How many uploads do you have until you got your first sale?

I have over 420 files, and still no sale.

It must be the quality of my uploads.

200 files here, no sale. Way to go  . We need to be patient, keep our spirits up and ADVERTISE 

Update on the Cablevision/Optimum SpamScrubber blocking registration e-mails:

I spoke with a representative at Cablevision/Optimum today and they are escalating the issue to a senior team, trying to determine what is causing the e-mails to be blocked by their SpamScrubber.  I've requested that they try to come up with a universal fix that would allow all Symbiostock e-mails through.  My concern is that it's not only blocking the registration e-mail but once someone does get the password it might block the download response and other e-mails too.

They said that it may take 24 to 72 hours for a response so I'll update during the week when I hear more.

That's nice of them! I hope they come back with a clear answer to the question what is causing the e-mails to be blocked so Leo can change the e-mail accordingly. - We can't possibly ask every ISP and every anti-spam/firewall software company to do what Cablevision/Optimum is doing here.

The SY crowd is growing with impressive speed already. Be ready for a tsunami of new SY sites when buyers start buying on the SY network in greater numbers. 

Seriously, Leo, you did an awesome job and that is the reason for our active SY community. We all see the potential this has. I don't think you should worry about this venture paying you off eventually. At the very least I hope it will  .

Anyway, count me in for your premium upgrade plugin!     

Registered and got e-mail instantly. No problem logging in either.
My SY site is on Bluehost feel free to register.

A "Translation Ready" plugin. Meaning that every English word of the theme can be easily translated into other languages of choice because they are accessible (and editable) through a list. The image database would need an extension for foreign language metadata. The theme would get a language button where users can switch language easily.
That plugin could even include an online translation tool in the back-end of the SY theme allowing us to automatically translate keywords and descriptions then edit and store translations with image database. 

What I understand is that Tom is generally talking about oversupply and dilution of images buyers want with masses of irrelevant images (produced by amateurs as if pros create relevant images only  ). He has a point. Symbiostock won't solve this issue, which is a general issue of the image market. However, so far all micro/midi/macro/boutique agencies are struggling providing just relevant content (and nothing else) to buyers. There's no easy solution. It's kind of far-fetched to construe Symbiostock's failure on these grounds. Because Symbiostock is a novel approach it will provide different results to a particular image search and thus might evolve into the answer to the problem Tom is talking about at least for a part of the image buyers. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I agree, a bit of controversy adds buzz. And that's good     

Edited: And Tom advertises his own answer, of course.

i just found a easier way over a PHP script.. that doesnt require your Host to support ssh!

looking into it and will report back when i have some news..

Sounds like there're 100 ways to this  .

I am just learning about "lftp" which is a linux (command line) ftp client that handles also TLS/SSL (need for Veer). Blue Host has it installed by default...

"Royalty Free" is a very unfortunate term for artists trying to sell license their work. It not only implies "Freebie" it is also practically un-translate-able into any language other than English. If you know another language just try one of those free online translation tools for a good laugh.

I hope that we can come up with some other word (even if the license terms are still effectively RF) just to raise awareness for the fair trade concept of selling direct.

I simply refuse to believe that most image buyers don't care about us image producers and are happy with feeding greedy bloodsuckers middlemen. I believe given a powerful image search within a big enough collection, smooth, fast and reliable payment/download transaction and a good overall experience (think: farmers market) it will be easy to win image buyers for fair trade and using SY.

The hard part is providing such a well-functioning system and that "woow-that-was-easy-to-find-and-license-just-the-right-image-I-wanted" buyer experience. Well, I guess we are working on it

Here's how uploading to the micros through my Blue Host shared hosting service (where I run my Symbiostock site) using SSH went:

First of all I had to call Blue Host to have my hosting account verified. This is required before you can enable SSH on cPanel. No problem. SSH was up in minutes.
Then I needed an SSH client. There's tons of free options out there. I decided for a SSH firefox plugin. Easy install, easy connect.

Reaching this point difficulties started mainly because the hosting server runs on linux and I have no linux/unix knowledge/experience at all.

The SSH script that (finally) worked looks like this

#!/usr/bin/expect
set timeout -1
spawn ftp -v -i [micro ftp server]
expect "[some word on the last line of server response]"
send "[your login]\r"
expect "Password:"
send "[your password]\r"
expect "ftp>"
send "mput *.jpg\r"
expect "ftp>"
send "quit\r"

(The stuff in [...] needs to be replaced by server/your specific input.)

So I punched something like this in notepad, saved as xy.sh (or whatever), uploaded to my blue host site to the same folder where my images were already waiting, made sure they had sufficient permissions (read, write, execute [0700]), directed my SSH client to that directory (cd ...) and punched in ./xy.sh. AND: I got a bunch of error messages about unknown commands and such. 

It took a while until I realized this was caused by incompatible text formats between my windows system and linux  . So I opened the xy.sh script with the editor available in the cPanel file manager, deleted everything and punched it in again. NOW it worked!

The rest was just gathering all required data for my 12 or so micro accounts.
I don't claim I understand what the "expect" command really does but it seems to locate text strings in the response from the ftp server so the script can send data (login/password) where and when needed (Linux experts, please forgive me  ). The actual response is displayed in the SSH client, so it is not too hard to figure out.

