Early in life I became a boater. Rather tragically... I originally was a biker. Yes, motorcycles. In 1995 I was in a motorcycle accident after a rider that was a buddy of mine cut me off because he thought a white farm truck in a field was actually a cop! He slammed on the brake and cut me off taking my front wheel out from under me. Needless to say, I skipped and flip flopped on down the road. After that experience I wasn't much of a fan for having nothing between me and the road. To get my motorhead fix in, I switched over to boats. I figured that if I ever fell out of the boat, I'd have a much more forgiving landing surface.
Boat Pics
Obviously, I didn't really think of the time about the possibility of drowning (which hasn't happened of course). But in any case, I became a boater to the core! I love being out on the lake and feeling the motion of the ocean! To keep my head in the right place I've taken to taking tons of pictures over the past several years. With the availability of digital cameras and the ever increasing mega pixels, I've been taking more and more boat pics. I have tried quite a few places where I can post pictures including facebook but have a favorite. There is a site that has a good mix of features for sharing just about anything someone would want to ever post.
For example, to put your boating pictures into the site, first, go out and have yourself a great day on the water. Then, log into your free member account, click on the "My Albums" link in the My Site menu. Then click on the Create new Photo Album link at the top right corner of the page. Enter your album title, keywords, set who is allowed to see the pictures, and write a good description as to what the pictures are about. Press submit and you'll see your description on the next page with a link to "Add Multi Photos". What this means is that the site allows you to upload up to 1000 pictures at at time or up to 1 gb of pictures at a time. The site will resize all pictures to fit the site. This way if someone likes your pictures, they'll have to contact you in order to get a full sized picture. Simply good practice for a site don't you think? All your pictures will load into the photo album in about 20 minutes or less. If you're only doing 100 or so, bet on it only taking a minute or two unless you are on a dial up connection. I use the wifi on my phone and it's still very fast!
Boat Video
For those who want to see boat videos there are several different ways to go and find what you want to watch. First, simply use the search bar at the top of the pages. Or view the boat videos by category so that you can look up fishing or boats for sale or whatever you want. In addition to this, just above every video, there are links to the rest of the videos from that same album. Click the video count above any video, and you'll be taken to the page for that member account to view any and all publicly available videos. Just click the thumbnail that you like the best and it'll play.
Uploading YOUR Boat Video
Uploading is very simple. Go to the "My Videos" page either from the pull down menu above or on the left if you are already looking at your own pages. Then just as with the albums link, click add new video at the top right corner of the page. That will open a popup or new window with a small form with a browse button. Click browse, select your video file and click upload. The form shows the percentage uploaded. Once it get's to 100%, the site will process the video into the site and come back to the same upload form. Then select another video to upload! And another, and another. Your videos will only be seen by you till you title them, set the access restrictions and set the album and description. Just find your way back to the My Videos page and all your uploaded videos will be there waiting to be updated with the right informaiton.
Boats For Sale
The site is really for anything boating. Party Boating, Yacht Photos, Lake Photos & More. And when all these great features are combined, any member can create the best classified ads around. So to see a really great ad of a boat which combines these two types of media, check out what their classified ads look like. Here is a 1998 Bayliner Avanti 4085 for sale or listed as more of an example ad. Any member can create this level of listing with both any amount of text, pictures, and video all completely free of charge. Now, if you are fine with having your ads show up in any order with all the free ads, you can leave it as a free ad. Otherwise, if there is some urgency to selling your boat, you may if you choose to list it with a higher than free service level to rank your ad closer to the top of every list or search that would include your boat. All boats and searches for that matter are sorted by service level in descending order. So essentially the people who pay the most for their listings will get the most exposure for their ads.
The site I use for my boating pictures and where you can see everything I've posted is www.hotboatdeals.com/dotcomd/
Another cool feature that the site has is it's boat forum. Here anyone can start a new forum topic, comment on anyone elses topic and get their two cents in. The site owners however are very serious about keeping the topics clean and do not allow any fighting. So if you're a troublemaker, you might as well just stay away. Getting into trouble could be cause for your account being disabled. That's one of the things I like about it. They don't put up with the bs like other sites do.
