I’d rather start with a general direction than a time-consuming blind search!

As Jeremy has begun burning out all his tech-energy on his business, I’ve been getting more irritated with the tech-tasks that have been piling up at home. So I’m taking a few matters into my own hands: cleaning up the website and eventually recreating it, creating a site map, trying to get listed by Google (it crawls us but doesn’t list us), finding a new photo hosting platform, and last but most importantly:

Offsite storage.

This is important for a few reasons. First, we ripped our DVDs onto our HTPC (legally and we kept the hard copies) using a free trial of a program; a recent NAS crash left us movieless and now it looks like we’ll have to cough up $100 for the software. Second, one possible reason Google doesn’t list us is that we have 32 repeated meta-tags, courtesy of our current photo hoster Gallery (which I can look into as soon as Jeremy is done uploading the 600 photos of our vacation.) Third, if we have offsite storage for the originals of our photos, I can remove some of the older ones from the website, which will leave less for me to manage (we have 3019 images before the vacation pics are done loading.) FOURTH, Jeremy won’t store the photos as hard copies on CDs because he says that data stored like that will corrupt (and he’s right.)

As far as the photo gallery goes, Peter Wood’s photo gallery is so SWEET that I think we’ll be going with SmugMug. But I can’t do anything until I know if I can leave some of the pictures behind.

So, any thoughts on off-site data storage, preferably with an auto-update feature?

***Update: we’re using Gallery 1.4 for pictures (yes, I know, it’s time to change!) and as far as I can tell, there is no way to change the titles of the pages in this version. So, I created a robots.txt file that tells search engines not to crawl our pictures. I tested it in Google’s robots analyzer, so I know it works… but I’m wondering if the sitemap will allow Google to crawl those pages anyway? Anybody know?