Do you have a profile / photo site (re: old school, non-social media) for your bjd's?

Well, OK I really don't have a doll site precisely but my Flickr site
is exclusively doll photos and each of my dolls has an album page
there. Tom Beach

 

My site just holds my latest photo story series, a few random stories, and some random photos.

BJD Stories

 

I just have an instagram page for my 2 girls. I like how I can upload photos of them sharing them with fellow collectors and have it seperate from my own private account. The insta is: gmd_bjd13

 

My Flickr has albums for individual dolls, no profiles though.
guyelfkin’s albums | Flickr

And they're not all on there yet

Teddy

 

@TomB are all those beautiful Matryoshka dolls yours? Wow. Such a collection.
@Teddy I'm so jealous of your organization!
@gracemary13 I'll get an instragram acct so I can check yours out. That sounds like a good idea, indeed.

Sadly, such as I have have gone fallow the last few years as house remodel has taken precedence over Wiishu-time, but such as I have is here, altho it is part of an equally neglected and unkempt blog.

Wiishu’s Diary 2012 « Harmonies Of The Net

Wiishu also has his own facebook page, also sadly neglected. I have plans for sprucing up the lot, just no time so far...I'm still 30 photostories behind in processing. I've taken fast shots as Wiishu investigated and supervised the remodeling, but just haven't had time and energy to process them.

I very much want to make a section for each resin kid with real honest-to-god portraits of them rather than story snapshots, which have exceedingly indifferent quality. I really have no excuse for not doing so because I don't have very many...I'm hoping with my craftroom taking shape this summer, I'll be able to set up a good lighting area and do something more elegant for them online.

 

Hmm if your wanting to make a profile site for your bjds I would recommend just making a fb page
Here is mine ~ Tanya Welsh's Doll Collection (I guess it's still social media but it's better then the one off posts and it keeps everything bjd compiled together). I'd definitely recommend some sort of photo site for your bjds as it works as a bit of a history book when you scroll back and be like "oh i had that" or "ooh the doll family has grown! since [insert year]". Mines a bit of a moosh of various dolls as i collected others things before going into bjds

 

Don't be - the Flickr account was set up in a flurry of desperation when Photobucket started messing about with free accounts, and I transferred over a small proportion of the pictures I'd put haphazardly into my Photobucket accounts over a period of about 12 years.

Once I caved and paid to keep my Photobucket account untouched (because I didn't have time to transfer everything to Flickr straight away) the frantic transferring and organization pretty much halted and I'm currently only putting new pictures on Flickr now.

Teddy

 

That photobucket mess put me off the whole notion of trusting my pics to anyone. I put some up on Wiishu FB page (and my own) but for the most part, I just keep them on my own server.Problem with that is that most ppl feel safer (not surprisingly) going to a commercial site for viewing.

 

I had started to build one, but before I'd gotten very far into it the Profiles section here came along. I've been adding the crew to that instead.

Someday I may go back to the project of building my own, but for now I've shelved it. I don't take a lot of photos of my dolls anymore and the DoA profiles work perfectly well for basic information.

 

Have a website for my doll photos - Antique Lilac
I decided I needed a place to showcase my doll photos, like a personal doll photo album. There's also a Blog there where I'll share photos as I take them, or talk about what I'm working on. But to me the most important thing is the Favourite Photos section where there's albums from every year since I started.

I did get into facebook not that long ago, but I still prefer my own website for the majority of my photos. I'll post maybe a photo or two on social media, while the entire story is on my website.

The website also serves as the perfect photo hosting site for forums like this.

 

Who maintains your web site??

 

Weebly. I just use their free option.

 

I've been contemplating the thought of using some sort of online portfolio for my photos, as well.

Right now I'm using Instagram to share my photos, but I'd like somewhere that I can upload them in their original quality. The Instagram algorithm can also be quite frustrating sometimes. I've heard mixed reviews about Flickr, and am kind of on the fence about whether I want to create an account. A Weebly website doesn't seem like a bad idea, either.

 

IG, Flickr, Wordpress.

 

There’s a site called Airtable which is kind of like a spreadsheet but more. There’s different templates to use, but you might find it more useful as a catalog of your dolls+items, rather than a website, really.

There’s also tumblr as an option— there’s an ability to link to tags on your blog, it’s got easy templates to use and customise, and you can upload your photos directly to them.

 

I am building a doll profile website with weebly too!!

 

I’ve got a site. It’s linked via the image in my signature.

edited to add the actual address since sigs aren’t showing up on mobile for me:

http://ramendoodles.wixsite.com/justsomedollies

 

A part from the social media accounts (Twitter and Instagram) I keep on posting photos to Flickr and I've recently started a photo-blog on Tumblr.

