When I travelled to Siem Reap in October 2006, I happily shared my travel photos in Webshots. Webshots was a popular free photo sharing platform them, before features like Flickr become popular. I know sometimes the speed is slow, but I had appreciated the fact that I was allowed to host these photos for free. So it was no big deal if they plaster a banner on top and a little Adsense ad on the side.

After putting the photos, adding notes, I hardly checked the photos. Till I noticed recently that I was getting a lot of spam- spammers leaving urls of all kinds of websites as comments in my photos in Webshots. My blogs are okay because the spam comments, which are a lot, are taken care by Akismet, a plugin that came with WordPress templates.

The spam comments made me went back to Webshots and lo and behold! How the advertisements have grown:

As I have done with photos of my travels to Thailand, I decided to create a specific blogs and transfer all my photos here.  This will be done in stages- after having the photos transferred, I will start deleting most of the photos.

In terms of layout, I felt it will be more user friendly for users to navigate in a blog than in an album. Even though albums can display slideshows or rotates on the sidebar, it will not be able to get the overall picture with explanation at a single glance. And since I’ve taken photos and wrote much about the travel, it will good to put a story behind the photos- when I went there, I was very dilligent in taking photos and jotting down notes.