I’ve finally thrown a bone to the dying breed of people who actually regularly update caption galleries with caps from IS. The new “My Favorites” link in the main menu will display all the captions you’ve thumbed as a favorite in the last two days in a stripped down view that should make it easier to drop the captions into your own pages without leaving all sorts of unwanted time sensitive links back to IS.

While I’m at it, let me just offer up some free advice to gallery keepers. Don’t take it too personally if you’re doing a lot of the things I’m complaining about. Most of them are common mistakes or just pet peeves of mine, and none of them are life and death. What’s more, you can have a good site without doing all of these things, especially if the content is good.

1. Make navigation easy. Every page in your gallery should at least have links to the next and previous page in the site, and the site’s index page. The next & last links should be at the bottom of the page. You can have them on the top and bottom if you want, but most people paging through will be reading from top to bottom. Don’t include a “next” link on the last page, nobody likes 404’s. Just be sure to add the link when you add more pages.
2. Make it easy to find the updates. The simple running list of dates with links to the first page updated that day method gets the job done.
3. Use the height and width property on all your img tags - they’re already set properly in the source code at IS. Avoid using them to resize images: making the image larger will result in cruddy looking images, shrinking images still forces your users to download the full size image (and you to store it), and relying on the browser to fix the aspect ratio gives unreliable results (and 99% of the images on the big three cap sites are at the right ratio to begin with.)
4. A link back to the sites you gathered the captions at is always nice. It’s fine if it’s only on one page of your site. If I hit your site googling for “peter griffin superman dr. who armpit fart” and I find a cap made at Glitter’s, your should lead me to Glitter’s in a link or two.
5. Avoid using screengrabs of your browser. This introduces extra work in trimming out unwanted captions, can decrease the quality of the images (it certainly can’t improve it), prevents readers from setting font sizes and colors that might be better suited to their monitor and eyes. It also doesn’t help you any in search engines. Just save the original files for the screengrabs and save the captions as text. The exact steps here depend on your browser, operating system, personal style. It might be achieved by saving the entire page via the file menu or right clicking on the images and picking ’save image as’ while cutting and pasting the text into another file. (I know, the mail a caption feature violates these rules, it was a compromise because of issues with html in mail).
6. If you must use the IS logo, copy this approved one to your site, or ask my permission. Don’t grab it without my permission, don’t make your img tag point to a copy on my server, and don’t resize it in ways that make it look even shabbier than it already does. (Unless you’re leeching my bandwidth, I’m extremely unlikely to complain about you borrowing the logo, just carry a silent grudge. And most of the sites out there with copies of the logo have either gotten semi-official permission.)

This entry was posted by GersonK on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Caption Sites, Inventing Situations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.