(Bruce Lewis) For some time, OurDoings has been keeping your photos safe by doing daily backups to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). They, in turn, keep backups of the backups. Now it's even better. Starting this weekend, we're not just backing up once per day.
We now have a backup process that runs all day, every day. If you visit the page for a particular photo (where "photo.html" appears in your address bar), you'll see something like "Backed up 2009-11-23" at the bottom. This message disappears if you rotate or edit the photo, since it now needs to be backed up again. Then it will reappear once the new version gets backed up.
Keep those precious photos safe. Upload them to OurDoings today.
Small companies fail. Big companies drop unprofitable projects. Labors of love stick around. I run OurDoings in my spare time. Or, more precisely, I improve it in my spare time. Running it doesn't take any time. The hosting bills are totally affordable. If I supported video it would get costly, but I have no problem hosting text and photos from lots of people.
I keep my own family history on OurDoings, so there's no way I'm going to let it disappear. Every day new files get backed up to a separate company from my hosting provider. I have a 7-day rotation of database backups. I've restored from the backup and know it works. My important memories on OurDoings get backed up by exactly the same system yours do, so you know I'll do my best to make sure it's safe.
2. You'll be busy.
This may come as a surprise for some of you, but OurDoings wasn't originally designed for early adopters of the latest web technologies. It was originally designed for parents who have no time. Guess what? When your baby is born, that's going to be you!
Emailing a picture from your phone is fast and easy. But friends and relatives will be clamoring for higher-quality photos from your camera. You won't have time in the hospital to wrestle with uploading programs and unreliable wifi. With OurDoings and Dropbox you won't have to. Just copy all your photos to a folder and Dropbox will keep trying until the wifi lets it upload everything.
Did I just say "all your photos"? Oh yes I did. With OurDoings you don't need to sort through your photos to find the best ones to feature. You can crowdsource that job. Especially with a new baby, it won't be hard to find eager helpers. Tons of people will follow your "more photos" link, click thumbnails, and change "more" to "featured" for their favorites. Since it's a totally reversible designation, no registration/login/etc. is needed. People just click. Yes, this works. The feature has been out and on by default for quite a while now. It's generally not abused because there's so little amusement value in abusing it.
3. OurDoings captures the story like nothing else.
A set of birth photos on Flickr sure looks nice, but what's the first thing you think when you see it? "I can't believe that was just two years ago. Time is going too fast!" You want to see what the baby looked like a month later, etc. There's probably a way to do that on Flickr somewhere. They have a lot of features. But it isn't obvious to me how to navigate by time. Why? Because Flickr is optimized for presenting art. People like it for that reason. OurDoings is optimized for presenting doings. It's for capturing a story. Navigating by time is central.
Photo sites organize by albums, sets, etc. Social sites like FriendFeed organize by hotness of the conversation. Blogs organize by publication date. OurDoings organizes by when things happened. That's an important distinction. Sometimes the day you post about something is different from the day it happened. But you're going to remember and find parts of your life story not by by when you posted them, but by when they happened. OurDoings suits that purpose better than anything else.
