365 Project With a Twist: Need Suggestions
Posted January 6th, 2008 @ 11:10pm by Erik J. Barzeski
A lot of photographers commit to a sort of "365 Project" every new year wherein they take (and post) one photo every day of the year. It's designed to get photographers off their duffs and creating imagery every day, whether they feel like it or not.
That sort of thing never quite appealed to me, but towards the end of last year I had an idea that would make such a "365" project a bit more fun. I got busy over the holidays and didn't even have a chance to blog about the idea, as I'm doing now, and was somewhat bummed. Then I realized: 365 projects (or derivatives) don't have to start on January 1. So now I'm pursuing this again…
Anyway, here's the twist: competition. A friend and I would like to have a photoblog. We'd each anonymously post one picture a day to the same entry. Visitors to the site could vote for whichever they feel is the "better" image. The blog would have comments, perhaps, but little else. Just two images, side by side every day, a voting system, and comments.
The "competition" wouldn't be too serious. One day I might have a picture of a horse while the friend has an interesting picture of a glass vase or something. We wouldn't have themes. It'd just be a "365" project with a little twist.
Now, the question is this: is there software out there that can do this for me?
Ideally, the software would simply pull a pair of images (perhaps named yyyymmdd.jpg) from two directories, display them, and tabulate votes. I'm fairly certain nothing's going to do this out of the box, but I'd like something that do this with minimal fuss, hacking, tweaking, plugging, etc.
WordPress could probably be made to do it (though I'm not certain about the automatic creation of entries each day), but I'm hoping there's a better solution out there - perhaps one that's more geared towards photoblogging itself.
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Posted 07 Jan 2008 at 12:27am #
A ratings system like these could almost work, but my fear is that we wouldn't be able to see the "winner" very clearly because most people will rate images towards the middle. A 6.5 might beat a 5.5, but those same two images might earn 210 and 17 votes respectively. I kind of like the idea of forcing people to make a binary decision: this image or that image. Not letting them cop out by rating them on a 5- or 10-point scale.
Pixelpost is many photoblogger's first choice of software, but I'm not sure it's up to the task I've proposed above. I've asked in the forum.
Posted 07 Jan 2008 at 12:42pm #
Given the discussion in the forum, I've realized WordPress may in fact work just fine. I can install a poll plugin, write an SQL script to generate the entries (and probably the polls), and pretty much be done with it.
I'm disappointed that pixelpost doesn't have a poll plugin (it has at least two ratings plugins) because I was almost looking for an excuse to try pixelpost for this.
Hrmph.