Brendan Young Blag » project 365

15 Minutes of Flickr Fame

Brendan — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:23:49 +0000

Checking my email today I found there was an alarming amount of Flickr notifications about people commenting on and favorite-ing some of my pictures. When I logged in to check my stats I saw that I had over 2500 hits for today alone, with over 2000 of them being from this picture. Looking at my Flickr Stats page when I got home (and had the internet installed. WOO!) I saw this:

I’m not sure why it thinks it’s tomorrow, but the stats I’m talking about are for June 4th.

Looking at the referrers, it seems all the hits originated from that Door Note picture being featured in a Flickr Blog post.

I doubt I’ll ever see these kind of stats again. Unless I starting taking really really great photos:P

Flickr and Brendan’s Bandwidth Adventure

Brendan — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:40:00 +0000

I recently went to Video Games Live and I gotta say, it was amazing. The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra didn’t miss a note and the on-stage antics were fun and entertaining. I took some photos while I was there and uploaded the good ones to Flickr via Flickr Uploadr. I wish the rest of this post could just be those photos and a couple paragraphs about my experience at VGL (which I recommend going to if you like video game music).

Flickr Uploadr lets you select a bunch of photos from your computer, add the titles, descriptions and tags you want, and then upload them to Flickr in one batch. It’s worked great for me until now. I’m not sure if my internet cut out (Which it does. OFTEN. Thanks telus.) or what, but when the upload “finished” my photostream had multiple duplicates and it hadn’t actually uploaded all of the photos that I had selected. ODD. I deleted the duplicates and went to try uploading the one photo it missed via the website instead, and I got this message:

Weird. I’ve uploaded more photos than this in a month before. Flickr Uploadr probably got screwed up by telus, which would explain the duplicates. OH WELL. I decided to upgrade. I’d been thinking of trying it for a while to see what the stats were like. Plus it’s only 24.95 USD for a year, might as well try it out. Added a 1 Year Flickr Pro membership to my cart, entered my billing info, and BAM:

Wtf. I got the same result trying in Firefox, IE7 and Chrome, on XP and Vista. I figured I must have typed my billing info incorrectly or something, but after trying a bunch of times I was forced to assume that Flickr must not like money.

That sounds pretty cynical but I actually really like Flickr and it sucks when you want to support something like this and they won’t even take your money. A quick look on the Flickr Help Forums showed me I wasn’t alone in having upgrading issues. There are plenty of people who are getting the same error I am, but also people whose payments went through and have yet to be upgraded to Pro status.

I still plan on using Flickr (once they reset my bandwidth on June 1st), but this is definitely something they need to fix. Or so help me I will migrate to Picasa.

Also: Here are my photos from Video Games Live that made it up to the site.

Project 365

Brendan — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:42:55 +0000

A couple weeks ago I started what some people have dubbed “Project 365“, where you take a picture a day for a year. I haven’t blagged about it ’til now because now I have a few weeks worth of pictures to show off. I had already seen other people I know doing it, and when I stumbled across my digital camera and reflected on how little I actually use it, I figured I’d give it a shot. It was a redundant roundabout process, but I managed to resurrect my old Flickr account, so if you’re interested you can see what I have so far here. You can totally feel free to leave some comments or critiques.

It’s been real fun so far, and I haven’t even figured out all my camera’s functions yet. So watch out world-of-really-really-amateur-photography, here I come.