That missing blog functionality

jemostrom · August 21, 2015

WARNING: this is going to be a long, probably incoherent, ramble of why I'm playing with the idea of switching from Smugmug to some other platform

I've been thinking about why I'm not using my smugmug site as much as I want, I really want to use Smugmug but I'm not doing it to the degree I want. I better give you some background so you better understand my thoughts.

I'm a hobbyist (I think my all time total "income" from selling photos is $35), I'm taking photos just because I enjoy it.
I haven't got any real "audience" for my photos, my fan club consists of 1 person: my mother . Usually there are very few views (if any) but once in a while I get more views (I think that my personal record is about 35000 views in 24 hours). So my site is basically a "ego site" with very few visitors.
While I like looking at photos I like reading/looking at photo stories even better.
I really like the way Smugmug handle photos, how it can be customized, the support, the lightroom plugin, etc.

So I should be happy and use smugmug without any complaints ... but as I've wrote earlier I'm playing with idea of switching to some other platform. Why? I'm missing the words!!

I'm not very good at it but I really enjoy writing a story and illustrating it with my photos, or making short blog posts with one or a couple of photos. Perhaps a quick blog entry from my phone while travelling. Nothing fancy, but I enjoy doing this and my fan(s) say she enjoys reading them

.

But Smugmug has no blog tool, this makes it difficult/cumbersome to create/maintain some kind of blog on the site. So I did the the same thing that so many of you have done, I tried combining Smugmug with some blogging tool but I've never managed to make anything that looked and worked like one single site.

So for the last couple of weeks I've been playing with WordPress & NextGen Gallery. It sure makes it easier to write stories, creating blog posts (what a surprise :wink), creating content from my phone, etc. And while NGG is better than plain WP for handling photos it's nothing close to Smugmug. But the combination makes it easier working with blog posts/text and the resulting site is one site, not two that works together (kind of).

So, I really want to stay with Smugmug because of how it handle the photos but I still want to have the option to work with blog posts/stories/text in an easy way.

I suspect that I'm not the only one with this problem, how do you handle this problem? Is there someone who can show me some examples?

I've looked at

and they look good but it also seem to be a lot of work for each post (assume that I create anything between 1 post/week to 4-5 short posts/day).

denisegoldberg · August 21, 2015

My photos are on my smug site and I blog using blogger. I have matched the header of my blog to my smugmug site, and when I place photos in my blog I do it using the share... add a link... embeddable links so clicking on the photo takes the viewer to the photo (and gallery) on my smugmug site.

I like using a blogging product that focuses on text; I can't imagine using a page in smug as a blogging platform. And I like that my blog is generating inbound links to my photo galleries.

Links to my site and blog are in my signature below.

--- Denise

jemostrom · August 21, 2015

Yes, I've tried something similar some time ago using wordpress/tumblr (not at the same time though

) but I never managed to create anything I really liked - the difference between the sites were too large for my taste. Perhaps, it's time to try again.

Perhaps Smugmug should not build a blogging tool but instead offer a feature that created a theme that matched the smugmug site which than can be used on some common blogging platform. That would totally work for me.

Allen · August 21, 2015

One of the keys to a blog is a menu of the posts. I like Blogger because of the Blog Archive. Nothing's worse then
having to scroll down through 100's of posts looking for a date or subject of interest. The Blog Archive/menu allows
me to expand each year and find what I'm looking for.

Hikin' Mike · August 21, 2015

jemostrom wrote: »

Yes, I've tried something similar some time ago using wordpress/tumblr (not at the same time though ) but I never managed to create anything I really liked - the difference between the sites were too large for my taste. Perhaps, it's time to try again.

Perhaps Smugmug should not build a blogging tool but instead offer a feature that created a theme that matched the smugmug site which than can be used on some common blogging platform. That would totally work for me.

I'm using WordPress to run my blog and my main site.

Allen wrote: »

One of the keys to a blog is a menu of the posts. I like Blogger because of the Blog Archive. Nothing's worse then
having to scroll down through 100's of posts looking for a date or subject of interest. The Blog Archive/menu allows
me to expand each year and find what I'm looking for.

WordPress has that option too.

denisegoldberg · August 21, 2015

jemostrom wrote: »

So, I really want to stay with Smugmug because of how it handle the photos but I still want to have the option to work with blog posts/stories/text in an easy way.

