37... and some "next time"s

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Midweek report.  37 registered entries with photos likely to pay.
That's 193 photos and planting plans, folks.  53 "entries" exist on the
site, but let's say five of those are probably no-shows.  

The non-garden categories continue to languish. Biotope has 1 entry (and
it's Lake Tanganyika fish in a planted tank.  Should we suggest they
reclassify, or is it still "natural?"), Artificial 2, and Paludarium 3.  
Remember my suggestion of compacting the sizes in the other categories?  
Don't have to.  They're all in the "middle" 60-284L range.

Yesterday I went to the post office and picked up an entry sent from
TURKEY!  It joins the others from Norway, Finland, Singapore, China.
Interestingly, nothing from Germany, Japan or the Netherlands.

We're starting to get the diversity of entries we were looking for (at
least within Aquatic garden).  If anyone's still feeling down about not
having 250 entries, remember that the purpose of the showcase was to
gather and display information on diverse aquascaping techniques from all
over the world, and we will be doing just that!

Some "need to improve" on the tecnhnical side for next year (if there is a
next year). Jotting them down here where it'll get archived:

1. Make it easier to edit the captions for each entry, by maybe having all
five photo captions shown on the main entry form.  Several entrants have
either not bothered to "Add Photo or Planting Plan", and a couple have
just added one with the caption "Five digital images".  It's been not too
bad for me (the administrator) to add four more, but then I have to tell
them to log back in and caption the suckers.

2. Make it clearer that people should put captions on their photos in the
printed form.  Maybe in bold.  OR  Add option to site to not display a
caption for particular images via checkboxes (I may do this for the
display THIS year, because there are an awful lot of "no caption"
captions.

3. Make printed entry form follow exact same order as online one.  Oopsie
on my part.  The current different order makes it a little tougher for the
guy typing in the entry forms.

4. Make it clearer that "No Copyright burn-ins on the images".  One of the
entries I got in the mail had a copyright actually SCRATCHED IN the photo.
I did a little digital retouching and removed it (hey, the rules said no
retouched photos can be ENTERED in the contest; never said we couldn't
retouch them ourselves).

5. Maybe stronger words about using maximum resolution possible for the
camera or scan.  Lots and lots of people have followed this very well,
sending 1500-2000 pixel wide images, but a few have sent pre-reduced
jpeg's.  They will probably stick out like a sore thumb... you guys tell
me if you notice it in November.

(Incidentally, many many entrants, even the ones who sent low-res photos,
sent nice high resolution scans of the planting plan, or just mailed a
piece of paper. I have done image editing on virtually every one to either
invert the drawing to white-on-black, or knock out the white background
outside the tank.  It looks very sharp.)

8. Internal workings only (end users never know about this): Instead of
manually scaling down from 2k scans, keep maximum resolution jpegs in View
directory after doing any necessary adjustments.  On website, add
resolution of 1024(-pad) to list as the biggest, then just scale down
like the other resolutons.  Add option for judges only to download max
resolution version.  (I was very pleased with the results of switching to
"scale to known widths" last week.  Though the images are perhaps a bit
blurrier because of the interpolation, the consistent widths are worth it.
You'll see this in the showcase when you come to the Index pages.  The
above change will help improve this even further.)

7. Add "Preview Entry" link to entry form that shows how the entry will
literally look in the showcase.  I couldn't do it this year because I
didn't (still don't really) have the showcase tuned to where I like it.

OK, that's enough for now. :)

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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