Marc Benton dot Com

Marc-a-Day

I’ve realized my life will not support a 365 photography project. The three times I’ve attempted it have resulted in failure after about 30 days or so. Maybe someday my life will normalize and become a little more structured but until that day comes I can POST a photo a day. Hence my new photoblog, Marc-a-Day.

This photoblog uses the DuoTone theme for Wordpress that is the evolution of the popular Monotone theme.  The background color dynamically changes for each post to present the best accent for the photo.  I’m pretty happy with this one, so far it’s been easy to customize and SEO friendly.

Stop by and let me know what you think.

My slow but sure comeback

My absence from the online community I hold dear is slowly coming to an end.  My sometimes self induced and mostly work induced hiatus has allowed many of my projects and plans to suffer.  I am slowly but surely reversing that trend.

I’ve spent the past two weeks taking inventory of my online assets, something I would suggest everyone do at least once a year.  Just like spring cleaning the house, your online space can get cluttered.  This was a long and sometimes confusing process due to the number of sites, services and assets I involve myself with.  In fact it is still on going.  The goal is to streamline my online presence into a circular path where each node feeds the next.  My various interests should not be separate entities but a series of pieces that flow into each other to create a complete picture of who I am, what I’m looking for, and what I can provide for you.

The initial plan is to rebrand and redesign this site, create a professional photography services site, publish a social media resume page (more on that in a future post), and a new daily photoblog.   These are assets that I will own the domain and be 100% responsible for the content and functionality.  Then there are other sites I utilize like Facebook, LinkedIn, SmugMug and Twitter where I have limited control over my content and very little in the functionality side.  Last year I did not do much to integrate my sites and these services other than reposting blog articles.  To be truly successful online you must find the recipe that uses all of these ingredients in healthy balanced portions.  I’m pulling my chair up to the buffet and loading my plate with what I believe will sustain me best.

Here’s my plans for the upcoming months:

• I’m working with a talented graphics artist now to create new logos.  My plan is to have similar branding across all of my work whenever I can.
• Once the logos are complete I will start work on redesigning this site, removing the User 40.0 moniker and creating new content.   I expect this to be completed and launched in late February.
• Tonight I’ve launched a new photoblog named Marc-a-Day.  If you can’t get enough of me here then go check it out and get some of me everyday.  This is not me taking a photo a day, I’ve failed too many times at that, but I will post a new, hopefully interesting, image a day.
• Two more sites will soon to follow, a new photography service offering along with an expanded social resume site.  I currently have a domain at marcbentonresume.com with a small social profile but I plan to expand this to include more of my professional background and also include a video or two on it.
• Photoblogging DC was both a success and failure.  Success as I was able to talk a number of truly talented photographers to contribute and our daily visits were steadily growing.  The failure was in the way the site was designed.  It was dependent on one person to format and publish the posts, something that eventually I was unable to keep up with.  I hope by the Spring to bring this site back with a better design where our contributors will have more functionality in the system.
• Sherri and I plan to organize more photowalks through this site and the Photowalk DC Facebook group.  Look for a late-February event announced soon.

We’ve recently kicked off a new decade.  Its time to let go of the baggage of the past and start anew.  I hope we all enjoy the trip together.

10 Year Milestone

Fellow photoblogger and online friend Jason D Moore recently achieved two milestones on his site.  First was his 1000th post followed a few weeks later with the celebration of his 7th anniversary of his site.

After seeing Jason’s Facebook status on his 7th year, it got me thinking about my time online.  Thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine I pulled up my first site that used my old URL mbenton.com (which now redirects here).  It appears I just passed my 10th anniversary online.

My first entry was dated 9/6/1999:

Wecome to my website. Please be patient while I find the time to work on it. In the next few months I expect to build a site that hopefully will become a usable resource for Software Engineers. Topics I am most interested in are XML, Java, JavaScript, HTML, UML, and CMM procedures.
Please check back soon.
marc…

Here’s a screenshot of the original site:

In 1999 Wordpress, Movable Type and other blogging and CMS solutions were nonexistent.  This site was lovingly built by hand with my trusty windows VI emulator (Lemmy).  Lots of tables, no CSS.  Surprisingly though I had little cross browser issues.

The purpose of my original site was quite honestly to grab some acreage on the internet and stake my name out there.  Looking back now I realize I did not have a focus on what I wanted to accomplish.  Due to this my updates were slow.  I did have some good resources such as software language guides on the site, some of which I still use at times today such as the color index page.  Overall though it was not a resource that would keep people coming back.

One direct benefit of hosting and building my own site was an increase of my own knowledge that could be brought to bear in my professional life.  At the time I was a government contractor supporting the USMC.  DoD code then was still mostly client/server using C, C++ and some Java. Web technology was the new frontier.  I’m happy to say my teams helped blaze the trail by implementing XML and HTML in much of our software baselines and helped to set the stage for improved data sharing between USMC and service intelligence systems.  Much of this success was due to our own personal uses of these technologies in our private lives.

Just over two years ago I relaunched with Movable Type and a new focus on social media.  Also about that time my wife and I rediscovered photography and my postings about this subject gradually increased.  Eventually I switched to Wordpress and rebranded as a photoblog.  Today I feel better about my online presence than I ever have before.  I still have times of slow updates due to work schedule but I am becoming more consistent.  Its all about focus and finding one that reflects your passion.  Digital photography is mine.

I congratulate Jason on his seven years.  He’s shown focus and consistency for quite some time.  While I may say I’ve been online for 10 years, when I compare my efforts against Jason’s or some of my other favorite photobloggers its more like 2 years.  Here’s hoping 10 years from now we’re all still here with fresh and relevant content with our new holographic blog posts (possibly a new Wordpress plugin???).

PhotoBlogging DC

While surfing the net for Wordpress photoblog themes to include in my presentation on photoblogging at WordCamp I came across Autofocus by Allan Cole.  This theme really stood out to me as the epitome of a photoblog with it’s minimalistic approach. The photo is really the subject of the post, no sidebars or widgets to draw your eye away from the image.  I started to think of a way to utilize this theme in a new project.  Yes thats a little backwards for most projects, normally the project is defined and then a theme identified.  This was a unique case though.

Last month I launched PhotoBlogging DC.  Just like the theme, my purpose was minimalistic:  Bring together and spotlight photos from some of the Washington DC and surrounding area’s talented photographers.

To begin I sent out invitations to contribute to about 15 of my photography friends.  Word spread and as of today we are up to 32 contributors.  Our photographers are of all experience levels, amateur to professional, but they all have one thing in common…they all have a love of photography.  So far I have not turned any prospective contributor away and all but one of the original 15 invites were accepted (you know who you are ).

I didn’t set any hard rules for photo submissions other than they needed to be taken within the DC and surrounding area.  I’ve defined that area as North to the border of Baltimore, West to the Shenandoah Mountains, South to Fredricksburg, and all points East.  This gives us a broad range of subjects from the monuments on the mall to horses in Loudon county.

Each day a new photo is posted so be sure and visit the site and subscribe to our RSS feed.  We also released new badges today so consider adding one to your site.  If you would like to become a PBDC contributor then contact me or leave a comment here with a link to a sample of your photos.

Photoblogging Video from WordCamp Mid-Atlantic

Special thanks to Courtney Engle for posting a portion of my talk about Photoblogging at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic on Vimeo.

Marc Benton speaks at WordCampMidAtl from Courtney Engle on Vimeo.