1b) Delivering photos over https due to SEO noise that Google is creating over pages/images on a secure connection.
I'm not quite sure I understand this aspect of it.
I do get why Smugmug itself, e.g. in gallery displays, are switching to HTTPs and the nickname domain.
And for customers who just go with the flow, and use Smugmug's generated links, you get the nickname domain.
But why are you doing the redirects? It should not be for SEO/Google benefit, since a custom domain image link coming into Smugmug is already very likely coming from a http page (otherwise it's mixed content and has even bigger issues).
Is it that the custom domain links to images are served by the old CDN? Or not by any CDN at all?
Can they not be served from the CDN as non-https, plain old http, and from the custom domain?
I do get the whole desire to move toward HTTPS. But if someone has a page without HTTPS now, and links in a HTTP link to an image explicitly -- what benefit is the user getting from the redirect? Apologies if you just explained that, but this aspect did not sink in, unless it is that the new CDN just cannot serve those (as http)?
Well, looking at my SM site today, I seem to have lost the possibility to link photos any other way than a link to the photo page in a gallery. No direct link with size option, nothing. So I guess I've missed some further changes in this regard after all? Or is that just some kind of problem that's worked on?
@leftquark said:
I floated the idea that it could be done, except that you'd lose the ability to have your images delivered via https and the images wouldn't be delivered through the CDN, which could slow down image loading. Since many of you preferred to have your images delivered via https, we left it as is.
Oh. The way you phrased it it seemed as if it's going to happen, just maybe in like a month or two. So it's kinda unfortunate to now learn of the fact that it's actually been completely scrapped again in the meantime.
With respect to liking, as I've said in the past, it's something that I would like to see returned, however it has to be done in a way that makes it useful. There's over 3,000 feature requests for SmugMug, plus our own thoughts on how to improve your workflows, and we're a Small Business that has to make tough decisions about what we work on. We'll get to it but I want to be clear that I'm not making any promises of it being in any specific timeframe.
I can understand you're a small team and there's a lot to be done. But given the fact that I can't recall a single feature introduced during all that time I'd actually find useful to me, unlike an option for the people viewing the images to show they liked that particular photo - which people ask me about (only for me to tell them that it can't be done) and which could even be useful to me in multiple ways - I hope you as well can understand that I'm not overly enthusiastic about which features seem to have priority and which do not. It doesn't feel all that great to be apparently completely out of your target group on something that seems like a very basic functionality for a photo gallery site (goes for the above as well)
Also, I find certain irony in the fact that there's apparently now a possibility to react to posts here on this forum, yet no such luck when it comes to the actual photos.
@Case1 said:
Well, looking at my SM site today, I seem to have lost the possibility to link photos any other way than a link to the photo page in a gallery. No direct link with size option, nothing. So I guess I've missed some further changes in this regard after all? Or is that just some kind of problem that's worked on?
Check if you have been logged out. When that happens it reverts to one size. I find it auto-logs me out on a fairly random basis. I just confirmed mine shows all sizes still (with the nickname domain of course).
1b) Delivering photos over https due to SEO noise that Google is creating over pages/images on a secure connection.
I'm not quite sure I understand this aspect of it.
Can they not be served from the CDN as non-https, plain old http, and from the custom domain?
Correct. The new CDN can't deliver anything from a custom domain. We're trying to deliver as little as possible from the old CDN (reliability, speed, being the main drivers) and are down to just the HTML being delivered from it. We could go back to custom domain image URL's but it would have to skip the CDN directly, and still wouldn't be delivered over https. This way we at least deliver the images via the more reliable, faster CDN.
1b) Delivering photos over https due to SEO noise that Google is creating over pages/images on a secure connection.
I'm not quite sure I understand this aspect of it.
Can they not be served from the CDN as non-https, plain old http, and from the custom domain?
Correct. The new CDN can't deliver anything from a custom domain. We're trying to deliver as little as possible from the old CDN (reliability, speed, being the main drivers) and are down to just the HTML being delivered from it. We could go back to custom domain image URL's but it would have to skip the CDN directly, and still wouldn't be delivered over https. This way we at least deliver the images via the more reliable, faster CDN.
OK, I think I understand. I guess one could say "let the user decide to use the old CDN" but in the long run that's likely quite a support mess.
But... even http pages (not images) cannot be delivered on the new CDN from custom domains? That seems.... well, awful. Especially after all this time. I'd think that Smugmug being so huge could just push Amazon around and get things done really quickly.
@leftquark said:
I floated the idea that it could be done, except that you'd lose the ability to have your images delivered via https and the images wouldn't be delivered through the CDN, which could slow down image loading. Since many of you preferred to have your images delivered via https, we left it as is.
Oh. The way you phrased it it seemed as if it's going to happen, just maybe in like a month or two. So it's kinda unfortunate to now learn of the fact that it's actually been completely scrapped again in the meantime.
We still can -- it's not off the table. But when I posted, a number of people responded both here in dgrin and via the Help Desk that they'd rather have faster, more reliable image delivery over https (especially once people learned it didn't negatively impact their SEO).