 

This is such an oldschool thing by now, I'd wager a lot of people don't really understand what you mean! Gosh that makes me feel old. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr all count as social media to me, they're not the same thing as what you're describing. I don't have such a website myself, although I do have my own website I'm currently doing nothing with that I was debating turning into a more doll-focused site. It's been sad how many sites have been closed down over the years and the amount of knowledge and pictures that have been lost.

 

I have a free WordPress (the .com version, not the .org one) site where I started creating doll profiles. It's a joint venture with a friend, and she's a little shy about sharing her characters and our stories, so we haven't actually put it live yet. But I find their site easy to use, and they allow a good number of storage space for the free versions, so you can upload a pretty nice number of photos. Which isn't really that many, if you are just doing say, one or two profile pics per doll.
And their web builder tool is very nice as well. There are ads on pretty much every page for the free ones, but given that it's free, I don't mind that. The paid options let you do some different things on the back end, and remove the ads. And, I do like their technique -- if you ever let a plan expire, it downgrades to the free version, so anything you have there doesn't just disappear if you don't pay for it anymore.

I think a lot of websites have gone down over the years, because there weren't many free versions back in the day - mostly paid ones. All I remember is Geocities, which I think made a massive purge years back. The sad truth is, for anything hosted on private, paid-for websites, if someone decides to stop updating or paying for it, it's just gone. And as people leave the hobby, or just stop being so active, their sites will go down. Unless it's on stuff like all the different social media platforms (which hang onto content forever unless you delete it, or your account), it seems to be at-risk of disappearing one day if the owner decides not to keep it up.

 

Yes, I'm seeing a lot of responses that are essentially "well here's my social media page" :P I set up a page for my very first dolls in the hobby as a subpage on the website I had on...let me see...I want to say Freewebs? That's long gone now, unfortunately, along with the dolls. I browse a lot of old DoA threads (mostly researching or looking for owner photos of sculpts/companies that are old) and like checking out the links to those oldschool sites and seeing the ones that still work is a cool bit of nostalgia. If I launch a freestanding website for any of my creative work in the future it might be nice to host a little dolls page but it's not really worth the effort or investment to me right now.

I've seen a lot of Japanese doll hobbyists and OOAK sculptors still maintaining individual sites, though.

 

ETA: I let th domain lapse, couldn’t afford it. Back to http://ramendoodles.wixsite.com/justsomedollies

I dunno if anyone would be interested, but I revamped my site and have my own domain now

www.justsomedollies.com

 

My website is the 'old school' kind. I do have a Blog on there too, but my favourite parts are the Favourite Photos from each year, which have all the doll photos and stories from that particular year. The site is hosted by Weebly, and I put everything together myself. Each year also has albums with 'Behind the Scenes' shots, and there's a whole Tutorials section with free patterns and instructions on making stuff. Antique Lilac

 

Reviving this thread from the dead because I've just started a very basic site on Neocities, and would love to see more BJD sites pop up on there. As someone who spent a lot of their childhood building websites to show off site adoptables, this has been very nostalgic and fun for me.

The Hartwood

I keep thinking about maybe trying a webring setup, or some other kind of directory, if there's enough personal pages around. I miss seeing homebrew sites like this.

 

I second neocities, it’s a wonderful place that you can make your own site on.

I don’t have a dedicated site for my bjds, though I do have a section for photography of them.

 

Cryptid - there are a few BJD folk on Neocities. I've linked to a couple of them on the links page at my doll blog. One of them runs a BJD webring and has a lot more BJD links in their links page than on mine. There may be more webrings out there.
I'm always looking for BJD-centric websites and blogs (not social media) to link, so I'm happy to add anyone's site to my links page. It's about time I updated it anyway!

It's not quite what the OP is asking - but I have a doll blog on my personal domain, here -

| Sky River Dolls

I'm using Bludit as my blog engine, it's simple to set up and much leaner/faster than Wordpress. (And the backend relies on flat files/folders, not a complicated MySQL database). The photo upload function may be too simple for some people, but I much prefer it. I have a bit of web development knowledge so I was able to take a theme template and customize it for my tastes.

The blog is great for posting my photos and BJD ramblings, but isn't so great for doll profiles and custom code. Eventually I will make a separate website for doll profiles and worldbuilding.

 

I keep wondering if I should bunch of basic guide stuff and do a 'how to do make your own site, free of Flickr' post.

Good to know there's more people on there; searching by the BJD keyword didn't seem to turn up much, when I tried it. I'm still working on site link graphics for my site; it's something of a crash course in pixel art.

 

I have been wanting to have my own site dedicated to my dolls for a while now, especially one that is not on a social media platform so that I could have more creative control. I bought my domain name last year, but only got around to working on this project last week, but excited to share my page. Of course I do a search on DoA, and there's already a thread that I can join.