I didn't even have to start each script manually. With another script all.sh like this

#!/bin/bash
./xy.sh
./yz.sh
./zz.sh
....

I could run all uploads in one go. App. 40 images were distributed to all my micro accounts in less than an hour. Very nice. And I even got a detailed error message in a case of one malformed image file name. Took the guesswork away as to why this file didn't arrive.

I am happy  . Goodbye Lightburner and thank you for your service so far!

There is only Veer left where I couldn't get it to work. They use FTP with TLS/SSL on a Windows NT server. I have no idea how to edit the script to account for that. Expert advice on this is very welcome!

A note regarding security: Logins/Passwords are clearly readable in these scripts. I made sure the image/script folder is outside the public_html area and I deleted the scripts on the blue host server after the upload was done. I will upload them again when the next batch is ready. Experts: is there more one could do (such as encrypting the ssh files)?

I wish good luck to everyone who is going to try this as well! 

 

fair trade license

That's brilliant! We're are selling no RF licenses but FT licenses  - If we can make this the buzz-word of the year SS will be out of business soon

Thanks for your kind comment on my port, which is mostly LCV, unfortunately  . But it is what I like to shoot 

Quote from: Pilens on June 09, 2013, 03:10

Quote from: Ron on June 09, 2013, 02:12

Hi all,

I have been wondering about this. I want to create a page with FAA cart on my SY site. However, some images are similar on both FAA and for sale as RF. Pricing is of course different. Here is where my question come in.

How do you justify the price hike between RF stock and FAA? This is mainly for the full res. I am selling full res for 20 euro, but the pricing on FAA for that same image is around 125 euro.

I could justify it because I am the artist and I decide how my images are priced, plus all the extra work involved needs to be compensated. Which is true.

Next question. I could lose FAA sales over this as they can download the image and go to their own POD site. Which is fine. A sale is a sale. But would it be smart considering that, not linking my FAA cart to my SY site?

Thank you for your thoughts.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to implement this FAA shopping cart code on SY. 

Comparing FAA prints with RF digital files is like apples and oranges, isn't it?

Sure, if you overprice your FAA stuff you might sell an image file instead. But this buyer still has to go through the hassle dealing with that cheap POD site of his/her choice. Will they deliver FAA quality? Can they handle odd formats? Do they offer that fancy canvas? etc. - I have no concerns.

Your success on FAA mainly depends on your own marketing. So if you don't link your SY site with your FAA stuff you are missing out on cross-marketing both sites. You might lose sales potential on both sites.
I see absolutely no good reason not linking FAA with my SY even more so FAA offers this nicely integrated page/cart. A buyer does not even leave my SY site (at least not on the browser surface). I wish other POD sites would offer something similar (e.g. RedBubble for calendars, Zazzle for t-shirts, etc).

I understand the POD and DL part but why sell the POD image for more then the DL image? Its the same image.

I probably don't understand what you are getting at. Where is the problem when the sale price for a 20x30" canvas print is higher than RF license to use that same image for whatever purpose within the limits of your EULA terms?

Hi all,

I have been wondering about this. I want to create a page with FAA cart on my SY site. However, some images are similar on both FAA and for sale as RF. Pricing is of course different. Here is where my question come in.

How do you justify the price hike between RF stock and FAA? This is mainly for the full res. I am selling full res for 20 euro, but the pricing on FAA for that same image is around 125 euro.

I could justify it because I am the artist and I decide how my images are priced, plus all the extra work involved needs to be compensated. Which is true.

Next question. I could lose FAA sales over this as they can download the image and go to their own POD site. Which is fine. A sale is a sale. But would it be smart considering that, not linking my FAA cart to my SY site?

Thank you for your thoughts.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to implement this FAA shopping cart code on SY. 

Your last question first: just get the code line from FAA, install the Wordpress plugin "iframe", create a page "Prints" (or whatever), paste the code (and remodel it a bit according to iframe-plugin syntax), add that page to your main menu - done!

Comparing FAA prints with RF digital files is like apples and oranges, isn't it?

Sure, if you overprice your FAA stuff you might sell an image file instead. But this buyer still has to go through the hassle dealing with that cheap POD site of his/her choice. Will they deliver FAA quality? Can they handle odd formats? Do they offer that fancy canvas? etc. - I have no concerns.

Your success on FAA mainly depends on your own marketing. So if you don't link your SY site with your FAA stuff you are missing out on cross-marketing both sites. You might lose sales potential on both sites.
I see absolutely no good reason not linking FAA with my SY even more so FAA offers this nicely integrated page/cart. A buyer does not even leave my SY site (at least not on the browser surface). I wish other POD sites would offer something similar (e.g. RedBubble for calendars, Zazzle for t-shirts, etc).

Don't panic

That's really good advise! - Everyone is still getting their boat ready and the fishing nets prepared. We still have LOTS to do for months to come, even without any new line of code, before we risk getting stuck by the limitations and bugs Leo's theme has. This won't fade away easily because it already shows its incredible potential.

I am not much of a coder myself and I don't know any software developer who would like to jump in. But I am confident that Leo's work is already exciting and convincing enough to get developers interested once they return from their summer vacation beaches  . Even Leo, after all his hard work, might be still hooked once his summer break is over  .

To me it really doesn't matter much which of cascoly's 3 options this theme will take. Although I fear that relying on option 3 only might have serious limitations so that important changes can't be implemented.