I haven’t posted a blog entry about blogging in awhile.   Nothing more boring, really.  But sharing the jumble of ideas in my head is sometimes an effective way of sorting it all out.

As you may know, Oksana and I are gearing up to leave on a round-the-world trip and I’ve been busy setting up a new web site for it.  I don’t expect the new site to be 100% done until we start off on our journey (on, or around, July 1^st,) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t ready to be seen.  Consider this our website’s “soft launch.”  Please, take a look:  www.postcardvalet.com.

Setting up that website was a lot harder than I thought it’d be!  I spent a lot of time switching over my web hosting and domain name to Dreamhost and, once I figured out their new control panel, I set about importing my blog’s database.  One of my primary goals in this whole endeavor was to keep posting to my personal blog (A Midgett Blog, this one)  while having the new, travel-only blog (Postcard Valet) simply pull pertinent posts from the same database.  The Domain Mirror plug-in solved that fairly easily, but when I decided to buy the Postcard WooTheme, I ran into all sorts of difficulties.  A friend, Pat, is helping me smooth out some of the kinks, but I suspect there will always be a few things I can’t do, just because I need each entry to display correctly on both blogs.

If you take a look at Postcard Valet, you’ll notice that I’ve already seeded the site with a number of travel-related blog posts from A Midgett Blog.  That should at least give anyone that stumbles upon the site an idea of what to expect.  I’ve spent some time working on the FAQ (a great place to start if all this is news to you!) and Contact pages, too, but there’s still work to do on the About This Site, Archives, and a yet-to-be-created “Subscribe to the Podcast” page.

In the next week or so, I hope to find enough time (and knowledge!) to get our podcast listed in the iTunes directory (currently the “Podcast (iTunes)” link in the sidebar only links to my own RSS feed – but I think it works if you want to subscribe early.)  Oksana and I also plan to record video introductions for the About This Site page as well as keep plugging along on our “practice” video podcasts.

Speaking of.  Tomorrow will be the start of a regular schedule of postings, beginning with a video podcast we’ve been working on about the Sydney Opera House.  Hopefully that will kick off a new schedule.  From now until July 1^st, I’m going to try to commit to the following:

• First Monday of the month: A new video podcast episode.
• Every Wednesday: A written blog entry. (This may be a travel story, a short update on our travel preparations, or possibly even website-related stuff like the “How to Subscribe” or a “What is a Podcast” page.)
• Every Friday:  A “picture with a story” blog entry.  I think of this as “Photo Friday,” and it will likely follow the same format I’ve used in the past.

Considering all the packing and planning we have to do in the next three months (on top of our full time jobs!) I think that’s an ambitious schedule.  If you like what you see, do me a favor and keep me on task.  Any feedback you give, criticism or praise, translates directly into valuable motivation.

So, please, take a look at our new website, try to see past the rough edges for now, and let me know if there’s anything that’s missing or that we could be doing better.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2010. | Permalink | No comment |

When Oksana and I got serious about planning our year-long trip, I started bookmarking all the intriguing travel sites as I came across them.  I mean, of course, we’ll see the pyramids in Egypt, walk along the Great Wall of China, and visit the Taj Mahal… assuming we find ourselves wandering anywhere near those places, that is.  But what about those things that hardly anyone even knows about?  The fireflies of Thailand that blink in perfect synch, the starling congregations on Ot Moor, or the Darvaza crater in Turkmenistan?  The things you’ve never heard of are so easy to forget…

While we’re traveling, I want to try to update a map of our progress around the world.  Ideally, some combination of a GPS unit and the Google Maps API would automate the process for us, but at the very least, I’ll update the website myself just to let people know our current location.

This week, I’ve been playing with the Google Maps interface, just to see what I could whip up without any real work.  The results are pretty cool and I liked them enough to go ahead and create a new page on my website.  There’s a permanent button up above on my navigation bar, but here, let me make it easy; Check it out: Destinations.

