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Tassography v4.0 Goes Live Using ASP.Net MVC
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Ben Vincent
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Late last year I set out to completely rewrite the front end of tassography.com based on ASP.Net MVC. Well it’s finally done and now available for everyone’s viewing pleasure. As well as changing the underlying code the most important change I made was a switch to an entirely new SEO-friendly URL schema. Gone are all the ugly, impossible to understand /ViewCollection.aspx?c=20100214 because that’s now /photography/2010-02-14-wandering-around-pier-39. I’ve also refactored my Silverlight controls into cleaner reusable components. One of the aims I had was to release the photo viewer onto Codeplex to complement my Fotofly metadata library. I’m close to finishing this work and hope to have something to share later this week. 
In a future next blog I’ll go through a few things I’ve learnt along the way, and the websites I used for tips and tricks. |
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Oh Google, where do thou get thy Keywords from?
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Ben Vincent
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| The traffic to Tassography has definitely increased since I started playing with Search Engine Optimzation (SEO). The Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit has definitely helped me get my head around the common things to fix. Amusingly the traffic to the site continues to be less to do with my Photos and more to do with this Blog! According to Google’s Webmaster tools I’m appearing in a wider variety of search results now. Which pretty much matches the traffic I get into the site (from all Search Engines, not just Google). [Read More] |
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The Very Useful IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit
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Ben Vincent
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| I’ve done my best to make my site ‘indexable’ by Search Engines but I’ve never really tried to optimise it. Martin Peck got me thinking about it more when I shared my analysis of my IIS logs last year. Back then my referrer list looked something like this: [Read More] |
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Tag Clouds Revisited, Refactored and Improved
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Ben Vincent
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| About a year ago, I added a Tag Cloud to allow you to navigate tags associated with the photos on the site, but I’ve never been happy with the algorithm used. I spent some time Friday working out the problems and updating my code. The Problems 1) Tags were distributed across ten buckets, each bucket containing the same number of tags. But even with 1800 tags the frequency isn’t linear. [Read More] |
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Tassography Usage or never believe stats…
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Ben Vincent
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| After posting the story about usage of Tassography it got me thinking. So I did some digging into the data and realised it’s rubbish. When I look at the visitor’s data it looks like the usage logs aren’t capturing everything that’s going on: [Read More] |
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First look at Usage of Tassography
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Ben Vincent
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| I’ve been meaning to look at the log files generated for my site for a while, especially after the TransRockies. I finally got round to it this weekend and there’s good and bad data! Unfortunately I only have log files from July 2008 but it’s clear the TransRockies had quite an impact on the usage of the site. In August-September the traffic doubled and in November it tripled. [Read More] |
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Tassography Gets Personal, thanks to Facebook
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Ben Vincent
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| Thanks to a little more magic from Facebook I’ve been able to use Facebook Connect to create a personalised view of Tassography for all my friends. The page will show you any pictures I have of you and any photos of your friends based on your Facebook friends list. To get there just click on the Facebook Connect button at the top of each page: [Read More] |
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Now you can Comment on my Photos
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Ben Vincent
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| Thanks to some magic from Facebook it’s now possible to comment on any photo on Tassography.com and see comments left by others. At the bottom of each photo you’ll now see a very familiar Facebook comment box, simply type in your comment and it’ll show up on the page and on Facebook. [Read More] |
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New Tassography Silverlight Search App
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Ben Vincent
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| I’m starting to get the hang of Silverlight, so I thought I’d replace my very basic HTML search feature with a Silverlight app. It only took about 3 hours, with most of the effort spent tweaking the UI to make it look right. Which just goes to proves how easy Silverlight is. Now when you visit www.tassography.com/search you’re presented with a pretty straightforward search box: [Read More] |
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Turning the Silverlight on Tassography.com
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Ben Vincent
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| I’m always up for learning something new and when it comes to development the best way for me is to add a new feature on tassography.com. That’s why the site is packed full of features, half of which I’m sure only I know about! Silverlight has been usable for about 18 months now and it was time I finally played around with it. Over Christmas I pulled together two simple applications that I think are pretty cool. [Read More] |
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Using WIC & C# to read Windows Live Photo Gallery’s People Tags
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Ben Vincent
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| In my last posting I talked about how Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG) stores People tags in XMP. In this post I’m going to extend the Windows Imaging Component code from Robert Wlodarczyk’s Blog to read the data. The code is pretty simple to use, just make sure you have PresentationCore registered in your project and the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace. [Read More] |
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Understanding how Windows Live Photo Gallery’s People Tags are Stored
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Ben Vincent
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| Since writing Tassography.com tags have been an important part of my workflow. For as long as I can remember I have been using Microsoft’s Digital Image Pro 2006. With the release of the new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG), I took this Christmas the time to switch over and take advantage of some of the cool new features. The most compelling new feature for me is the new people tagging capabilities. [Read More] |
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I’m Number 1 on Live Search, Number 2 on Google
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Ben Vincent
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| I don’t know much about Search algorithms but I do know that they are getting better all the time and sites don’t normally appear high up in the list unless they are meant to. Google uses a method that works out how many sites link to yours, I don’t know how Live’s works. So I’m pretty impressed that I now appear as the first hit on Live Search and the second hit on Google when you search for my name: Live Search: [Read More] |
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Sorry for the Spam….
by
Ben Vincent
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| Every so often, I’m tired and I do something silly! This time I was trying to fix a broken link in a blog when I accidentally uploaded my test config, used on my laptop, onto tassography.com! So you will probably have got 4-5 “This Week” postings, most of them with broken links and no images displayed! I’ll try and not do it again! [Read More] |
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Tassography v3 Goes Live…
by
Ben Vincent
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| For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trickling out a couple of changes, which I have now wrapped up into what I’m calling Tassography v3. The site has come pretty popular to the point that I’m getting about 10,000 hits a day on a consistent basis. So hopefully these changes will be some freshness to the site and some new features. New Design I’ve had the same design since I launched Tassography in 2007, so it was time for a refresh. [Read More] |
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My first Blog...
by
Ben Vincent
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| This feels a bit like writing a Hello World application, but I guess it's where we all start. Welcome to my Blog, which I will be writing to supplement the photos that are already published to this feed. My aim is to share random things that I think people will find interesting, useful or amusing. Hopefully I'll also try and share some of the technology behind www.tassography.com, so I can do some small part to pay back all the bloggers that help me solve numerous hurdles I've overcome. [Read More] |
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This website, all photography & other content is Copyright © Ben Vincent. Unauthorised use of images is strictly prohibited.
Catalog Last Updated: Mon, 19 Jul 2010, 22:48:43 | Version v4.0.3861.38195
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