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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Meanwhile, I have another thing I’d like to announce: I’m working on a firefox extension for flickrbabes. A simple one, but hopefully you guys will like it.

Thanks.

Thank you

So, the worldcup ended today, and there’s a new champion: Italy! Congratulations, and well done! Viva el futbol!

So, he asked me if I could ask the readers of flickrbabes, maybe one of you saved it to your harddrive and can send it again to his owner?? I hope one of you did saved this photo.

Please help, the photographer misses his photo very much

Leave a comment if you have any info.

Anyway, Ecuador did an excelent job, and everybody here (Ecuador) is happy about it. We lost, but it’s not the end of the world. The team did a lot, and I’m proud of them.

Go Ecuador! YOU RULE!

I wanted to answer to some of the request and feedback I’ve got from people.

Tagging and categorizing
Tagging is a more flexible way to categorize photos, however, it also requires way more work than just add each photo to a couple of categories. Tagging was in my initial plans, though for the moment I’m dropping it. I’ll probably use the tags that were originally added to the photos by the photo authors (in flickr), as I have that data stored in my database. The problem there is that not all photos are tagged, but at least the ones that are will work, so you can see photos by tags.

Also, I just added a few categories, and updated all the photos until December 2005. The categories are few and simple. I guess there are so many ways of categorizing the photos, I just decided these worked for me, and were easy to update. (check them out, they’re on the sidebar).

Asians

I read a comment that said that while all photos of white girls seem to be amateurs, all photos from asians are from pornstars. I really don’t know, and it might be so, but I don’t do it on purpose. If you check the photos, you’ll see that most photos of asian girls are from the same couple of flickr authors. It’s just that I’m subscribed to their photos so I check them very often. I think this happens because I move through a few groups and users (and users’ contacts) at flickr, and most of them are either from South-america, or from North-america. I guess I could broaden my circle, but I don’t know how. Therefore, if you find any cool photos, no matter from where, as long as it’s of a pretty girl, send it my way (there’s a contact form in the site now).

African Americans

I’ve also got the comment that I don’t post any african american girls. I really did notice this, but I don’t do it because I don’t want to, or any stupid reason you may think of. I just don’t find any at flickr. Again, I guess this happens because of the way I browse flickr, always around the same users and users’ favorites. So, if you find any cool photos, no matter from where, as long as it’s of a pretty girl, send it my way (there’s a contact form in the site now).

I make no difference in race, religion, politics, or whatever at this site. All that matters is that it is a good photo, and the girl in the photo is a goddess, like every other one at this site Remember you guys can contribute, just send the urls and I’ll see if I post the photos.

Creative Commons

Another visitor said that I should add the creative commons logo (or copyright sign, depending on the license of the photo) below the photo. That’s actually a good idea, and I’m going to implement it.

Remember that all of the photos posted here are copyrighted by their respective authors (every photo links to the author’s page), so it’s not like you can use them freely for whatever you want. Some of them are licensed under creative commons, which means you can use them freely under certain conditions, as long as you give credit to the original author.

I’ll have to get that info from flickr and update the photos. As there are more than a thousand photos here, it’ll take me some time.

Pocket PC version

Yes, I’m working on a few other ways to display the site. It’s not that hard, but it takes time, and as I work on this site when I have free time (and I don’t have time), it takes me longer. I’m not getting paid for working on this blog, so, it’s not really my main priority

Slow or fast

Some say the blog is slower than when it was at blogger, some say it’s faster. I don’t know, do you know? Personally, I think that in the beginning it was way slower, but suddenly it got faster. I also made a change in the scripts, so it should render at least 3 times faster. Also, now the archive photos are smaller, so that pages will load faster. Anyway, I guess I optimized the scripts as much as I can, though there’s still work to do, which is in my todo list, so it’s far from finished. It also depends on the hosting. I’m using dreamhost, which is cheap, and apparently, good enough. I don’t know if a dedicated server would work better, but then again, that costs, and well, I just don’t have the money to pay monthly for that kind of hosting (I think it’s around 79 to 100 bucks a month).

Why you thank me?

I received a lot of comments thanking me for the site, and that people are loving it. I’m glad, but remember, this site is nothing without the photos, and none of the photos are mine. You like a photo, click on a photo, tell the author how good and talented he/she is, and maybe, if you see they don’t have a pro account at flickr, buy them one (it’s like 24 usd a year or something like that), maybe that’d motivate them to post even more photos, which, if they let me, i’d post here.

Ok, now I’m going to watch the Argentina Vs Mexico game. And guys, tomorrow’s game is Ecuador Vs England. I’m from Ecuador, so you better support my team, pray, and scream for them, hopefully we win, because if we don’t I won’t post any photos in 3 months

So, I was playing with the blog, and I made an small change: if you go to an archive page (by day or category), the photos will have a smaller size, while if you visit the homepage, or click on any of the page numbers at the bottom (or the ‘previous entries button’), you’ll see the normal size photos. I did this so people could browse the archives faster (as the photos would obviously load faster), and of course, to be nice to flickr, who are nice enough with me letting me keep blogging, because, as you know, all photos are hosted there, which means you guys are using a lot of their bandwith. So, hopefully, this change will save them some bandwith, I’d like to know if it’d work, but it’s hard to contact them (if by any chance any flickr employee is subscribed to the blog, I’d love if you could give me some feedback).

Again, if you’re getting the photos via rss, you won’t notice any change.