It’s a good start; there are already a few dozen entries on the map, and I still haven’t quite depleted my store of travel bookmarks.  Go ahead, click around.  If your sense of wonder about the world is at all similar to mine, you’ll probably end up following a few of the handy links.

Already we’re visualizing how best we can use this map.  Oksana has recommended that we change the colors of the pins to green as we visit each site – a great idea that will very quickly show what we’re up to.  Also, as more pins are put on the map, I can’t help but notice when they start to cluster.  I imagine that whenever we face a fork in the road, we’ll take the path that travels towards the biggest group of pins!

If you have a minute, take a look at the map, down Argentina way.  See how we’re using different types of pins already?  We’re going to use the “person” icon to remind us where we should go to visit friends and family, the “film” icon to point towards our own video podcasts (I used the Transient Books video as an example), and the little “camera” icon to share the photos we take.  Google makes it easy to embed YouTube videos, image tags, etc.  This could be a pretty neat document when we’re done.

As I said, right now we have a couple dozen points of interest already saved on the map.  I’ve got enough ideas – mostly common one, but a few more  ”off the beaten path” ones, too – to round out the first hundred or so, but I hope to have at least two or three hundred before we set off.  We don’t want to pass right by something cool just because we forgot to write it down!

If you’ve been somewhere really neat, heard of a place that sparked your imagination, or even if you simply come across something on the internet and it reminds you of our upcoming trip, please, please, please, send me a link!  I’d love to consider it for one of our Destinations!

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2009. | Permalink | No comment |

So, 2008.

Yeah, I didn’t get as much writing done over the break as I’d hoped. Instead, I fiddled around with WordPress a lot, both on my own sites and someone else’s. If you’re the type of person that likes to read this via the RSS feed – And why shouldn’t you? The new version of WordPress tried to stop me from including the whole entry, but I fixed it. I got your back! – you might click through and take a quick look at the new design. I frittered away a lot of time on it while procrastinating. Hope you like it the one time you see it.

Looking over my blog’s web statistics for 2007 was enlightening, though I doubt any of you care. Just a hair shy of 50,000 “unique” visitors last year. Well, not really. That statistic resets every month, so there’s no telling. But still… scary on so many levels. Who are all you people?

On a related note, I did an ego search on Google the other day for the word “midgett.” This blog is third on the list after Midgett Realty and the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter! That’s insane. “Arlo” shows up on the second page, but I doubt I’ll ever climb to the stratospheric reaches of Arlo & Janis and Mr. Guthrie.

What else is new? Hey, remember my idea to create a hard-bound book out of all these blog entries? Well, once I got to work on it, I realized publishing is harder than it looks. Specifically, proofing, editing, and designing the layout for a manuscript is a bitch. I scaled the project back, however, and I’m almost ready to try self-publishing a volume encapsulating just the first year of the blog. If it turns out, I’ll move on to 2004 soon. Right now I have a nice, big Word file – boy do I love Office 2007, by the way – with copious footnotes, a table of contents, and 4 or 5 appendices. Only thing holding me back is the foreword. Anyone want to write that for me?

Also, with the end of 2007, my first timeline was officially complete. I slapped up a new one for 2008, but my life has been boring so far; nothing to report. I went ahead and archived the old one, though it makes me feel bad that I didn’t write about many of the things on there. Guess it’s time for a quick synopsis:

Back in April, Oksana received news from her brother that the four-bedroom apartment she inherited from her parents had finally sold. It had been on the market for a couple years because we could afford to stand firm on the asking price. When a local fisherman – local to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, not Juneau – expressed interest in it, he turned out to be quite dedicated. He was more than willing to pay the full asking price, but until the summer fishing season was over, he couldn’t afford to. His solution, which we weren’t too crazy about, was to give us half the money up front. I guess they don’t do escrow in that part of Russia. 

