Robots crawl the web to index it (for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN). Beyond the robots.txt standard, some of these will happily list out any directory for which Apache doesn't serve up a default page. A good idea is to place a ".htaccess" file in these directories. This mechanism can also stop external image linking, or particular robots from gaining access to information like email addresses.
Most of the photos on the site are taken with a Nikon D70.
I use Adobe RGB color space on the camera and take pictures using RAW+Basic mode on the camera. The Basic JPEG images are quite large. For web viewing, I use a batch process in Adobe Photoshop CS to downsample these into one-quarter resolution images, and simultaneous convert to sRGB colorspace. Another batch process downsamples the sRGB images into one-third resolution thumbnails, and saves the thumbnails without their sRGB profiles. All the sRGB images are uploaded onto the server by placing them into a local copy of my site, and using the script below to automatically upload the files.
Going through the full list of images, I page through, building galleries that group images in the order they were taken. On the server, my PHP source dynamically links the thumbnails to the larger images. Finally, I go through and select a few pictures to provide an interesting gallery for the initial trip page.
When a site is quite small, it's possible to track the changes that need to be transferred to the ISP in one's head.
Soon that becomes impossible. Add to that the inevitable need to undo changes to fix unanticipated problems, and site maintenance can become overwhelming.
Source files for this site are stored in CVS, which solves the problem of versioning.
The next problem to solve is ensuring that the all files that were changed for
a given update are uploaded onto the server. Initially, my ISP didn't provide
shell access, and I had to use FTP. Lack of a remote shell ruled out using rsync.
I developed a solution based on expect using find . -newer
on the root directory, to drive ftp. At the same time, I log the files
which are uploaded.