I’ve always felt a bit bad, spamming this blog with photography. So I had an idea of creating an extra, photo blog, which would mainly showcase my photography and would be updated more often.

In decided to do it in a simple manner.

• I wanted a simple, dark design, emphasising photographs.
• I wanted Flickr to be the source of my photos, so I don’t need to reupload them.
• More precisely, I want to be able to make a post right from flickr photo page.
• I decided on using an online blogging platform to avoid the hassle of management and software updates.

In the end, I decided to use Blogger, as it allows me to create my own template and can comply with the above needs.

The result of a couple of hours work:
Proudly presenting Dušan Smolnikar: Photo Journal.

An article of mine has been published on Slo-Tech. It’s in Slovene, and deals with, yes, you’ve guessed it, color management on the web.

read it here:
Slo-Tech | Barvno upravljanje na spletu

For those of you less fluent in the language, here’s a list of sources (in English) I’ve referenced to prepare this.

1. Is the Web Safe Palette really dead?. Gillespie, J. 2001.
2. Frequently Asked Questions. VisiBone. 2008.
3. How a 16 color palette is represented in different pixel formats. A Witness to YAHWEH. 2002.
4. HTML Colors. W3Schools. Referenced Dec 27th 2008.
5. So Many Colors. Holley, B. 2008.
6. sRGB. Wikipedia. 2008.
7. A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet - sRGB. Stokes M., Anderson M., Chandrasekar S., Motta R. 1996.
8. Graphics Interchange Format. Wikipedia. 2008.
9. JPEG. Wikipedia. 2008.
10. The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction”. Sivonen, H. 2008.
11. Browser Gamma-Correction Test Page. Roelofs, G. 2005.
12. Get better color online through Flash Player 10. Nack, J. 2008.

This is quite a popular buzzword nowadays - web 2.0. Some people have migrated to web 3.0 as well. So, what is this all about? Where do I download the new version? Many people have heard the term, many follow its directions, but very few really know what it is (and what directions they are really following).

It seems the term “Web 2.0″ was first used as a name for a conference, held by O’Reilly in 2005. The basic idea was, that the internet was/is becoming a social network, rather than just a collection of information. We were no longer just readers, but started contributing to the experience. This was the rise of blogs, wikipedia and flickr, to name just a few. More on this at O’Reilly - What is Web 2.0

Just 5, maybe 10 years ago, how many people you know, were using the internet actively? A few.. and they were probably referred to as “geeks” or such. But was internet not a social network back then? We had bulletin boards (or forums, if you prefer), we had ICQ, we had irc (or was it mIRC? ;) ). So why wasn’t it popular back then? Besides dial-up being slow and expensive, I believe all of these were too complicated for the common people. They were afraid of them.

So what is popular nowadays? Blogs… Starting your blog at blogger or wordpress is just a few clicks away. Commenting on them just requires your name and maybe an e-mail. Compare this to endless signup forms of forums and you’ll see why this is big.

And then there are social networking tools, such as myspace or facebook. It’s now as easy as ever to put yourself online and show yourself to all of your friends. But the technology existed years ago. Does anyone remember The Geocities page builder, back in 2000? It was a nice attempt, but still too complicated for the majority.

I skimmed trough Web 2.0 how-to design guide today. Let me sum it up for you - Just follow this little step:

1. Make it simple

And this is what web 2.0 really is. The end of endless forms, dull hierarchical navigations and cluttered pages. And by accomplishing this, “other people” can navigate the web without feeling lost. Plus, they’ve started contributing. Communicating. Everyone can upload his or her photos to flickr. But would they have done it if they had to connect to ftp.flickr.com on port 19752, using passive mode transfers and upload their photos to ~/www/photos/gallery ?

So, what do we, web developers learn from this? If you want people to use your pages, make them simple. Forget the nonsense, cut to the point.

And what about the web 2.0 design principles? Glass surfaces, reflections, shiny buttons? I’m sick of them. Sure, I do such designs - but people seem to expect that from me. And people seem to enjoy clicking them. So if you’ve read this far just to learn how to make a shiny website design, I feel sorry for you. I really do.