Even though there was no way we were going to get the full payment before summer, April was the only month Oksana could even think about flying to Russia. Work would be ramping up in June, her MBA classes continued through summer and fall – April was her window of opportunity.

So, Oksana enjoyed a little impromptu visit with her brother. She was only gone two weeks, but she managed to help her brother empty out their parents’ apartment, sign it over to him (so that he could complete the sale later), change her “official residence” to her brother’s address, and begin wiring back $5,000 each day – the maximum international banking transaction allowed.

I pretty much stayed at home and continued not knowing how to speak Russian.

Not even a month after her return, we packed up again and flew down to San Francisco. My old college roommate, Noah, was about to graduate with an MBA from Berkeley. He didn’t know we were coming; his wife had deviously planned our invitation without him. With discipline nearing heroic levels, both sides kept the secret, and on a fine Saturday morning, Julie went out to get “balloons for the party” and came back with Oksana and me instead.

The look on his face – politely described herewith as “speechless” – when we walked into his house was alone worth the trip.

Sadly, we were in a rush. We spent the rest of that Saturday playing tourist at Pier 39, Sunday at Noah’s graduation and after-party, and Monday on the flight back to Juneau. Oksana, perhaps feeling a bit guilty about taking time off for her emergency Russia trip, still put in a half day at work when we got back.

Hanging out with Noah’s family was great, though, and I’m particularly proud of the fact that I was able to present him with a graduation card signed by almost every one of his former roommates and coworkers.

In June, Oksana’s life went into overdrive. The auto dealership she works for purchased another dealership and her workload increased significantly. She used to be the sole accountant for one dealership and now she’s juggling the finances for two. While going to school full time for her MBA.

It’s been seven months and she’s still working just as hard as when the dealerships merged. Excepting the vacations I’ve forced her to take with me, I honestly don’t think there’s been a single weekend where she hasn’t gone in to work for at least one day. Her weeks have gone from 40 hours to 60 at least, sometimes pushing 80 when it’s time to close the month. I have no idea how she manages schedule in time for studying – if I see her before next June, I’ll be sure to ask.

She did get a raise for the extra work – a 25% salary increase – which would be a goodly pay bump in any other situation. But I’m still trying to figure out how twice as much work translates into a quarter more pay.

As if she didn’t have enough to think about, right when work was getting stressful, Oksana received a call from the FBI. Here’s a hypothetical for you: Someone with a local number leaves a message on your voice mail identifying himself as an FBI agent… What do you do? Oksana said she was very busy (which was actually true) and that she would call him back.

Later, we looked up the local FBI number from the web page of the division office in Anchorage. Oksana called and got the same guy who left a message on her machine. Guess he was on the level.

Turns out, he wanted to ask her some questions; the kind that you apparently can’t ask over the phone. She told him that she wasn’t comfortable meeting him alone, and wanted me to go with her. He tried to talk her out of it. “It’s just a few questions.” “There’s nothing to worry about.” “There’s no reason for your husband to be there.” “Is it the language thing?” Oksana stuck to her guns and he finally relented. I’m proud of her; if the FBI tried to push me around, I’d probably be all, like, “Yessir, whatever you want, sir. No quiero ir a Guantanamo.”

Anyway, she scheduled the interview for a few weeks down the road so we could have plenty of opportunity to wonder what it was all about. Was there a problem with her upcoming citizenship? Did we trip some sort of red flag with our money transfers from Russia? Had her father been some sort of international espionage agent, working to bring down the U.S. government with scheming acts of terrorism?

Actually, we didn’t think that last thing at all, but damn if that wasn’t what it was about!

