As this is my 100th day on ipernity, I just want to write something, anything. First thing that comes into my mind to write about is a retrospection of what I've written so far. Maybe mixed with a few review elements and some random new thoughts. I apologize in advance for this unstructured post, but sometimes I have to just babble.

Random thought 1: I've just discovered "My Network"-->"Latest docs & post"-->"Everyone"-->"Photos". It's a stream of your contacts' docs in size 240. (flickr provides this in size 100 only and limits it to maximum 5 images per contact.) Cool.

Random thought 2: I've also just discovered how it works to embed images in notes like here. It works like puttting images in comments. And it has the same limitation: Text is required. I inserted a dot after the image and suddenly it worked. (flickr doesn't require text, but doesn't allow images.)

And some retrospection: On day#0, I wrote "a pro account keeps the static URL when photos are replaced (flickr doesn't)". I've just checked it again: It's NOT true anymore. flickr used to, but they changed it. On ipernity the replace link was recently gone for a while. Now it's back, and it's changing the static URL now. The old pic continues to be available with the old link, though (whereas flickr deletes the old link).

And also just tested: Ipernity doesn't delete ANY of the static images (whether replaced or not) even if the pics page is deleted! (If this is a feature, I want my money back. If it's a bug, I want it FIXED soon! Because that means, documents CAN'T be deleted at all! I consider this a VERY MAJOR bug!)

On day#1 I wrote "Tag views have numbers in their URLs, so they can't be guessed (on flickr they can)". On ipernity they're also case sensitive, as I found out later. So Giraffe and giraffe are different tags with different links (on flickr they aren't).

I also wrote "flickr's cool calendar view hasn't been cloned". As of now, I have to say, that I find ipernitys archive more compelling. I has some additional very useful features, whereas flickr's calendar view doesn't turn out to be so useful after all.

On day#2 I wrote lots of interesting stuff that today, I've forgotten myself. I guess I discovered those things with the new-user sharp-eye. One thing has to be corrected, though: I then wrote "for social networking it can't compare to flickr at all". I now think that this isn't true. After 100 days of testing, my opinion is, that it's superior in some aspects, inferior in others, but on the bottom line.. it's the same.

More retrospection: On day#3 I wrote about video. Today, now being pro, I'm not very pleased that the 90 MB limit for files holds for pro members, too. Because for my cam that means a 50s video length restriction even in low resolution mode 848x480. Ipernitys video features are still far more superior than flickr's, but at least I've got 90s there.

On day#4 I found a bug, that's still not fixed. I didn't report it, though. I never reported any of the many bugs I found. Maybe I should.

On day#13 I defined my four albums as they still are today. I find the album feature quite useless on ipernity and not comparable to the set feature on flickr. I therefore use tags for grouping instead, and I love ipernity's ultra fast tag views. flickr is creepingly slow in that respect. (In fact, it's completely and entirely unusable.) Ipernitys speed totally changed my tagging habits.

On day#17 I wrote about my first encounters with other ipernity members. (I was shy back then.) I also got my first blog entry comment. I got only one more later. Most visitors don't read the blog.

On day#18 I praised the blog's forward view. There's a bug in it, though: http://www.ipernity.com/blog/rumpel/archive should show the entire blog like http://www.ipernity.com/blog/rumpel does in reverse order. But it shows only the same as http://www.ipernity.com/blog/rumpel/archive/2008. That's sad. No forward view crossing years available. :-(

On day#21 I babbled about tags and groups. Random thoughts: flickr shows who added a tag (although it's a relatively new feature). Ipernity still doesn't. flickr has an announcement field in groups that admins can fill. Ipernity groups haven't.

On day#35 I wrote about the "brand new flickr mobile interface". I should mention here that flickr switched back to the old interface very soon after that and kept it until now. I therefore didn't use it anymore and tried ShoZu instead, but I didn't like that either.

On that day I also blogged something not related to ipernity or flickr. I'm still not sure whether in the future I might make this as a habit. Tomorrow is my 101st day on ipernity, after all. By (my own) definition the ipernity testing phase is then over. There shouldn't then be much more to say. So if I want to keep the blog alive, I have to find new content...

On day#37 I wrote about faving my own pics. Today, I faved the first two blog entries of mine. As can be seen here, it's what I wrote on day#67 and day#85.

Ok, reviewing my own posts like that is boring, so here're some more random thoughts not related to former posts: 1. You can't load entire album contents into the doc manager. But that's no problem, because albums are useless on ipernity anyway (see above). I tag pics with the album title to get a detail view at least.

2. flickr allows you to see your own contributions to a pool. Ipernity doesn't. As a workaround I tag pics with "in pool xxx" for every pool they're in.

3. Ipernity continuously generates views on the leading images in the stream. So the view popularity is just a measure of how long they were on top of it. Is this, because of the "Latest photos" mini slide show on the user's home page?

Hm, I have to finish this blog entry now, because it's to long and too unfocused already. Just two more things: On day#37 I wrote "I like ipernity more and more". And on day#45 I enthusiastically blogged about ipernity winning that contest. I didn't know by then that images can't be deleted. For me this is a NO-GO against ipernity! I hope this will be fixed, otherwise I can't recommend it.

There was another annoying bug that I encountered. The "uploaded on"-date was resetted to "01/01/2000 01:00:00" when I changed the "taken-on date" of a pic (and therefore moved the image to the beginning of the stream). And the "taken-on date" of the pic was changed to a random value when I corrected the "uploaded-on date". I tried that, because the replace link was away and I wanted to replace a pic that I had forgotten to rotate before uploading. I couldn't see that in advance, because it had an exif orientation tag and was rotated automatically by viewing tools. Ipernity however, like flickr, doesn't change the uploaded original, not even if you press "rotate". So that day I had to re-upload 15 images just to get the rotation done. And I wasn't pro yet. I forgot to rotate a pic later again, but I didn't correct it this time as a memorial of that former event.

That's me! I've spent lots of time and energy exploring everything on those first 100 days with ipernity. It's beta, and it shows. It's community is small yet, and it shows. But it has potential.

It is my new home.