Flickr babes, It's about beauty

More flickrbabes coming soon

So, I’m back, more flickrbabes coming soon, I’m just getting up to date with work and personal emails, but don’t worry, more photos coming soon.

7 comments October 15th, 2007

No flickrbabes for you

As you’ve probably noticed, the site hasn’t been updated for the last couple of days. There’s a simple reason for that: there will be no more flickrbabes for you.

Don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s only for a couple of weeks, while I’m on vacation. I hope you can survive without the babes of flickr until i come back (October 15). Good luck with that.

19 comments September 28th, 2007

Updates

Hello people. I wanted to give you guys (and girls) the State of the Flickrbabes Union.

First of all, some geeky stuff. I was checking the visit logs, and I’m not sure, but it looks like nobody’s visited the site from an iPhone. Really, nobody. Maybe I’m wrong, so leave a comment if you’ve used an iPhone to visit the site. Also, a quickie about browsers: about 43% of the visitors use firefox, another 40% user Internet Explorer, and the rest, well, they use other browsers. That’s good news though, because me loves firefox.

More stats: as you’ve noticed, there are some regular photographers and models featured here. Who are the top eleven?

1. Machine - 86 photos
2. GVK - 79 photos
3. FotoCobo - 77 photos
4. Shiroi Kaze - 69 photos
5. Mark Velasquez Photography - 68 photos
6. Jef Harris - 56 photos
7. mhaight -55 photos
8. Lauren Michele - 55 photos
9. Sgt. Gooch - 54 photos
10. TjF Photography -51 photos
11. studio.es - 51 photos

Thanks to them and every one of the photographers featured here, as it’s their work that makes the site.

I’ll post a bigger list one of these days.

What else? Well, I’ve been working on a few improvements, though my real job has taken a lot of my time, so I’ve really haven’t got time to do anything. I need to do some changes to the database, as for some known technical reasons (too boring to explain), it is using too many resources. After that, I want to bring the rating plugin (remember the 4 hearts next to each photo that let you guys rate it?). I’m also working on a sort of start page that will feature random photos (top secret project for now). I was playing around trying to create a firefox plugin, and a netvibes addon, but again, I haven’t got the time to finish those (one of these days I’ll surprise you). Here and there, I’m working on some changes to the interface, as it’s time the site gets a better design.

So, that’s it. I’m trying my best with the free time I have, but it’s difficult. Keep visiting, keep subsribing to the feed, and keep enjoying the site. Also, don’t forget to check out my other blog: fb revolution.

6 comments July 9th, 2007

HELP!! (please read)

Flickr member Lara Jade writes:

Yeah, that’s right. My image is being used for a pornographic movie called ‘Body Magic’.
Did they have permission? Did they hell.
This happened a few months back (well, since I found out). Somebody noted me saying this company was using one of my pictures.. actually let me get this straight - a SELF PORTRAIT that I took at the age of FOURTEEN.

Continue reading what she has to say by clicking here.

This is not nice. Not nice at all. So, if you can help her in any way, it’d be great. Her main problem is that she doesn’t live in the US, while the infringing company is based in Texas. So, lets show some support for her!

4 comments June 2nd, 2007

Have you noticed the lack of posts?

Hey, I guess you’ve noticed that there’s been few photos posted during the last couple of days. There’s a reason. Mediatemple, the company that hosts this site, tracks the sites usage and translates that to GPUs. I can use 1000 monthly GPUs because of the hosting plan I have. Now, this is usually more than enough, but the GPU usage for the site exploded this week (right now the site’s used 841 GPUs and that’s just for half this month).

If I pass the 1000 GPUs, I pay $0.10 per additional GPU. Right now, that overage might be about $20, which isn’t much. But it’s not good to pay that amount of money every month even more when I want to put back some features that have been deleted from the site for a while (ratings, tags).

I know I always complain about hosting, but what can I do when I want to run the site with the lowest budget possible.

I think the reason for this issue is the feed. I’ve discovered that we are the second most popular feed at netvibes, which means the site has more than 10000 subscribers.

Anyway, just be patient with me, I’ll be working on the site these days, and if I get this GPU issue fixed, I have some cool new features I want to show you.

3 comments April 13th, 2007

RSS and updates

Hey there.

So, it seems there’s a few updates. Thanks to everybody that was willing to collab, and gave ideas, I really appreciate it.

