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I see a lot of wish list items creeping in here – I didn’t add things that were not in the product that I’d like to see as Leo didn’t ask for that.
If you do want a wish list Leo, can I suggest that you have a third topic for that? And perhaps that everyone list their top 5 wishes (to force priorities and avoid laundry lists that don’t help focus your development time/resources?
– Customization: that I can have my own watermark, logo, header on the front page, menus, licenses, etc. Have my own Categories for images (I could live with a small required subset).
– Network search if nothing is found on my site
– phrase searches (I know it’s premium, but thought it’s worth mentioning)
– similar images
– latest images
-widgets to put various features (like similar or latest images) on our own pages
-Batch editorThings I’d get rid of:
– The RSS feed on Categories
– The author description on the image pages (just the name with the necessary tags for making copyright ownership clear) – name linking to the About page is fine
– Limits on # of network partners (have as many as you want)
– The Symbiostock Community link on image pages
– icons in front of headings (keywords, categories, similar images, logout – everywhere)
– cart manager (perhaps I don’t know how to use it?)(I’ll come back and edit if I think of others)
Sorry about the crappy experience you’ve had. I guess WordPress themes are the wild west and sometimes you get hornswoggled by fast talkers 🙂
I had one bad experience with a plugin I purchased from Themepunch via Code Canyon (part of Envato, the folks who own PhotoDune, the stock photo site) where things weren’t working well and they asked for an admin account to take a look. At the time I was horrified that a complete stranger might royally mess up my site and wasn’t willing to do that. I moved to a different plugin and decided to write off the $13 as the performance was terrible.
I have since been willing to give one other plugin developer an admin account to look at a problem – I think it’s a pretty standard approach for solving WordPress problems – but I was still rather nervous about it. And that was just for a plugin!
Regarding phrases, I typically use them to avoid spam that you’d get if you made the keywords individual words.
For example, with this image I used the phrases Codz Poop and Palace of the Masks as well as the word masks. If i were searching for just palace, I wouldn’t want to see this, but just masks would be OK. Likewise, I can’t put poop as a single keyword (think pooh in UK English versus US English).
Similarly, there’s no apache in this image, so I used apache trail as a phrase, but also trail individually in case someone doesn’t care which trail.
I try to balance covering all the buyer search possibilities with keeping thing spam free, and generally try to remember plurals where appropriate
I’m really confused.
I updated my test site (I tried to get a zip file of the theme with the fix for the search bug but GitHub appears to be old; what I downloaded from symbiostock.com seemed not to have any changes in analytics.php; what I downloaded via the link the forums (that little box on the right on the Board Index page) likewise seemed unchanged).
I thought from what the theme update said that I was updating to 3.3.4, but when I look at the author page attributes section, it says 3.3.3
I was updating the test site so I could get the theme code so I can add my changes and then update my real site to 3.3.4 and turn networking back on without the search being slow.
Does anyone have any clues where I can find 3.3.4? Or what I need to do in updating my test site to get it to actually update to what it said was available?
It would be really good if future updates were clearly marked with the version somewhere.
@klsbear wrote:
For whatever it’s worth, I’m not seeing a throttling problem on my site. 3.91 seconds over the last 24 hours is all I show when I checked. Two incidents, each less than 2 seconds in duration.
If I recall from the slow search with network turned on, your site was one of the speedy ones. No idea if the two things are connected and I haven’t gone back to turn on the network and see if that has reasonable speed searches now the throttling is done
See item 6 in this blog post for using the text widget to add whatever HTML you need
http://www.digitalbristles.com/image-authorship-with-google/
Aah – makes sense now. I didn’t realize. You can use AJT’s plugin to make your site a portfolio referral (pointing to IS for a sale) in the interim
http://ajotte.com/stock-plugin/
I don’t know what sort of portfolio page you had in mind. If you just want to display everything on your site, you can make a menu item linked to your-site-name/image/. I also have a category for Best Sellers – it’s just like any other category in how it displays – so you could have one for your highlights.
If you want something you can make a layout for and pick only certain images you need a gallery plugin. I use one for my categories gallery
http://www.digitalbristles.com/gallery/categories/
http://bestwebsoft.com/plugin/gallery-pro/
And there’s one I use for my blog table of contents – Masonry by page builder
http://www.digitalbristles.com/blog-posts/
They have a nice example of making a gallery of images:
http://demo.siteorigin.com/origami/masonry-layout/
You can put together a page by hand of course with anything you like 🙂
So that made a huge difference. Right before I made the change
And 50 minutes later
I don’t know why the numbers for earlier 15 minute segments don’t match up, but the bottom line is that the graph is now quiet (and I did do some searches and accessed images on the site during that time).
I guess this has been going on since analytics were introduced? When the fixes are made to this, I’d really like to see an on-off switch – not just for public access but for the whole process of gathering data. Even when the current bug is fixed, there may be future changes to server or usage of the sites that cause analytics to impact performance. The ability to quickly turn the whole thing on and off will allow us to simply see whether or not that’s the performance problem without tinkering with the code.
Edited to add a big THANK YOU to Tim for find this!
So I looked at my site and see masses of throttling
I’m off to comment out the code your friend suggested to see if that helps.
I’m assuming that just turning off public access to analytics wouldn’t do it – that it’s still generating the stuff, just not sharing it?
@leo wrote:
Sometimes I wonder if I’m retarded for keeping my port up there, but honestly they haven’t started doing the really bad stuff like Istock, so I’m allowing myself a small allowance of retardation.
If it’s earning you money and you’re getting paid, there’s nothing wrong with that 🙂 Perhaps if enough other people leave you’ll see a boost in sales? 🙂
You do – yea!
However you need to look at your image pages – I’m not seeing prices on the two with previews and there are for with none, but which have prices
http://www.4surephoto.com/image/
That will list all your images.
I don’t have an answer to your plugin question, but I would urge you to think about posting a huge stream of automated stuff – I think it works much better when there are some highlights and not too many at once.
I have unfollowed people a couple of times when I was sick of a meaningless stream of automated posts.
Was this a rhetorical question? 🙂
I don’t sell through Fotolia any more, but even for a loathed area like Categories (such a pain on most sites to find a decent fit; Bigstock had the right idea by automating choices, but I prefer it when the site uses keywords to do it for you) Fotolia stood out with a bizarro world view in their list.
The worst system out there is iStock (I left last February over the google/getty deal) but the reason people put up with it was money – in the past anyway they were consistently the top money earner.
If the agencies were fair, honest, efficient, organized and had gobs of customers, there’d be no Symbiostock 🙂