@Case1 said:
an option for the people viewing the images to show they liked that particular photo - which people ask me about (only for me to tell them that it can't be done)
As a workaround for now, you can let them know they can leave a comment, which also includes a star rating, to mark that they like a particular photo.
27% of all websites on the Internet use WordPress.
You are never going to create as rich a blogging platform as WordPress. Hell, it's open source, so you'd be better off just using it as your platform rather than trying to create something from scratch. There is a community of millions of developers, and tens of thousands of plugins which are available.
As far as Smugmug customers wanting to blog in Smugmug, I was never asked, so I'm not sure where you got the data.
I would think if you want to grow the company, targeting 27% of the internet would be a great place to start and would require less work than creating an entire blogging platform from scratch to meet the needs of current customers who could just as easily use whatever WordPress solution you came up with.
2014 Travel Photographer of the Year, Society of American Travel Writers
2013 & 2015 Travel Photographer of the Year, North American Travel Journalists Association
@Ferguson said:
But... even http pages (not images) cannot be delivered on the new CDN from custom domains? That seems.... well, awful. Especially after all this time. I'd think that Smugmug being so huge could just push Amazon around and get things done really quickly.
Correct -- the new CDN just can't handle the # of custom domains we need it to support. Amazon's working as hard / fast as they can, and we're exploring some alternate options to work around things (including having our Chief Geek on it) but unfortunately some things just take time
You are never going to create as rich a blogging platform as WordPress. Hell, it's open source, so you'd be better off just using it as your platform rather than trying to create something from scratch. There is a community of millions of developers, and tens of thousands of plugins which are available.
As far as Smugmug customers wanting to blog in Smugmug, I was never asked, so I'm not sure where you got the data.
I would think if you want to grow the company, targeting 27% of the internet would be a great place to start and would require less work than creating an entire blogging platform from scratch to meet the needs of current customers who could just as easily use whatever WordPress solution you came up with.
Heheh ... you sound like me before I dove into our customer data and feedback requests. I said the exact same thing: "why would we try to build a blogging tool when there's already a great one out there." But the more I talk to our customers (and I talk to a lot of them), the more they say they don't want to use WordPress. WordPress is meant for delivering text, with images supplementing them. SmugMug customers want the photos to shine, with text supplementing them, so there's room for us to do a better job for all of you.
But lets keep the topic here relevant to the Custom Domain URL topic. We can pull the blog item to a separate thread if you'd like to keep discussing.
When serving up a web page, the image is just text <IMG>.
What would be required for a WordPress plugin it seems would be really easy. Make sure images used from Smugmug are responsive (and the code for this has already been written), and make it easy to select images from our galleries when writing a post. That would be most of it.
Also, if you aren't going to allow custom domains, then I'd at least like to eliminate all the redirects. A tool which would go and replace all my old image URL's with new, non-redirected URL's, would be handy. I'm guessing eliminating redirects would also help Smugmug.
2014 Travel Photographer of the Year, Society of American Travel Writers
2013 & 2015 Travel Photographer of the Year, North American Travel Journalists Association
I have felt SmugMug has been a good platform. I was patient and understanding where my photos took an eternity to load. I believed the SmugMug staff was dilligently working on a fix. Google says my average page load time was 13 seconds. Yikes, a definite buzz kill. Now a new cdn is in place and I have noticed a speed increase, but a drop in my SEO ranking. I have given some time and consideration to the fact that images are sourced from smugmug and not my custom domain. I have photos that receive thousands of views a month and I have got to believe this cripples my seo when photos are sourced from smugmug and not my custom domain. Now that I understand that SmugMug is committed to quality digital photos over a compromise in quality but coming from my custom domain, I just have to begin looking at wordpress. Great quality is not more important to me that getting found in search results. If I am not found, what is the point of the best quality. I know there is so much voodoo and science mixed with seo, but everyone agrees, original content is king. And original photos from my custom domain are more valuable to me that original photos from Smugmug. A lot more valuable. All the many efforts I make with seo are crippled when the biggest source of Google juice doesn't get credited to my domain. I just can't wait much longer.
Comments
I'm not quite sure I understand this aspect of it.
I do get why Smugmug itself, e.g. in gallery displays, are switching to HTTPs and the nickname domain.
And for customers who just go with the flow, and use Smugmug's generated links, you get the nickname domain.
But why are you doing the redirects? It should not be for SEO/Google benefit, since a custom domain image link coming into Smugmug is already very likely coming from a http page (otherwise it's mixed content and has even bigger issues).
Is it that the custom domain links to images are served by the old CDN? Or not by any CDN at all?
Can they not be served from the CDN as non-https, plain old http, and from the custom domain?
I do get the whole desire to move toward HTTPS. But if someone has a page without HTTPS now, and links in a HTTP link to an image explicitly -- what benefit is the user getting from the redirect? Apologies if you just explained that, but this aspect did not sink in, unless it is that the new CDN just cannot serve those (as http)?
Well, looking at my SM site today, I seem to have lost the possibility to link photos any other way than a link to the photo page in a gallery. No direct link with size option, nothing. So I guess I've missed some further changes in this regard after all? Or is that just some kind of problem that's worked on?