The interview itself was very informal, and I don’t know how much my presence influenced that. A local agent, casually dressing in jeans, a flannel shit, and an Eddie Bauer fleece vest, sat us down in a cluttered office/storage room on the 9th floor of the Federal Building. He started by confirming that Oksana was who he thought she was – 26, female, from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, etc., etc. He then explained that he was simply asking routine questions that the head office had sent down, that their international espionage section had sent down. The key point seemed to be, “Are you the daughter of one Boris Gregorievich Kadachigov?” which she was, but when she supplied her father’s birth date, the whole interview essentially came to a stop. “Oh,” said the agent. “Okay, must be someone else, then.” Just when the conversation sounded like it was going to get interesting, too!

The whole mood in the room lightened up after that. The agent, obviously through with the formalities of the interview, explained to us why they sometimes have to follow up on espionage leads even after a person dies (because the person replacing a spy in an embassy, say, will often also be a spy), and Oksana, for her part, became less defensive. Me? I pretty much just sat there and continued not saying anything at all.

We left the office feeling relieved. Nothing to concern us, especially since Oksana was about to receive her U.S. citizenship. But since then, we’ve heard rumors from more than one source that information about foreign nationals is still being collected – locally – under the authority of the Patriot Act. Scary amounts of information, too.

Oh, well. I guess we’ll just have to make extra sure to fill out all the necessary paperwork if we ever want to sell a rogue nuclear submarine on eBay.

In June, I got talked into going to Anchorage for an ultimate Frisbee tournament. Alaska Airlines was offering a huge mileage plan discount, so my flight only cost 10,000 miles and about $5 in taxes. Good deal; made chipping in for the hotel and rental car easy on the wallet.

This was my third ultimate tourney in Anchorage and the first one that actually qualified for regionals. Not that we were competing, we just went for fun. We brought some good players with us, picked up a couple more on the sidelines, and proceeded to have a good time despite the consistently rainy weather.

There were ten teams on the roster, and you could pretty evenly divide them between “serious” and “fun.” I believe the official rankings put us fifth at the end of 2 days (and 6 or 7 matches.) I like to think of our team as the one that dominated the fun teams, but I wouldn’t argue if you told me we just got whipped by the serious ones.

In August, Oksana and I went to PAX, of course. I wrote about that in detail, but only mentioned in passing that the follow-up to that trip was a quick jaunt to the East Coast. We spent a week with my mom’s side of the family on the beach in Nags Head.

We had ambitions of comparative HDTV shopping while we were there, but we pretty much just stayed tethered to the beach house. The weather was near perfect and the ocean uncommonly warm (seriously, like 80 degrees warm.) We spent time with family, cooked big meals, and ate peaches. A tiny bit of excitement was generated when a large sea turtle of some sort, obviously dead and drifting for some time, washed up headless right in front of the cottage. Mostly, though, I stayed in the hammock and read books; the mark of a great vacation.

And you know, barring a divorce, I’ll probably never get to grow a goatee as long as I did last year. That should be documented, shouldn’t it? I’m glad you agree. Here’s your picture of me bringing sexy back: 

And that’s about it for 2007. Next up, more about Australia. Just as soon as I quit fiddling with the site…

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2008. | Permalink | No comment |

Time to highlight a few minor changes to my blog.

The first is a new image at the top of the page.  It’s a timeline of what I consider to be notable events in my life throughout 2007.

Why?  Glad you asked.  Firstly, I want it to be a supplement for this blog’s content.  Ideally, I’d like to make the events clickable, so that they’ll take you to specific blog entries.  I mean, if these things that happen are important enough to highlight front and center, I should be writing about them, right?  You might notice that some of the past events don’t have entries; that’s because I’m lazy and need to get back to writing.  You might also notice some of them are in the future; that’s because they’re things that I know I’m going to want to write about this year.

There’s another reason I like the idea of creating yearly timelines.  How many times have not been able to figure out when something important happened in your life?  Hmmm, that first road trip across the U.S.  It was in… um, well, I was in college, so it’d have to be after ’90, but it was before I moved to Juneau in ’94… um…  It’d be cool to be able to quickly look up that information, but beyond that, I think it would be incredible, later on in life, to have one of these for every year.  Pass it on to the grandkids, you know?  Oh, wow, granddad met his wife in Venezuela and then proposed to her exactly a year later in Costa Rica!

