lewinp wrote:I think the creative quality of the P-Base community is far superior to other "general public" photo sharing websites, but it is hard to justify the annual expense when many of these free sites offer easier to use interfaces. For example,
Having to enter numeric HTML sort order tags to arrange the images is very outdated, especially when sites like Facebook offer image dragging to visually arrange photo albums.
The requirement to use winzip to upload multiple images is extra steps and often slow, it is not as efficient as many sites which have java-script based batch uploads.
If you are going to collect usage fees you should be re-investing some of that money in technology - I can't recall the Pbase interface changing in a significant way for years. Having an up to date tool and good community of photographers is worth an annual fee for me, but it is hard to continue justifying this expense when other free websites offer an easier to use tool.
Agreed on all points, affirms our thinking on pbase's value and utility proposition for web management of photos. We are 1 month away from running out of pbase credit, having been paid up for LONG TIME. So, in addition to not having paid for some time to get pbase's mediocre UI, admin, and performance, the exponential changes in web interfaces and paradigms since then have obviated the design issues you mention above, notwithstanding the commonplace rich features way above and beyond pbase-assic era.
The bulk of the serverside pbase codebase I believe is still mainly Perl driven. Somebody correct me otherwise. Perl has its merits, great for text parsing and regular expressions, and general command line admin utility scripts. Perl came along for the ride during proliferation of HTTP browsers in early 90s, used along with CGI as one of the first ways to create dynamic HTML.
Fast fwd to 2009: Google has taken over the world(ww) and they did it one async (XMLHTTPRequest) request at a time. The javascript that does the dirty work is just as ugly as any hairball Perl code can get, but it allows websites rich interactivity (flickr, google maps). The key is innovation and funding, repeat and rinse.
Flash is attempting a (second?) renaissance (flex,mxml,blaseDS) to coax more website market share than just rock band and advertising company splash-page animations. Once again, innovation and funding.
So, pbase is on the losing end of the proposition at least 3 times over and probably more. No reason to throw good opportunity cost at renovating the legacy Perl serverside code, good odds there will always be wonky performance/scaling issues as well as Perl being an archaic way to stream/render HTTP/HTML. Slug's kernel of a photo sharing idea was innovative THEN, BUT currently the prima facie requirement to do a total redesign and w/o a full staff, innovation will be limited at best, more likely zilch. Started as a free no-advertisement website to share photos, pbase started charging I think in '04. $ has gone to server/bandwidth upgrades, but these are band-aids at best.
SO, is today the the day I migrate 1800 (358MB) photos to another photo site? Eh, I don't think so. 6 cents a day can stall that decision another year, so I will re-up. I don't use pbase for commercial purposes, just sharing photos with friends/relatives, as per my original use, as per pbase's original purpose.
Ok, let me qualify that, I'm going to do a spot check right now, I will re-up if I don't see any major performance issues (apart from the annoying profile page takes forever coz its building stats on the fly issue) OR missing links in any of the galleries!