Oh. The way you phrased it it seemed as if it's going to happen, just maybe in like a month or two. So it's kinda unfortunate to now learn of the fact that it's actually been completely scrapped again in the meantime.
I can understand you're a small team and there's a lot to be done. But given the fact that I can't recall a single feature introduced during all that time I'd actually find useful to me, unlike an option for the people viewing the images to show they liked that particular photo - which people ask me about (only for me to tell them that it can't be done) and which could even be useful to me in multiple ways - I hope you as well can understand that I'm not overly enthusiastic about which features seem to have priority and which do not. It doesn't feel all that great to be apparently completely out of your target group on something that seems like a very basic functionality for a photo gallery site
(goes for the above as well)
Also, I find certain irony in the fact that there's apparently now a possibility to react to posts here on this forum, yet no such luck when it comes to the actual photos.
Check if you have been logged out. When that happens it reverts to one size. I find it auto-logs me out on a fairly random basis. I just confirmed mine shows all sizes still (with the nickname domain of course).
Correct. The new CDN can't deliver anything from a custom domain. We're trying to deliver as little as possible from the old CDN (reliability, speed, being the main drivers) and are down to just the HTML being delivered from it. We could go back to custom domain image URL's but it would have to skip the CDN directly, and still wouldn't be delivered over https. This way we at least deliver the images via the more reliable, faster CDN.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
OK, I think I understand. I guess one could say "let the user decide to use the old CDN" but in the long run that's likely quite a support mess.
But... even http pages (not images) cannot be delivered on the new CDN from custom domains? That seems.... well, awful. Especially after all this time. I'd think that Smugmug being so huge could just push Amazon around and get things done really quickly.
We still can -- it's not off the table. But when I posted, a number of people responded both here in dgrin and via the Help Desk that they'd rather have faster, more reliable image delivery over https (especially once people learned it didn't negatively impact their SEO).
As a workaround for now, you can let them know they can leave a comment, which also includes a star rating, to mark that they like a particular photo.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
27% of all websites on the Internet use WordPress.
You are never going to create as rich a blogging platform as WordPress. Hell, it's open source, so you'd be better off just using it as your platform rather than trying to create something from scratch. There is a community of millions of developers, and tens of thousands of plugins which are available.
As far as Smugmug customers wanting to blog in Smugmug, I was never asked, so I'm not sure where you got the data.
I would think if you want to grow the company, targeting 27% of the internet would be a great place to start and would require less work than creating an entire blogging platform from scratch to meet the needs of current customers who could just as easily use whatever WordPress solution you came up with.
2013 & 2015 Travel Photographer of the Year, North American Travel Journalists Association
Facebook | Travel Blog | Travel Photography | Instagram | Google+
Correct -- the new CDN just can't handle the # of custom domains we need it to support. Amazon's working as hard / fast as they can, and we're exploring some alternate options to work around things (including having our Chief Geek on it) but unfortunately some things just take time
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Heheh ... you sound like me before I dove into our customer data and feedback requests. I said the exact same thing: "why would we try to build a blogging tool when there's already a great one out there." But the more I talk to our customers (and I talk to a lot of them), the more they say they don't want to use WordPress. WordPress is meant for delivering text, with images supplementing them. SmugMug customers want the photos to shine, with text supplementing them, so there's room for us to do a better job for all of you.
But lets keep the topic here relevant to the Custom Domain URL topic. We can pull the blog item to a separate thread if you'd like to keep discussing.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
When serving up a web page, the image is just text
<IMG>.What would be required for a WordPress plugin it seems would be really easy. Make sure images used from Smugmug are responsive (and the code for this has already been written), and make it easy to select images from our galleries when writing a post. That would be most of it.
Also, if you aren't going to allow custom domains, then I'd at least like to eliminate all the redirects. A tool which would go and replace all my old image URL's with new, non-redirected URL's, would be handy. I'm guessing eliminating redirects would also help Smugmug.
2013 & 2015 Travel Photographer of the Year, North American Travel Journalists Association
Facebook | Travel Blog | Travel Photography | Instagram | Google+
I have felt SmugMug has been a good platform. I was patient and understanding where my photos took an eternity to load. I believed the SmugMug staff was dilligently working on a fix. Google says my average page load time was 13 seconds. Yikes, a definite buzz kill. Now a new cdn is in place and I have noticed a speed increase, but a drop in my SEO ranking. I have given some time and consideration to the fact that images are sourced from smugmug and not my custom domain. I have photos that receive thousands of views a month and I have got to believe this cripples my seo when photos are sourced from smugmug and not my custom domain. Now that I understand that SmugMug is committed to quality digital photos over a compromise in quality but coming from my custom domain, I just have to begin looking at wordpress. Great quality is not more important to me that getting found in search results. If I am not found, what is the point of the best quality. I know there is so much voodoo and science mixed with seo, but everyone agrees, original content is king. And original photos from my custom domain are more valuable to me that original photos from Smugmug. A lot more valuable. All the many efforts I make with seo are crippled when the biggest source of Google juice doesn't get credited to my domain. I just can't wait much longer.