XtremeCamera

The Daily Snapshot has a long history of discussion, planning, and especially coding. There is much more to this page than what you see. A single person at XtremeCamera did the entire coding… A man I like to consider as about the best genius working on the web… His name is Sean Foushee, he lives in Texas, and he has more talent in one of his burps than I do in my entire body. He is, without question, the man responsible for all the cool features you see here. Let’s have a round of applause for Sean ladies and gentleman…

So, anyway, here’s some history about the Daily Snapshot you might find interesting.

When XtremeCamera went live with our release candidate 1 beta, back in June of last year, we had already been through a complete trashing of the old, original code, which permeated this site several months earlier. After a vast investment in time and money we discovered that the code originally written for us by a commercial PHP development company was “fatally flawed”. If you came to the site you didn’t know whose account would show up when you logged in. Sometimes it would be yours, sometimes not, it was a hit-and-miss kind of thing. There were dozens of problems of this scale, but I don’t want to spend all this space on that ancient history.

In June of 2007, with the guidance and skill of Sean Foushee, we introduced RC1 beta, which, if it held up, would become XtremeCamera v1.0. After a month of testing it proved itself stable and secure and we launched the site with 250 beta testers.
It is only after several months of use that something like this, a community on the Internet, would start to reveal the issues that led to right decisions and wrong decisions.

Much of the stuff, like our exclusive and still very cool, Organize feature, that allows you to drag and drop photos into photo albums, were nearly perfect. But one thing stood out above all else; one thing that was one person’s oversight (mine) and that was this; If paying members had their own homepage/blog on XtremeCamera who would know about them other than the people that that member told? How would anyone build an audience through Google searches or happenstance, if no one could find you? It was this question that led us to rethink the entire “home” page of XtremeCamera.

I happen to love the design of our old homepage, its been with us a while and is designed extremely well. But, unless you already know whom we are and how to get into the site our old homepage doesn’t make it easy to discover the inside, where the good stuff is.

The idea then was to build a new homepage that would give anyone and everyone a “snapshot” of what was happening inside at any given moment. We think the Daily Snapshot does that, and more.

Looking at the Daily Snapshot you can see instantly what discussions are taking place in the Forums, the most recent photo contributions to the Member Gallery, The newest Tutorial, this Blog that will keep you posted on the latest and greatest at XtremeCamera, some of the best photos, our Featured photos, that are published in the Member Gallery, and lastly, but most importantly, a direct link to the latest blog posts from our own members homepages.

When a member publishes a review of the new camera he or she purchased an instant link on the snapshot will lead you to it. When a member writes about a new model, some new technique, or anything else, you’ll see it here. Click the headline and off you go… Now, our members can finally get the word out about their own homepage. We think this is going to be a great catalyst and encourage more members to write and post in their own homepage.

Being able to see, at a glance, the newest photos in the Member Gallery will be a huge draw for anyone and everyone that stops by. No longer will they stare at the homepage and think, “What am I supposed to do now?” … It will also give our members the opportunity to get their photos seen by more people, more often.

The Slideshow that you see is where all our best work will go. Our Admins will choose the photos that will be featured in the Slideshow from all the photos that are uploaded to the Member Gallery. We believe this is a great way to help promote our member’s best work, as well as give incentive to our members to publish their work. Unlike the Pro Gallery, where our members can promote photos from the Member Gallery, the Featured Slideshow is reserved for the best of the best. If a member makes it to the Featured Slideshow, they will know that their photo is, in a word, incredible.

In this space, our main blog, our Admins will take turn writing about whatever it is, photography or XtremeCamera related of course, that they choose to write about. You can be sure that the writing will never be dull though, we all have something to say pretty much all the time.

Tutorials are also going to be huge on XtremeCamera. We have extended our welcome to not simply professional photographers, but to rather anyone that loves photography like we do. Amateur or professional, it doesn’t matter… So, with many members just starting out we’re going to be posting some entertaining and informative tutorials that will always lead to better picture taking… and that, of course, is what XtremeCamera is all about.

So, there you have it. The XtremeCamera Daily Snapshot is here. We hope you’ll stop by everyday. In fact, we hope you will make the Daily Snapshot your browsers default start page. Every time you visit there will be something different to see or read. It’s the heartbeat of our community. Welcome!

John Manzione
Admin