A Competition

With this post, we want to launch a little competition amongst the community. It concerns what is shown on a page that few of us ever look at. This is about the public face of Blipfoto, the page that people see when they discover us on the internet. Once you become a member, you generally stay signed in and never come to see this page again, getting directed to the browse view instead. It's easy to forget it exists.

You don't have to sign out of Blipfoto to see this page. The best way is to use a private browsing window in your browser, called an incognito window if you're using Chrome. It's a useful thing to know about if you're not already familiar with the idea. It allows you to visit a website without leaving a trace, or as if you'd never visited before. It's what you should be doing if you ever have to log on to a borrowed computer, or a public one. This guide is useful. We’re suggesting this approach because we really don’t want lots of you logging out of your accounts and then realising you’ve forgotten your password, or you’ve changed your email address. We'd rather like to avoid having to field lots of support calls to help you get back into your account at the same time. You’d probably cause our support team to blow a fuse!

If you go to www.blipfoto.com without being signed in, you will get the page that someone sees on encountering Blipfoto for the first time. We don’t think it does the site justice. It’s the page we inherited along with the new software, and we think it’s time for a revamp.

There are two aspects to this. First, we are looking to you to suggest a more appropriate banner image for the site, choosing from images in your blip journal. Please take care in making your selection. It needs to work as a banner, which dictates that it be in landscape format. It may need to be cropped to work in the most effective way. Please submit your images by tagging them #blipbanner. Please choose no more than three.

Second, we are also looking for some images to show the different ways in which people use their blip journal, along with a few short words - a little soundbite - which will we use to annotate the picture. Why do you blip? You will get the idea if you scroll down that introduction page. In this case, we’d like you to submit your entry by placing a link to the image as a comment to this post, along with your strapline.

We’ll give you a few weeks to trawl through your journals and make your submissions. Once the comments start to dry up, we’ll take a look through and compile a shortlist. We’ll then return to the community to vote for the winning images. I’m afraid we won’t be offering a prize other than a credit and the glory of being chosen. You'll be able to bask in some virtual sunshine.