SmugMug's Don MacAskill

Go read over on Baldy’s (my father and SmugMug’s co-founder) blog for the details.  Leave a comment there and who knows?  You might have an iPad headed your way.  🙂

We have at least four birthdays here at SmugMug.  I started working on the first lines of code for the project, which was decidedly not a photo-sharing site at the time, in October of 2001.  Then in August of 2002, we decided to shift gears and build a photo-sharing site “as a side business.”  Finally, we launched SmugMug and signed up our first paying customers in November of 2002.

But as far as the government is concerned, February 27th, 2002, is the day we were born.  It’s our official incorporation date and probably marks the day I finally wore my father’s resolve down enough that he agreed to come on board.  🙂  (Which, incidentally, is also the best decision I’ve made running this company).

So Happy Birthday SmugMug!  You’re 8!

Here’s to many more profitable, independent, customer- and employee-focused years!

(This post was written at my old location.  You’re now reading it at the new location. 🙂 )

I’m in the process of moving my blog to hosted WordPress at WordPress.com. Much as I loved the flexibility of hosting my own blog (and the rest of the company), the upkeep required just isn’t worth the extra flexibility. So my customization will go away, which is sad, but I should have to spend less time managing all the blogs at SmugMug. Which might mean I actually blog more often again. 🙂

Here’s the new URL in ‘beta’ form: https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/

I should have redirects up shortly, so everything should work fine, but if your feed reader breaks or something, now you know why. 🙂 Apologies in advance for any hiccups…

And, of course, I write more on Twitter now than I do on my blog. Follow me there if you want quickie goodies. Finally, I have a Facebook fan page up too. Feels bizarre to have a fan page, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to use Facebook how I want (only close friends as ‘Friends’, other people ‘Following’) without it, so here it is. My normal Facebook page is marked Everyone for my Wall and Comments, too, so you can feel free to check in there, but I’m just not equipped to Friend the hundreds/thousands of you who ask. Sorry. 😦

I promise to seriously make an effort to blog more of the long-form technical stuff here – I have a number of requests for topics, chief among them being more Amazon Cloud stuff, more Sun Storage stuff, and more MySQL stuff. I’ll get to it at the new location – so see you there!

SmugMug has always allowed everyone to upload an unlimited number of web-displayable files – JPEG, GIF, PNG, and MP4 – but to date we haven’t been able to accept the RAW files generated by modern digital cameras. For years our customers have been asking, begging, and pleading for us to let them upload their priceless archives.  I’m happy to announce that day has come!

SmugVault is a new SmugMug product that lets you upload all the RAW, PSD, BMP, and TIFF files you’d like.  And not just those – we’ll accept XMP sidecars, PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video archives, and anything else you might want to store with your photos.  What’s more, we’ll bundle your files together for easy, intuitive browsing and safe retrieval.

Thanks to an innovative new product from Amazon Web Services, DevPay, you only pay pennies per GB for the storage you actually use each month.  There’s no huge fee with a maximum storage amount – it’s truly unlimited and pay-by-the-drink.  Store one megabyte or one billion megabytes – we don’t care.  Whatever works best for your workflow and archival needs, SmugVault can handle it.

photo by: Andy Williams

Compose a beautiful panorama out of 20 RAW files?  No problem – upload your final JPEG and bundle all 20 RAW files with it, along with your Photoshop PSD containing all your layers and edits and the XMP sidecar detailing the Adobe Lightroom changes you made during the editing process.  You’ll see just the single perfect photo on your SmugMug site, but with a single click, you have access to every component you’ve associated with it.

Don’t want to upload final corrected JPEGs for all the RAWs you shot at that huge event, but still want them stored somewhere safe and sound?  No problem.  Just upload the RAWs straight off your camera and we’ll store them for safe retrieval.  Want us to generate JPEG previews of those uncorrected RAW files so you can browse your SmugVault visually to find that perfect shot?  We’ll do that too.

Loving SmugMug’s new HD video features, but wishing you had somewhere safe to archive the original footage rather than the web-friendly lower bitrate copies?  Not a problem.  Just add them to your SmugVault.

Unfortunately, we hear about people losing their priceless memories to hurricanes, fire, and computer failure almost every day.  We’ve always been glad we can simply help them get the JPEGs back – remember, your photos are yours, not ours – and I’m even more excited that we can now help everyone recover their priceless archives too!

Read more: Release Notes | Pricing | Help | Wiki FAQ

photo by: Jean-Yves

Have you reached stylesheet Nirvana? Are you the designer people go to for a fresh, clean, gorgeous look?

Have I got the dream job for you! 🙂

Come build beautiful stuff that millions of people all over the world can enjoy. We’re private, profitable, growing fast – and you could be a vital part of it.

BTW, as always, we’re permanently on the lookout for good software engineers, particularly if you have front-end web browser skills – JavaScript, DOM, AJAX, etc. Drop me a line.

So my Sun T1000 review got dugg, and commented on, and there’s one loud-and-clear message: people would like to see Solaris results.

So would I. But as I outlined in the review, I don’t have any Solaris expertise. I am a busy guy. 🙂

(I should re-iterate that Jonathan Schwartz asked for everyone to review the T1000 with Ubuntu, which is exactly what I did.)

So if anyone at Sun would like to spend a few hours with us and help us get this box configured for the same test on Solaris, I’d love to see what it could do and post a follow-up.

Any takers?