So, what’s happened? Remember I was talking about a site that was reposting the flickrbabes feed, and my problem was that he had porn ads on his site? Well, who would have thought it? The guy respectfully said he’s going to remove any flickrbabes content from his site, but it’ll take him a couple of days as he has to do it manually. Good for him, even though he made a mistake, he’s willing to correct it. Unfortunately, it seems his hosting put the site down. Hopefully he can put it back up. I think he deserves a second chance.

Our dear friend David (I know it’s Daniel, but David is sexier, dontcha think?), well, it seems that his hosting account got suspended. I wonder if it’s just that he exceded the bandwith of so many visits he got from us today?

Regarding the rss, it’s in beta right now (a la web2.0, don’t you guys love web2.0). The only requirement is that your rss reader (or your browser) have to have the flash player installed (if you can view youtube videos on your feed, then you can also see the flickrbabes feed). I’m doing that to have a bit more control over the content. I can do some nice magic with flash. But for the moment, I guess I won’t worry too sites that caused me problems seem to be gone. Hopefully the one with porn ads can come back up again.

Good news, right?

9 comments December 19th, 2006

Solutions

Hey, I know the rss feed is bad news. However, for every problem there’s a solution. I don’t care that much for the people that grew up thinking they can do whatever they please. Life handles that on its own.

I care that the work these photographers do isn’t displayed in any other site I can’t control. Seems people find republishing the feed is a quick dirty way to make some money? And that can harm the image of the site. It’s a shame that people are abusive.

But anyway, here’s the possible solutions:

I’ll check if there’s a way to ban ips from getting the rss (i’d need to move the feedburner feed back to this site, which probably means, as usual, more bandwith and all that).

Provide the rss feed with just the image code, and a firefox plugin that would translate that to an image again. Of course that will force you guys to use firefox, which isn’t a bad option either.

I had a half baked firefox plugin that would put the latest photos in the browser sidebar. Specifically, this page: http://flickrbabes.com/sidepanel.php I guess I could continue development of that and publish it one of these days.

I was once developing a module for netvibes, so netvibes users could also keep enjoying the flickrbabes there.

Finally, I guess it’s not the end of the world. The site is still here, and you can always come and visit

14 comments December 18th, 2006

There will be no more photos in the rss feed!!! This is why

Dear readers,

yesterday I got contacted by one of the photographers whose photographs was featured here weeks ago. That photo was removed from the site weeks ago, as I immediately do with anyone that requests this, because they are the ones that own the photo (not even flickr are the owners of these photos). I got authorization from many photographers to post these photos. From others I don’t have asked, they are aware I’ve posted these photos (as I leave a message at flickr for every photo I post) and most of them are ok with it, as they’ve added me as a contact at flickr.

Back to the story, this photographer that contacted me yesterday, asked me to remove her photo from another website that is not mine. Why did she contact me? because I put a link back to this site on every post in the rss feed, and there’s a nice little form you can use to contact me. Anyway, it turns out this site, another blog, is copying the content of this blog, not copying the idea or concept, as two sites I’ve recently seen: pd5.de and las chavas de flickr (hey, i didn’t invent this type of site, I’m just saying these two sites have the same concept as this one, and actually I think they are great).

This other site I’m talking about takes the feed from flickrbabes and just republish it at his blog (even the title says flickrbabes.com and a link back to the site, as you can all see in your rss readers). I went on a little research and found out there are several sites that do exactly the same. There’s one specific site that has added porn ads next to each repost. I don’t want this site being related to porn.

I emailed the owners of sites asking them to remove any flickrbabes.com content from their sites. I hope they do so. While I can deal with the authors from flickr to remove any photo from this site, I cannot do so in sites I do not own. I’ve provided the feed for over a year, happy that you like the site and don’t caring if you read it here or in your rss feeds. I do care if flickrbabes.com content is read from other sites because I cannot control their content or if they decide to put porn ads or any kind of freaky thing.

Anyway, I was going to wait until I see an answer back from the owner of the site featuring porn ads, but there was another answer from one of these sites ( www.doublenegative.com/wordpress ) that just made me immediately change the feed.

The anwer I got was:

> I have links back to you. And besides, you’re stealing from Flickr.
> Every link has flickrbabes.com in the title of the post too, it’s not
> like you aren’t getting credit.
>
> This is no different than having your feed in my news reader. It’s just
> my news reader is my website. I’ll cut you in on the 2 cents per day my
> personal blog makes.

He can think that way I guess, but I disagree. Unfortunately, this one person, plus the owners of the other sites (specially the one that added porn ads) are ruining the feed for the other 3000+ of you. I am not going to discuss this issue anymore, and I’m sorry guys that you have a crippled feed now. It’s a shame.