Keeping on task with this project will be hard enough.  Working backwards 35 years will be much more difficult.  Wish me luck.

More esoteric subscription/blogging software information follows:

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve switched my RSS feeds to Feedburner.  I’ve seen plenty of other sites use their service, but never actually looked at what they offered.  To be honest, I can’t say that I prefer subscribing to Feedburner feeds, but I do like what they do for the content producer’s side.  With just their free service, I can track the number of subscribers to my blog and see how many people click through to my website.  I think the number of subscribers reported is rather suspect, but at least it’s a rough gage.  And for the record, I don’t mind one bit if RSS subscribers don’t click through to my site — it’s not like I have any advertising or anything.  I fully support those that want to read entirely within their RSS aggregators; It’s my preferred method, so why not?

Let me know if you notice anything wonky with the new feed(s).  If things go well, I might even fiddle around a bit more and enable the podcast feature for the rare video files I sandwich into my entries.

And, as always, if you don’t use RSS to keep up, there’s the fallback option.  You can get an e-mail every time I update my blog by clicking the “get e-mail updates” link at the top of this web page. 

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | No comment |

Have you noticed, lately, the subtle shift in the voice of my writing?  I have.  My Ideal Reader has changed, and I don’t know who exactly I’m writing for, anymore.

Tinker with a blog long enough and you’re bound to see your readership grow and change.  I’ve had friends tell me funny stories about how they stumbled across my website.  Juneau’s small, but big enough that I’ve been introduced to people that already knew something about me because of what I’d written here.  I keep an eye on my referral logs, and every month I’m surprised by something.  Google is by far my biggest referrer (likely because my logorrhea produces plenty of keyword matches), and its search strings are enlightening.  Probably the biggest spike I’ve ever had was when Steve Irwin died and hundreds of people hit my post on the Manta Rays of Hawaii.  I’ve even had a New York Times Bestselling author post a comment here (though, I admit, that’s a bit of a cheat.)

I love looking at the world map, seeing where all the incoming visitors are from.  Is that my friend from Japan?  Are those hits in Moscow someone I know?  What the heck are people from Eastern Europe doing reading my blog?  The point is, I can no longer pretend that what I write here is only read by a few friends and family.  Which is cool, actually.  I can deal with that.  I’m just struggling to find my Ideal Reader again.  If I can, it’ll make it easier to decide what I’m going to write about. 

I’ve thought about it, and rather than worry about who’s watching, I’ve decided to embrace the new readers.  I have no idea if my ping-pong thoughts will mean anything to anyone else, but as I see it, there’s no harm in putting (most of) them out there.

With that in mind, I installed a couple new WordPress plug-ins.  The first one should serve up a mobile version of my blog for cell phones and such.  Partly this is because I want to play with the data capabilities of my new phone, but it’s also because, believe it or not, someone actually requested it.  (Note to You-know-who-you-are: I expect you to read even the 15,000 word posts on your Blackberry!)

The other plug-in is more visible.  At the end of each entry (even in the RSS feed) there should be a new link called “Share This.”  I honestly don’t have any expectations for how this will be used, but after doing all that Web 2.0 thinking awhile back, it seemed like a worthy addition.  If you think something I post here is worth sharing, feel free to pass it on.  I’ve only played with the E-mail and Google Bookmarks part of Share This.  If you use any of the other services listed — Del.icio.us, Netscape, Technorati, Yahoo, etc. — give the plug-in a spin and let me know if it works.

I doubt anyone will Digg one of my posts, but if you want to, hell, I’m game.  Bring it on.  I’d love to see what a metric butt-load of internet traffic does to my server. (Just as long as it’s not pointing to one of the videos.  God forbid half a million people try to download Pimp my Couch!)

