Goodbye Smugmug

After 13 years, I decided a couple of weeks ago (clearly I’m a little slow) that I’ve been paying Smugmug too long. Smugmug is the site that stored all my pictures, I would upload a picture there, and either share it over email or create a blog posting on this site and point to smugmug to display the image. All told over that time I’ve probably given them over $2,000.

As I now have my own servers, I no longer need to pay them. I’ve been in this position for quite a while (around 5 years) so it’s taken a long time to make this change.

To move everything, I had to re-write my website from scratch! This took a couple of weeks, and I now have a site (this one) that’s very light weight, easy to maintain (for me) and it points to my servers for all the pictures.

I should admit that this was a ton of fun, I had to learn how to write my own wordpress theme and then carry out a ton of testing. My old site was a free theme that I slightly modified, this new site is a brand new theme that I created. I also made this version of the site, mobile aware, so you can view images on your phone (which amazingly didn’t work before).

In addition I created a few plugins that assist the site. The slideshow on the homepage, the gallery functionality, the popup windows on each blog image (if you click on them) and the view counter on the side bar are all new and written by me . Incidentally, the number of views on this site is legitimate. This is quite amazing to me and means that over the last 13 years over 1.6 million people (or bots, let’s be honest it was probably bots) have visited my site.

If anyone comes here and notes an issue with the site, please do let me know (either leave a comment on this blog posting or email me at Tony Seeley. While I tested it for over a week, any developer will tell you the worst person to test code is the one that wrote it! We tend to use the software as we intended and don’t find as many bugs.

Anyway, enjoy the site and look for more pictures of Colorado in 2026. I will try to post more than one or two postings next year.