Building on my earlier project of selecting the homepage photo by finding the photo taken nearest the current day of the year, I created a new page called Today's Photos listing the all the photos taken on the minimum distance (currently +/- 2 days) and any others within 10 days of the current date (to include periods when many photos were made and otherwise wouldn't be selected).

It took quite a while to get right and the algorithm will most likely change in the coming weeks as the current list of 18 photos ages out. I seem to take lots of photos on Labor Day weekends so the current selection method might leave weeks with the same photo on the homepage.

People keep asking me for advise picking a digital camera. Ironically I still don't own a digital camera and have really only used five or six cameras, and of those only a few long enough to give a purchase recommendation.

Each person that asks me for advice has different needs and expectations for their camera so imposing my will by suggesting a specific camera would be stupid. Consider the following items, then find the camera that matches your needs. There are two major topics that should be evaluated: image quality and user experience. I'll start with user experience because it's more commonly overlooked.

User Experience

• Price: do you want to pay $100 or $10,000?
• Size: do you want the smallest possible camera so you can put it in your pocket or a larger camera (usually with more features and longer battery life)?
• Weight: sometimes heavier is better because it's easier to hold steady. Any motion of the camera while pressing the shutter release button will blur or "soften" the photo which is why most professional and serious amateur photographers ALWAYS use a tripod.
• Ergonomics: how comfortable is it to hold? Is the view finder easy to see through with or without glasses/sunglasses? Can you quickly find all controls (power button, shutter)?
• Menus: is it easy to accomplish common tasks such as reviewing and deleting photos?
• Battery life: some cameras chew through a set of expensive lithium batteries in an hour or two. All but the cheapest cameras seem to include a rechargeable battery and charger (like a cell phone or camcorder). Can the charger charge a battery directly or must it be plugged into the camera? If so, you can charge a backup battery while you use the camera. This is good for vacations.
• Start up time: how long does it take until you can actually take a picture after turning the camera on?
• Burst speed: how many pictures can you take per second? Most consumer level film cameras can take between one and two photos per second. Many cheaper digital cameras can only take one photo every 4-6 seconds at highest quality setting. If you need speed you'll probably have to spend a little more (see "Price").

Factors influencing image quality

• Optics: lens quality, auto focus accuracy and speed, focal length range (how far "in" and "out" you can zoom)
• You generally want minimum: "Noise" (random bits of color usually caused by taking a photo in low light)
• You generally want maximum: Image sharpness, Color Accuracy, Resolution (# of megapixels). Obviously the more megapixels the better but don't get hung up on this number. If you aren't planning to make poster-sized prints most reasonably priced cameras will have adequate resolution.

I'd just like to reiterate there is much more to selecting a digital camera than finding the highest possible resolution. Consumers tend to find one feature of a product and fixate on it. PC buyers seem interested in nothing but the CPU clock speed (2 GHz), TV buyers on screen size (65"), and digital camera buyers on megapixels. Resolution is important only if all the other factors affecting the image quality are present in sufficient measure.

I rarely recommend a particular camera because I don't know enough about any particular model to be comfortable telling someone to spend hundreds of dollars. This is especially true because digital camera models change every six months. However, I am partial to Canon and Olympus as manufacturers. I own a Canon EOS Elan II (a film camera), a couple of lenses, and a SpeedLight 380EX flash. I prefer digital cameras made by companies that first made film cameras because their optical quality is better and user experience is more refined.

Let me know if you have questions about specific cameras. Happy shooting!

I've been thinking about the differences between a true web content management system and a web log. I built this web log system so I could completely integrate the navigation of my regular, non-blog, content. Moveable Type didn't seem capable of that coexistence of content types (at least when using .Net as a non-blog content solution).

This site currently consists of a SQL Server database-backed blog system, static content (ASPX Web Forms), and some ASP.Net application content such as the Photo Database, Wish List, and DVD Collection.

My options are to continue on this path of mixed publishing techniques, create a new database-backed application to manage the non-blog content or modify the current application to accommodate both types of content.

So what’s the difference between my blog content and my regular content? Blogs seem to have an implicit expiration date. Once they’re sufficiently aged off of the main page they get fewer hits and are forgotten. Many blogging “experts” suggest linking to your older content from new postings but I find that web logs are most appropriate for temporal content. If I wrote random bits about TiVo all over my web log it would be difficult to read it all, even if I added categories to the Web Log entries or had full text searching available. Instead I have a page about TiVo available in the Materialism section of this site and anytime I think of something new I want to say about TiVo, I put it on that page. Google drives several people a day to the TiVo page (mostly looking for networking help, Home Media Option hacks, and video extraction).

How does anyone know I’ve posted changes to the page? Googlebot seems to crawl this site every couple weeks so some traffic will come from the new content but what about people who visited before the change and would be interested in an update notification? A site wide RSS feed would be a perfect way to publish a notification of changes. Even better would be to let users customize their own feed by selecting categories of content, blog entries, photos, and specific pages they want included in the feed. The system should let users save a profile on this web server to let them get the same feed from multiple computers or pass all required information in the feed URL so the ultra paranoid types can rest assured that I won’t sell their non-identifiable information to spammers.

Another feature made popular by blogs is user comments, a feature also available in the ArsDigita Community Management System—which preceded the blogging movement by a couple years—and is just as valid on my content as it is on blog entries.

The homepage photo is now automatically selected by finding the photo in the archive nearest the current day of the year. Currently the homepage photo is from my trip to Washington DC, which was two years and four days ago. Yesterday the photo will have been the Lincoln Memorial (the previous day of the trip).

I've been manually picking the homepage photo every few months (whenever I get tired of seeing the old one) and have usually tried to find something appropriate for the time of year. The concept of using photos as a way to look back in time, both in nature and in my own life, has always been compelling to me and hopefully this will introduce more photos to visitors of this site.