Aspherical Boundaries

Let me start by saying that I never learnt much about how websites work. I know some basic HTML and know about CSS. I have some idea about what Javascript and PHP do, but never touched any of it.

Despite this, I have built a small number of sites over the past 7-8 years, starting with a little two-pager for CS class back in high school. I started in notepad, and moved onto DreamWeaver, but still building static pages, from scratch. Every time, I would have two things on my mind:

• I need to learn to do this properly;
• There’s got to be an easier way…

Needless to say, I never learnt anything about CSS or HTML. More importantly I guess, I know nothing about good web design.

Why do I blabber on about my boring experiences of making websites? I suspect it is similar to many people’s site building experiences. Looking around the web, It would appear that the vast majority of sites are static sites hacked together in an afternoon. Most of these are once-off sites, and are no longer updated. However, there are those too that are continuously updated into gigantic sites. Of the photography sites I visit often, numerous ones fall within this category: Ken Rockwell, Naturfotograf, ByThom and the monstrous Photography in Malaysia.

These hacked together sites are generally usable, though most have poor design. More importantly, they require immense dedication to maintain for the often one-man teams that runs them.

When I finally gave in to the blog, and started playing around with WordPress, I realised that there is very few situations when someone actually needs to build a site from scratch anymore. Just as most developers don’t write their own linked list class, most people making a website no longer need to be touching HTML.

Looking at the Wikipedia page on current content management systems, I suspect there are very few needs not covered by an existing solution. In fact, the last statement remains true even if you stay within the standard Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP hosting environment.

Most of these take a few hours to set up, at most and allows the webmaster to present content in a much more professional manner than the afternoon hack job.

Why do we still see so many badly, but painstakingly put together sites?

Not surprisingly, Nikon revealed the D3x on 1 December 2008, ending the Coolpix P6000’s short reign as Nikon with highest pixel count. See here for the news on DPReview.

The specs are a bit disappointing, since the only change compared to the D3 is the 24MP sensor, trading a doubling in pixels for lower ISO range (100-1600 as compared to 200-6400) and shooting speed (5fps (even lower for 14-bit) for 8fps). The big shock, however, is the Canon 1Ds class price tag of 8000USD.

Lots of internet people are very… angry over this, stating that the newer model is not worth 3000USD over the D3. I think I would agree.

An interesting thing to note here is that this is a demand side reaction. Less people will buy this flagship model than if it was pegged at 5000USD. Let’s look at the supply side. Assume the marginal cost of producing the D3x is the same as the D3 (not unreasonable, since Sony sells the A900 with a very similar sensor for 3000USD), and that each model costs Nikon, say 3500USD to manufacture. That means at 5000USD, Nikon will make a marginal profit of 1500USD per unit. However, at 8000USD, that profit goes up to 4500USD. This means that Nikon has to shift only a third as many units as it would have had to other wise to make the same profit. (P.S. Note I’m dealing with marginal prices, not unit prices. For those who are unfamiliar, marginal prices don’t include fixed costs, such as R&D).

I suspect no matter how much the D3x was priced at, news agencies would not have been buying them in the thousands, simply due to the D3 being a more suitable price. So Nikon couldn’t have been expecting to shift many units to start with. If that is true, the pricing decision might have been a way to keep profits high in the face of low expected demands.

I’m also assuming here that despite being vocal, the internet people don’t actually buy that much equipment. 10% of the market, maybe?

Oh, as a footnote, I’ve finally upgraded Wordpress to 2.6.5. Yah. Also installed NextGEN Gallery.

It actually went up a few days ago, but I’ve only added a few more photos now. Here’s the link. I still need to update the home page, but that will happen.

I went with Coppermine for the simple reason that Bluehost makes it really easy to install. Even after using it briefly, I don’t think it’s the greatest thing ever, but it’s not that important, so I’m not going to waste too much time on it.

Finally, I’ve succumbed to writing a personal blog. It was partially based on my decision that it’s about time I had my own website with its own domain name. I’ve been parking www.tian.co.za for the past 9 month or so. It’s time to put it to use.

I’ve actually own another website elsewhere, but that was a once off joke (check it out here if you must: Tribute to Highlander Bob). The host I used was a South African company Hetzner. While the service was acceptable, the pricing was simply not competitive with the US hosting companies. After not much research, I settled 0n BlueHost. No real reason really. It was the first link off the WordPress site.

See how boring this is getting already?

I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing with this site, but there will probably be a photo gallery at some stage for a few photos I take. In addition, it will be a nice change to have a email address that doesn’t contain the letter “Z”.

Anyhow, I think there will also be a few fixed pages of tech stuff. I do an excessive amount of research before I buy anything technical. I guess I might as well as write up summaries just so that I can have it sorted out in my own mind. If anyone else finds it useful, great.