Halcyon Straits

Similar to @aihre, I decided to go with [heavily] customizing a template. I am using HUGO as my static site builder and CloudFlare Pages as my host since on their free tier, you can have 20,000 files up to 25MB each which would let me load a ton of images.

It's still a WIP, it may look different next time I update. Adding a links to other pages will be next on my docket!

 

I just did a bit of a revamp on my site, focusing solely on my minis. I’ll add more galleries later but for now you can read about my girls and there are links to their Facebook profiles and Instagram tags too.

http://ramendoodles.wixsite.com/justsomedollies

 

That's a really unique way to set up the galleries and profiles, I had fun cycling through and going 'that is a HERD of Dollfies.'

 

I've just started up my own site again after a long time. It's quite basic but I wanted to get something up, then flesh it out later.

I'm a big fan of owning my own content so I'm happy to see this thread! (I do use Instagram etc, but there you're at the mercy of whatever changes the platform decides to make. E.g. suddenly you have to make an account to view content, or they change the algorithm... etc. If you aren't paying for it, you and your engagement are the product...)

Anyway, here's my site!

Small-time Hijinks

(Making websites is my day job, so I used tools I like best, but which might be out of reach if you can't code. Sanity and Eleventy. I can really recommend Sanity for any site that's heavy on images.)

 

I have WordPress and I publish there doll stories (I'm just getting started), props tutorials...

 

I don't know why it never occurred to me to make something like a self-contained photo site for my doll photos, especially since I have several personal websites for other things like illustrations.

Decided to create a doll photo website really quickly with google sites when I saw this thread today, so here's how it's going so far: (meltychoco-bjd website)

A simple photo-hub without limitations is pretty nice, it feels sort of like looking through a physical photo album (do people still use those?)

 

I have a website for my dolls (not only BJDs but all of my dolls): Pine Island Dolls

 

I have a Neocities! I made it after several back-to-back "my favorite social media is shutting down" scares when I got really tired of the whole thing. Aside from the doll servers I'm on on Discord, this is the only place where I bother posting all my doll photos anymore (and Discord only gets them first because it's really easy to spam photos there ). For me, social media exists solely for mindless scrolling and hunting for doll sales at this point.
Doll Directory - Oculae.Net

The site's really a personal site for all my stuff, but the dolls section is what gets updated the most and is the most complete!

 

I enjoy websites about dolls! I also have my own.I created a website for my doll project a few months ago upon returning to the hobby. (Link in my signature)

 

I have a NeoCities linked in my signature.
Check out my doll page here! I also made a free-to-use DoA button if anyone wants to use it! I'm also going to go through and link back everyone here on my main page!

I JUST got access to an actual camera, so I'm also making a Flickr for easier doll picture organization. I also self-host my own domain, so I could do something fun with that.... I could make a doll BBS or something fun like that hypothetically?!
Maybe we should bring back email lists? I'm still a n00b to this hobby, so what do I know

Anyways, yeah, let me know if there's anyone else who has a 88x31 button and/or wants to be linked back!
EDIT:
I now have a doll gallery on my other website^^
IDK if I like it yet though... hm

 

If anyone in this thread would be interested, I've made a webring for ball-jointed dolls: ball-jointed.club

I made it because I wanted to make it easier for the BJD community to find personal doll sites that are not part of social media - social media has good findability built-in, but personal sites can be hard to find.

In case you haven't come across a webring before: it's totally free to join, and all you need to provide is the URL and name of your site (which should be in some way about BJDs, of course). I don't make any money off it (and there will never be any ads on it).

I see a few people from this thread have already signed up, which is really nice! And if anyone has any questions, feel free to message me here on DoA, or through my site.

 

@Rhian Ahhh a webring like in the good old days! I think this is the push I needed to finish the Neocities site. I'll join soon!

 

This thread inspired me to make a Neocities site for my BJDs and their stories. It's still definitely a work in progress, but here it is, if anyone is interested:

https://aconiteprophet.neocities.org/

(also I am very new to and bad at html, so if anyone has any tips or suggestions, please feel free to comment them! I'm still trying to figure out how to add those fun sparkly moving texts that I remember from old sites in the early 2000s.)

 

My usual go-to is the W3Schools site, as it's huge and includes basic HTML and CSS both. For doing some things, though, I've found you need to just whack at Neocities and Google for home-grown HTML and CSS guides until you luck into somebody explaining how to do what you want. IE, searching 'neocities how to do sparkle text' on Google got me this site with a generator (on Neocities, even).

 

@prophet I used a layout generator for my site: layout generator | petrapixel. Made things a lot easier!

 

These are both super helpful; thank you so much!! I really appreciate it!