Recent Activity

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  Tips on how to photograph art

  DIY $10 Macro Photo Studio

  Great for photographing jewellery and small items like ceramics, handbags etc

  Posted 25 Nov 07

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  What are the best blogging tools?

  I would recommend wordpress or typepad. Blogger is very easy for beginners, but has limitations. Typepad is also very easy to use and more intuitive then wordpress for the beginner. You do have to pay a small monthly/yearly fee for it though. Wordpress is the ideal solution for someone who wants to become a professional blogger. It is the most versatile of blogging tools available.

  Posted 25 Nov 07

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  What shopping cart solutions would you recommend for a blog

  Easy start off solutions are ETSY.com and Shopify.com. Will be doing some more research into this.

  Posted 25 Nov 07

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  Guidelines for Irish Arts Blog

  I think, now that we are ready to launch the blog, we need to decide on some guidelines as regards posting to the blog. The idea for this group blog came partly from the umbrella collective blog. As you can see, the group uses the blog almost like a gallery, with very little in the way of text accompanying the photographs. They also concentrate almost completely on their own art, with very stylized presentations of the art. All of the group members have their own blogs, so they decided to use this blog as a central reference point for  promoting the group to the media. Note, they also organize and advertise their own group exhibition through the blog.
  So my instinct is that we need to try to find a middle ground between what we were doing on the dummy blog and the umbrella collective approach. We can review this at a later stage, but for the time being I would suggest the following:
  
  1. Post a photo of your work in 4 out of every 5 posts. Always put a space between the image and the next line of text.
  
  2. Don't post too many photos of exhibitions. 1 every 6 posts. Main focus should be on the art.
  
  3. Keep posts reasonably short. Lets say 4 out of every 5 posts. Eg of a short post would be
  http://www.irishartsblog.com/2007/11/pressure.html. This allows visitors to quickly scroll through the various posts and get a quick overview of the variety of art and styles. I think this is important in a group blog.
  http://www.irishartsblog.com/
  4. Try to use one photo per post for the most part.
  
  Again these are just guidelines.. Its your blog so you can do as you wish. My feeling though, is that we should avoid being too free form in a group situation.

  Posted 25 Nov 07