I think Allen, Hikin' Mike, and I all agree that it makes sense to use a blogging tool for your blog. The ability to have an archive of posts and the ability to tag posts is important, as is the ability to easily write text without jumping through formatting hoops.

Clearly Mike likes Wordpress and Allen & I are happy with Blogger - both tools support what we want to publish.

--- Denise

Hikin' Mike · August 21, 2015

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I think Allen, Hikin' Mike, and I all agree that it makes sense to use a blogging tool for your blog. The ability to have an archive of posts and the ability to tag posts is important, as is the ability to easily write text without jumping through formatting hoops.

Clearly Mike likes Wordpress and Allen & I are happy with Blogger - both tools support what we want to publish.

--- Denise

Yep, you need the right tool(s) for the job. SM is great for displaying photos, but not so much for blogging.

jemostrom · August 22, 2015

Yes, easy writing and good navigation is a key for a blog (the archive feature is available in any of the blogging platforms I've played with, for example: WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Pelican, Drupal, Jekyll).

My main problem has been in the resulting "Look & feel", the result for me have been not one "integrated" site but two different sites that are cross-linked - if you understand what I mean. There are difference between how the blog site looks and how the smugmug site looks, there are differences in how the navigation works, etc.

Note that I'm not talking about small things like different domain names (blog.example.com and example.com) that isn't a problem for me. And neither is the use of iframes very attractive.

To be honest, the more I think about it, the more I think I that smugmug shouldn't create a blogging tool - too much work, too much that could go wrong. I'm starting to think that an easier solution would be to create a theme that corresponds to each basic layout in Smugmug and then the ability to export a CSS of your current design which then can be used to customize the look of the theme would go a long way to solve the problem (at least mine). Perhaps, a plugin that would allow the use the dynamic album/folder hierarchy on the blogging side (to be used in for example menus).

To me, sitting here morning robe and playing developer, this sounds like a smaller tasks than writing a complete blogging solution - but I realize that there are limitations to what can be done and that there are complexities that I haven't thought of. So I might be completely wrong.

As I wrote earlier, the WP + NGG solution makes it quite easy to work with text and images, but the text part is much stronger than the image part - WordPress have never been good in the media part. Smugmug on the other hand is excellent for photos but not that good when it comes to text.

After having spent some time playing with the WP/NGG combination I should see if I can make a reasonable Smugmug/WP combination before deciding what to do.

agallia · August 23, 2015

No Easy Solution
No easy solution to combining blog and photo galleries in a single tool. And not sure I would want to put all my eggs in one basket either. Wordpress, hosted through GoDaddy, has become my preferred blog tool and there are many smartphone/tablet apps that make posting very easy. Smugmug (with Lightroom CC), along with the great iPhone Smugmug app, has become my preferred photo gallery and processing tool. Sure the ability to have exactly the same theme and CSS on both sites would be great. But I am not stressing over that issue as easily working with photo and text content is much more important to me...and I am not sure those who look at my photos or blog really care.

Smugmug, perhaps adding several additional "Journal" styles, with photos and text in different relationships (ie. Smaller photo left, text right) would go a long way to making it look more blog like.

Kudos to Smugmug for the new SM. It was a complicated upgrade for sure and trying to make ALL users happy must be an awesome task. Patience, folks.

Allen · August 23, 2015

Creating "Journal" styles for blogs would be nice but I see the main issue with blogs on Smug is a menu is missing
like the blog archive in Blogger. Nothings worst then scrolling through many posts looking for a subject or date.

On Blogger you can jump to any year or month or date. See my blog link in my siggy. The top post if an info page
that I keep floating to the top. It has not looked like my Smug site but I just recently added a background and some
colors to make it somewhat similar.

agallia · August 23, 2015

Allen wrote: »

Creating "Journal" styles for blogs would be nice but I see the main issue with blogs on Smug is a menu is missing
like the blog archive in Blogger. Nothings worst then scrolling through many posts looking for a subject or date.

On Blogger you can jump to any year or month or date. See my blog link in my siggy. The top post if an info page
that I keep floating to the top. It has not looked like my Smug site but I just recently added a background and some
colors to make it somewhat similar.

Good point. Same blog archive data available on Wordpress too.

That missing blog functionality

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