MAS o Menos

Last year I started using SmugMug to host my photos. Prior to that I hosted my own photo galleries. In order to not exceed my allocated disk space, I trimmed each image down to a smaller size. In the days of broadband, it just makes more sense to have a dedicated media host like SmugMug or Flickr. Now all my new galleries are hosted outside this web site.

The problem with not hosting photo galleries is you send your audience away from your site over to their server. And your photo galleries develop their own audience which knows nothing about the parent site.

Yesterday I got the idea of using the SmugMug RSS feeds to build a gallery here on CriticalMAS, while the images reside on SmugMug.

SmugMug Image Gallery (moved to DigitalColony)

I coded this page using the XmlDataSource and DataList ASP.NET controls to pull image data for all my galleries onto a single page. It’s a little slow, but this page was just a proof of concept. The next version of CriticalMAS will bring fast preview galleries back to this site.

Tags: digitalcolony