 2008 when 750 user accounts were hacked.

Password reminders or so-called “security questions” can make it even easier. According to the Web Application Security Consortium:

(…) if the personal detail is “favorite color” then an attacker can use a brute force attack to retrieve the password as the number of color choices is limited. In addition, studies have shown that approximately 40% of the population selects blue as their favorite color (…).

Need more? A recent study of a 32 million user password breach at RockYou, a Facebook application developer, found that the most common password, by far, was “123456”, followed by “12345”, “123456789”, “password” and “iloveyou.”

THE BASICS OF PASSWORD SECURITY

1. Use different passwords on different sites. If you use the same login for multiple sites as soon as one gets compromised, they all are.
2. Don’t use common words or sequences. Instead use at least 8 characters and 3 of the following character types: upper-case letters, lower-case letters, numbers and special characters. There are 26^8 possible permutations for an 8-character lowercase password, but 94^8 possible permutations for an 8-character password that cambines mixed-case letters, numbers and symbols. That’s over 6 quadrillion more possible variations.
3. Don’t base passwords on personal data — we share these bits of information with others more routinely than you think.
4. Don’t leave your passwords somewhere visible. Take that post-it off your monitor. And if you keep a list of passwords in a file on your computer, call it something a little less explicit than “passwords.”
5. Make sure your password recovery questions are also secure and not based on common-knowledge personal data either.

USE SPECIALIZED TOOLS

There are tricks to make secure passwords memorable but I find they require more work than suits my brain. I much prefer to use a specialized password management utility.

There are a number of them. I use 1Password (Mac/Win, $39.95) and I highly recommend it. It’s simple and intuitive to use. It stores your usernames, passwords and other sensitive information on your computer, not on a remote server. It constantly gets great reviews).

And disable password storage by your browsers. As practical as it is to let your browser store your login info, they are very vulnerable. Even if the application encrypts the account information, it does so with a static key that can be easily deciphered. So turn it off and let 1Password or whatever tool you choose do the work.

There is plenty more you can do to secure your accounts but this is a good start.

Get Serious About Password Security from digitaltechparis - web presence for photographers