Free and Easy

Mostly, I'm still making photographs with my collection of ancient analog film cameras. Like everyone else, however, I ultimately end up with digital images and display them on line. I'm mostly happy with using the big image sharing sites like Google's Blogger and Yahoo's Flickr. Occasionally, I yearn for a way to have more control in how the images are displayed.

 I got interested recently in exploring the possibilities for on line slide shows and decided to see what kind of free web hosting might facilitate the endeavor. I googled up a ten-best list of current offerings and came across x10hosting.com. What distinguished that one from the rest was an apparent lack of any constraints on access or capabilities.

It took me about five minutes to create an account and do the initial setup for a basic web site that could host the simple scripts for creating on line slide shows. Had I the ambition, there is no reason the site could not have supported an elaborate web site, a big database application or a WordPress blog. The x10hosting.com dashboard features excellent file management and editing utilities which makes script hosting and debugging very easy. The slideshow scripts I link to from my photography blog seem to be running faultlessly. (At least they were until my cat tipped over my keyboard and deleted everything from the server. I have restored most of the lost files.)