Livelook.tv Blog

We’re pleased to announce a update to the Livelook user interface (UI). The new design should make navigation in the site more uniform. It also gives us room to expand features with the tabbed navigation style. The screen layout has been opened up to a wider layout as we noticed most of our visitors are on modern equipment. This will allow us more freedom in page layout and more space to make things easier to see.

Thanks to the team for pulling off this update. We hope you like the new look.

We would love to hear your feedback and thoughts, just drop us a line here.

Here’s one last look at the old site. Compare to the new site here.

If you like mountain scenes this is a nice one of the Dolomite mountains in Italy. http://www.garnidelta.com has produced two high quality cams with fine views. Click to see the image gallery with some impressive sunset views and interesting cloud formations.

Livelook has over 75 webcams located in Italy. Click to see all the cams on a map.

Some excellent webcam views are turning up of Melbourne, Australia. I’m really becoming partial to webcams built using standard cheap digital cameras and Melbournephotos.net.au has come up with a terrrific wide angle view of Melbourne using a standard digital camera. The owner, Daniel Vogel, has even thoughtfully blurred out the are of the photo pointed toward neighboring apartments. The image quality is terrific.

OMNIConnect in Melbourne hosts a series of webcams with a very nice interface based on the Apple Coverflow look. It lets you flow from one image to the next and has a nice last hour time-lapse feature. The image quality is very good and the display interface is really unique. It’s worth a look for sure.

Find other Melbourne webcams here on Livelook.com.

Some terrific live cams in Cape Town. I especially like the cam from Kapstadt.de! Great view of table mountain and the city of Cape Town.

http://www.kapstadt.de/livecam.htm

A normally very scenic view is from Midafricam.co.za but their cam has been down for maintenance lately. Let’s hope it’s back soon!

Another favorite is from the top of the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway and has a nice view when it’s clear.

Help raise money for a new webcam near Creede, Colorado at Ptarmigan Meadows webcam. I’ve seen websites in New England using the donation approach to fund a new live cam. A new company in Boulder has a nice idea for raising money so I thought I’d try it out.View the new Crowdfunder listing to contribute to see this view live!

Some webmasters attempt to stop direct linking with a hosting setting that displays an alternative image instead of the requested live image. The technique is described in this article.  This technique works but has the downside of blocking previews of the image for legitimate webcam search sites.  Imagine how much less useful Google would be if there was no summary text from a webpage in the search results.  A webcam listing with only a text search result doesn’t provide nearly as much information as a thumbnail preview image.An alternative idea that reduces bandwidth and still provides an image preview has been adopted by several leading sites. twopalms.com and mauiwindcam.com are great examples of sites who only allow access to the large size live image through their websites. They provide an alternative linking image URL that can be used by webcam search sites and others who wish to view a preview in some other type of device. A description of the linking technique is here from Maui Wind Cam. The provided image is below. It provides a semi-updated preview of the live conditions, identifies who owns the image and gives an incentive to visit the main site. This is a great way to insure your copyright and draw visitors to your main site while still providing a preview of your content.