If you’re willing to do so, you can contact Daniel (owner of doublenegative.com ) and thank him for making me realize there are people without respect, which are usually the ones that ruin the fun for everyone else. His email is dblaisdell@digitaljedi.com (please don’t send him any nasty emails).

I’ll update you on the info about the site that has porn ads, as that’s the one I’m interested in at the moment. Daniel’s site, well, I could probably given him permission to keep posting the content at his site, but his attitude isn’t just right, don’t you think?

I’m sorry I had the wrong name, it’s not David, it’s Daniel.

34 comments December 18th, 2006

Flickrbabes, gone

By now, you probably noticed that the site disappeared since last thursday, but it’s back again. I got a lot of messages from people asking what’s going on. I’m sorry I didn’t answer. It’s just that work has kept me too busy these days.

So, what’s going on? Flickrbabes was hosted by dreamhost, pretty good, pretty cheap. Unfortunately, it puts limits to their users’ sites. Basically, this site was using too many resources from the server, so they decided it was a good idea to just deactivate the site. This happened last thursday, and I had no notification about what happened, or why they decided to do this. They just notified me about this issue, when I wrote them an email. It may be just me, but I think it’s common sense to (at least) notify the site’s owner about what’s going on.

So, they told me one of the scripts of this blog was using too many resources. The most simple solution for me was to deactivate all of the blog’s plugins. After doing that, they’d put the site back up. The thing is, I did on friday night, and send them an email notifying that I did the requested changes. But again, there was no answer until today.

As this issue was taking to long to get solved, I decided to switch hosts. Flickrbabes is now hosted at mediatemple. Of course, my hosting costs increased, and considering I’m still maintaining some sites at dreamhost (like fbrevolution), I’m paying actually 3 times what I used to pay (sort of).

Usually shared hosting is fine with any site, until it either gets too popular (has a lot of traffic) or uses a lot of resources (like a forum). When that happens, the hosting company will usually close your account or upgrade to a dedicated server. Don’t get me wrong, dreamhost is a good hosting company, but this is what happens if you pay so little for hosting.

I’ll probably will have to switch to a dedicated (or virtual dedicated) server one of these days. I’ll also have to check flickrbabes code to see if I can improve its performance, hoping that the customized plugin I did for it isn’t the cause of the excesive use of resources. The thing is, I keep this site for fun, I don’t make any profit from it, and I won’t, because if I put ads or anything to make money, flickr will block my site, and also because all of these photos are the work of other photographers, so I don’t see why should I profit from that. The fact that I do have a job means that this site isn’t one of my main priorities. So, if it starts causing too much trouble, or I have to spend to much money on it, I’ll just have to close it. So far, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but who knows.

By the way, tomorrow we celebrate one year of flickrbabes! It existed from way before (I think July or August 2005), but a lot of posts were deleted by blogger somehow, a long long time ago.

4 comments October 30th, 2006

Today

today my dog passed away. It’s too painful, too sad

For now, I really want to have some time and stop a lot of things I was doing, so maybe I won’t be updating the blog for a while, though who knows.

Anyway, that’s about it.

36 comments October 12th, 2006

Two new features

Hey there.

I added a couple of small features to the site:

Social Bookmarking

You’ll see that on the bottom of each post you have a bunch of icons. They are links to some social bookmarking sites. The idea is that if you are a user of any of those sites (for example: del.icio.us) it’ll be easier for you to bookmark that post.

Post rating

On top of each post you’ll see 5 hearts. You can click on them to provide a rating for that post/photo. The idea is that you start rating as much photos as possible, so that we have better stats: top rated photos, top rated photos by month, etc. This feature won’t work unless you collaborate by rating the posts. So, I hope you take a few seconds everytime you visit the site and use this feature.

I want to do some little fixes to the site (layout and css). Most of them are just small details, I’m really not planning in any new features soon, but if you have any suggestions, I’ll be glad to hear/read them. Either leave a comment here or send me an email via the contact page.

3 comments August 20th, 2006

Flickrbabes at myspace

I’m not a fan of myspace, actually I didn’t have an account there, but I thought I could give it a try, as I’ve seen some comments in the blog and the shoutbox from people having myspace accounts.

I thought it might be cool to start ‘adding friends’, so if you are a flickrbabes reader, and want to be my friend (that sounds so pathetic, lol ) you can check out my myspace page at myspace.com/flickrbabes.

I spent sometime trying to improve the layout, because the default one just sucks. Anyway, visit there, add me as a friend, leave comments, and do all that that you do in myspace

2 comments August 8th, 2006