New morguefile is upon us.

Last week we launched the new morguefile.com. Everything is running smooth (with a small exception of outgoing mail, an issue we are still working on). This version was built entirely on cakephp and hosted on Amazon Web Services. The previous site was last updated in 2007 and it was due for an overhaul. In fact the original code went as far back as 2001. (I orignally had the idea for morguefile in 1998).

This time when I sat down to envision what a new site would look like I had two goals in mind. First was to build the “minimal viable product”. What would morguefile look like if I wanted to find photos, or upload and share photos with designers. Add to that the interaction with the fun and amazing people of the morguefile community.

And two, besides what was the very minimum for finding free photos, was to make it more like a game for the photographers. We added likes, favorites and ranks as well as a the ability to follow users and view their activity within the activity log to create a social interaction. We also are increasing our own soical media presence on facebook and hopefully I can reintroduce guess the photo as a facebook game.

There was also a smaller third component that I see as a growing trend currently. News aggregation pioneered by startupus like flipboard. The new site has a news aggregator bolted onto the bottom of the homepage. Its not really part of a minimal viable product and there has been discusion should we even have it. It is a gamble and we’ll see if its worth having on morguefile or moving it to a separate site.

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