Just wanted to get a bit of feedback. What you all think of the address www.renderpics.com for a gallery site? I'm thinking of it to display all my stuff.

It's ok but how about:  DAMrenderpics.com    ?   DAM meaning Death At Midnight of course.

renderpics.com sounds hot!

or if it was southern, Dayumrenderpics.com..;)

You might want to make sure the name isn't taken. There's supposedly search firms out there that will check, but a simple entry in your browser would probably do

yourender.com

rendertube.com

dayumfastrenders.com

Cool! Thanks for the feedback. It's taken... but by me ;-)

It sounds like a good website name..

I quite like 'Cardinals.R.us.com'

:-)

Hopefully I would like to do something nice with this site, of course. I'm not too sure how I would make my gallery site look.... colors, layout. What sites do any of you like that would make for a good standard to match?

Well for a gallery I would say, go with something easy to navigate and very clean and minimalistic in design. Dont over-do it by any means.
A good gallery design should do nothing more then providing an understated visual frame for the imagery, and must by no means be dominant and distracting from the image your showing.

As such i'd go with limited amount of colors in a low contrast color sceme. I'd avoid strong and vibrant colors or a palette that disrupts a neutral almost anonymous look.
If there is to be any stronger contrast anywhere, use it to frame off the display area from the main navigation of the site in general and/or use it for the navigation of the gallery.
Navigation should be simple and intuitive, preferably with small but very clear icons.

Providing some basic information relevant to the purpose of the gallery and site is a plus. In the case of a render farm i'd say those would include rendertime, resolution, software and render engine used to create it, the date on which the image was published, the name of the artist that made it (preferably real-life name as it looks more professional) and the title of the artwork.

A full description about the image from the artist might not be very neccesary if the gallery is used for the purpose of displaying and advertizing the services you offer as a renderfarm, so it would probably be left out to avoid over-cluttering the gallery.

thats my 2ct on gallery layout/design :-)

Very interesting. So how about an option for an artist to display either login/nickname/internet handle/alias, or his/her real name, or both?

Because some ppl don't want too much of their own information being displayed, which can lead to someone else googling it and possibly getting some personal information.. maybe an option to display a name other than an alias, yet not the real name.. a "display name".. which could be the real name if the artist puts the real name as the display name?

For a few weeks I've been writing my own site, mostly as a showcase to highlight some of my web programming skills. I don't get to show what I can do all the time.. usually I'm focused on a company product or a desktop application. So I needed something where I could expand some skills and express myself in a programmatic way. And so I started writing a little gallery site on my laptop, inbetween cups of latte on saturdays. For fun I've placed some suggestions mentioned here in the Bryce forum to help hinder ppl who wish to copy someone's gallery image.. drawbridgep had some good suggestions for the 2nd mouse button. Someone mentioned an automatic watermark on images. I thought it would be nice for the artist to select which type of feature he/she wants to place on an image.

Recently I've been moving every personal web project I do onto IIS7. Now I'm looking to invest in more capable software. I'm not going with Apache, it'll be IIS7, and I'm not going with MySQL.. it'll probably be MS SQL Server, or PostgreSQL. I'm preparing to buy more capable hardware too, mostly a new motherboard for the web server and a watercool unit. I have everything else needed.

So now that I know it is doable, I'm looking around for other things. The style, the layout. Programming I can do it all. I'm not a 2D artist, though, so so-far I've been keeping the look of the prototype site very simple. Need ideas.

Interesting!
What are the advantages of IIS7 over Apache?
And what are the advantages of MS SQL and PostgreSQL as opposed to MySQL?

Personally i like the gallery for Maxwell Render a lot, its very clean and simple.

Greetings!

  Hrm, the advantages of IIS7 over Apache? Well, personal preference. Apache is a fine product, quite powerful, and friendly to use up to a point. It is possible to run ASP and ASP.NET sites with Apache, but it takes a bit of effort. With ASP, I think there's no way to serve pages with VBScript, instead the web sites I found talked about using Perl for the scripting language. It's been 10 years since I did any Perl, and I'm not a big PHP developer. Instead I do ASP and ASP.NET very often and I'm more productive with them.

IIS can serve PHP pages, and one can server both ASP, ASP.NET, and PHP at the same time. I'm sure Apache can do all three, but to do the Microsoft stuff it takes a bit of effort to get going.

PostgreSQL is very impressive and mature product compared to MySQL. Of course MySQL is rather powerful too, yet at the time when I researched the differences, MySQL suffers from being weak with transactions. I haven't heard if the folks developing MySQL ever go around to improving that, but I know it was a known issue. PostgreSQL is a different kind of beast when comparing to MySQL. If I were to choose an Open Source database system, it would be PostgreSQL.

My decision to probably use MS SQL is because I'm more familiar with it. There is also practical reasons. I don't think MySQL supports storedprocedures yet, although I heard it was planned for version 5.. but I don't know if they have that worked out yet. 

With MS SQL it's quite easy to do what I need, design what I need, control what I need, quickly. MS SQL is proving to be a very capable product, and it integrates with the other MS products seemlessly. There's a wealth of books at almost any bookstore, and lots of info on the web (of course lots of info on the web for the Open Source stuff too, and quite a bit for MySQL at the local bookstore.)

Anyway, I like it ;-)

Wow I'm gone for a few weeks and D_A_M has been busy :)

Good stuff!!!

Does that mean PostgreSQL will provide better performance for systems that weigh heavy on the database? Think in terms of, large amounts of tables, dynamic generation of tables and/or cols, large amounts of data in general...
Does PostgreSQL allow to store arrays in a database? I tend to work on applications that have rather complex data formats and sometimes its handy to apply a degree of abstraction to make it all nicely accessible. I suppose I could dump JSON data into the database if i want to store array structures, but if PostgreSQL supports arrays it'd mean i wouldnt need to use a JSON parser in my php.

Greetings!

  You might want to check out the PostgreSQL web site. http://www.postgresql.org/ 

In short, PostgreSQL is extremely mature and powerful when it comes to Open Source databases. If I were to run my business with an OSS DB, it would be PostgreSQL.