Posted by Fingers on February 01, 2004 at 18:38:23:
OK - this is as close as I come to spam, but I once checked with Cocco and she said it would be OK.
I've been a member of Coccozella's since the time when the only way you could join was to send in photos. You would then receive a "secret" url to get in. Some time later I toyed with the idea of starting a website. I might as well make my hobby pay for itself, right? I asked Cocco for advice. The advice was: "It's going to be a lot of work." The second piece of advice was: "It's going to be even more work than that". How right she was.
Webweaver learned how to use Front Page (don't do that!), we signed up with CCBill (good move) and their hosting company (ok move) put up 6 pages of 50 photos and have posted at LEAST 50 photos a week since that time. We have a little over 12,000 photos up now, and probably 10,000 of them were shot by me.
We just loaded our 200th update to the site, and I just e-mailed more than my 200th submission to Coccozellas. Cocco, PixelDust, MacMan, Nomad and others have been VERY helpful. We're now hosted on Cocco's server. I've sent 10 out of every 50 pictures posted here to Coccozella. If you do a searach for Fingers in the box above, and ask it to give you 100 results you'll get 52 (it only gives 100 lines). In reality there are well over 200 Fingers galleries, but you have to search by event to find them all. If you want to search for them they are:
Mardi Gras - New Orleans, LA(February/March)
Arizona Art Show - Phoenix AZ(February)
Laughlin River Run - Laughlin, NV (April)
Bay to Breakers - San Francisco, CA (May)
CA Motorcycle Classic - CA (May)
Havasu / Parker Strip / Sandbar / Colorado River - Arizona (May/July/Sept)
Salt River - Phoenix, AZ (May/Sept)
Redwood Run - Piercy, CA (June)
Crawdad Festival - Isleton, CA (July)
Dyke March - San Francisco (June)
Gay Pride - San Francisco (June)
Country Fair in Oregon (July)
Over the Line Tournament - San Diego, CA (July)
Love Parade - Berlin - (July)
Up Your Alley - San Francisco (July)
ABATE of Indiana Boogie - Indiana (July)
Breast Freedom Day - Berkeley, CA (September)
Folsom Street Fair - San Francisco, CA (September)
Exotic Ball - South San Francisco, CA (October)
Zone Ball - Sacramento, CA (October)
Halloween in the Castro - San Francisco, CA (October)
In addition, a few Cocco regulars have donated some shots
Gulfport Blowout - MS (May) Arkodog
Easy Rider Rodeo - Chillicothe, OH - not credited
Fantasy Fest - Key West FL (Oct) CeMor
We could not keep up with the Mardi Gras shots we have (I've got a 3 year backlog on Flash4Us posting them once a month) so we opened a second site, MardiFlashers which has all of our Mardi Gras pictures. It has very few members, but almost pays for the air fair to New Orleans. We'll have gone to each Mardi Gras since our first in 1998.
In the beginning we would send the 50 picture upload over our 22.8k dialup modem. We'd get up in the morning to discover the server had dropped and would have to do it all again. Life is much easier with broadband. More people have contacted us hoping their picture was on line than wanting to have their picture removed (we honor both requests). My most recent request was from a woman who was in the Redwood Run Wet T contest in 2002 and flashed me at The Crawdad Festival in 2003.
I'm always on the lookout for new events and scan the Hot Tub and other boards for news. If all goes well look for pictures from Austin's Carnival Brasilieros soon. Events on my wish list include The Columbus Day Regata, Spring Break on South Padre Island, Party Cove on Lake of the Ozarks, Beer Can Beach in Chico, CA and The Testical Festival in Montana. I don't know when I'll get to any of them, but you never know, and new events pop up all the time. Cocco's Events List is as good as any, and it's updated all the time!
You can count on continued regular weekly submissions to Cocco's, but I hope you can find the time to wander over to Flash4Us and MardiFlashers and check out our free galleries on the Free Samples, Recent Past Updates and Upcoming Galleries pages.
Thanks!
Fingers