I have been slowly working on a complete overhaul of my photo pages and it is finally done. Here it is. Okay, not done; there's always another improvement to make, but done enough to make it public. My goals were: first, to emphasize the photos much more by making the design as minimal as possible; and second, to switch over to a proper mysql/php back end instead of the perl/html hodgepodge that was becoming a maintenance nightmare. I'm pretty pleased on both accounts, though of course I still have a long to-do list. Your praise feedback is welcome.

This incidentally has been taking up some of the time I'd be spending finishing up my Cambodia and Vietnam photos. There are other problems there (working with raw images for one), and I have other photo tasks going (preparing for a show that's coming up soon), but having the nice new site ready is a decent impetus for finishing up the rest of the trip pictures.

I figured some of you might find this interesting. Trailfire is #15 -- behind of most of the ones I've heard of and ahead of most of the ones I haven't.

My company Trailfire officially released 1.0 of our software and service today. We've been in beta since August, but today's release is much more stable, looks far better, and does a lot more. We're presenting at DEMO this week, and there's been a fair amount of press/blog coverage already, and more coming. pretty exciting.

Our software lets you put notes on web pages, link your notes together into what we call trails, and share your trails with your friends and the world. Anyone can view your trails, but you need to get our download to create the marks. Our web site is oriented around finding interesting people and trails. The site design (functionally speaking) has been my baby for the last couple of months. I'm pretty happy with the result.

Personally, I use Trailfire for my own bookmarking a lot and sometimes create narrative trails to show to other people. For example, here are my notes about cooking and my hotlist of cars. I have to-do lists and collections of sites to go through periodically. Here's all my (public) stuff. I think a number of you would find it useful or at least interesting. Try it out and let us know what you think!

For reasons not worth going into right now, I have been spending a bit of time this week poking around MySpace, particularly looking at the people who are really really really popular there, what kinds of pages they have, etc. And let's be frank: the most popular profiles on MySpace are either bands or trashy-hot girls who are or aspire to be models or strippers, and have photos showing lots of skin. My job kinda rules. There is lots to enjoy about spending some time this way (sure beats testing and debugging), but maybe the best is reading the comments left by fans on those trashy-hot pictures. E.g., look at this profile (something like 4th most popular non-band on MySpace). Here are some of the comments on her pictures.. MySpace rules.

DAMN, you should show alittle nipple.

dame girl your so fucking fine

i like every thing on you u is the most sexyst woemen ever [BEST MYSPACE COMMENT EVER]

i think ur hot

DAMN GIRL U GOT SUM NICE ASS TITZ DAMN DAMN DAMN U FUKIN SEXXI

So maybe you've seen tag clouds, like at del.icio.us and other sites. I think they are, like, totally cool. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's basically a way of presenting information that conveys a couple things at once. Typically you see a collection of tags, and the most-used tags are shown in larger fonts, so your eyes are first drawn to the most important things, but everything else is there.

It's easier to show than explain, which takes me to the point of this post, which is to show off something I put on perkowitz.net. Check out my new photo page. The cloud shows the most-used keywords among my many photos -- click on one to see the matching photos. The larger the tag, the more photos there are (hover to see an exact count). I added a little twist to my cloud too. I have too many tags to show them all in a manageable way, but instead of just showing the most common ones, which would get boring, there's an ever-changing fringe of lesser tags (try it! reload!).

One more feature, which I've really been having fun with, is that if you click on a tag, which essentially does a keyword search, you get a cloud with the resulting search. This cloud (try clicking on "japan") shows all the tags that occur on all the photos resulting from the search, and if you click on one, it narrows your search! awesome. Computers r cool.