Exposing Myself a Little
Not like that, you sickos.

My Flickr account is really my "everything photo dump," a mix of travel, fun, family, and artsy photos; this is fine and good and Flickr is well suited for that broad purpose, but I'm thinking I should find someplace to put my specifically artsy photos to showcase them on their own, as a portfolio of sorts.

I was thinking about resurrecting my deviantART account, but when I looked at it today (I can't believe it still exists), my last journal post there reminded me of why I abandoned it to begin with:

Journal Entry: Wed Sep 6, 2006, 5:18 AM
I haven't bothered to post anything new to DA in a long time, because frankly, it's not worth it. When I post photos to Flickr and share them with the communities there, I can get dozens to hundreds of views in a matter of a week or two. I've only had Flickr a few months longer than my DA account (which I've had since July last year), and I've got 11,697 total photo views there. I've just 397 views of my deviations here on DA. Total. Ever.

DA is too made of too many closed circles of friends. If you're not in one of those circles, you're nobody. If you are, you still have no guarantees that anyone will ever look at your submissions. The search still sucks so it's impossible to get any external exposure, and there's nothing here that really fosters a community feeling.

So in short, don't expect anything new from me here.

I wonder if this has changed much since I left and if I should give it another shot, or if I should keep looking elsewhere and - in that case - would like to solicit some opinions about what might be good or where I should look.

Part of the problem I think is that maybe I'm not sure what I want out of such a showcase-site. I like the community-orientedness of Flickr, but I think most sites that would enable me to show off my photos would likely have even less of a community around it than DA.

I could set up a website or photoblog on my home server easily enough (it should work well for this now that I've upgraded the RAM from the factory-installed 512 MB to a relatively whopping 2 GB), but I still wouldn't know how to get it "out there" in terms of exposure.

Suggestions? Advice? Recommendations? Solutions? Bueller?