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2007. | Permalink | No comment |

I read that somewhere, but try as I might, I can’t seem to find a proper attribution.  Whatever.  It describes the interaction I have with my blog quite well.

In the last week, I’ve posted three entries.  Good.  That means this one can avoid being another pathetic ”Sorry I haven’t posted in a while” file to Google’s cache.  However, I’m still going to write about what I write about here.  Again.

As I look back over the archives, I see that I’ve barely averaged one entry a month over the past year.  My ego’s not so swollen that I worry for my readership; what bothers me is that I’m not writing about things that I will want to read about in years to come.  One of the things I enjoy about my blog is that I can go back and read about things that happened before.  I’m reminded of the thoughts and feelings I had at the time.  Usually, that’s a good thing.  That’s the “have written” part I like.

A Midgett Blog seems to break down into just a few categories:

• Stuff that happened to me (1, 2 , 3),
• Travelogues (1, 2, 3),
• Essay-like writing (1, 2, 3),
• Movie Reviews (a short-lived experiment),
• Creative writing (of which there is really only one example ), and more recently,
• Photography

I always wonder if the things I want to write about have a place on my blog.  When I created it 3 1/2 years ago, I appended the “sporadic and rambling by design” subtitle specifically so I wouldn’t have to worry about a theme.  Sometimes I wonder if what’s posted here is a little too sporadic and rambling.

One of my writing goals is to effectively communicate what I’m thinking.  Stephen King calls this telepathy; I like that.  Often, I use many words in pursuit of this goal.  (Too many?)

I’m off-contract until mid-January so I thought I’d change things up a bit while I have the free time.  For the next little while, I’m going to shoot for shorter entries.  I’m hoping this will have the added benefit of more frequent updates.  Hmmm…  Perhaps I’ll change my subtitle to “periodic and rambling by design…”

I’ve got plenty of topical ideas jotted down.  More photos, essay-worthy musings, overdue notes on my trip to Russia, maybe even a half-hearted stab at fiction…  For those few friends and family that are among my regular readership, if there are past entries or categories that you’ve particularly enjoyed (or other suggestions), well, color me curious.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2006. | Permalink | No comment |

I’ve become rather oblivious to the spam in my e-mail inbox – it’s just one of the necessary evils of online life. Comment spam, on the other hand, annoys the hell out of me. A few months ago, I implemented a quick hack on my blog that eliminated the worst of it, but in the last few weeks it’s built back up to time-consuming levels.

Good. I needed an excuse to change my back-end to the better-supported WordPress, anyway.

I got it up and running yesterday, converted over all my entries, and began the slow process of tailoring the new theme to suit my needs. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s far enough along to give you an introduction.

A few things to be aware of:

• This will be the last entry I post in the Greymatter software.
• Comments in GM have already been disabled.
• The actual GM site will probably remain online for “just-in-case” reasons.
• If you typically arrive to my blog via a bookmark, the URL shall remain the same: blog.arlomidgett.com.
• If you were receiving e-mail updates each time I posted an entry, there will be a void in your life. Might I suggest using the RSS or RSS-Comments feed, instead?
• That reminds me: The old RSS feed will no longer update, either. Should probably replace it in your aggregator, yeah?

• Importing entries from one blogging package to another is not without its problems!
• Some of the punctuation from my GM entries got scrambled when it was ported over (because WordPress converted the encoding from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, if you really want to know.) I could probably fix it by re-importing, but I found a slightly less-tedious method – it’ll just take time as I apply it to each entry. In the meantime, if you read an older entry with a “, –, or, ‘, well… expect to see a lot of question marks.
• I’m not crazy about the default archiving that WordPress employs. At least I figured out how to create a post-by-post listing in the archive index – The link’s at the top of every page. Wish it also had the dates, though.

Now that the “look n’ feel” of my blog is grossly out of step with the rest of my site, I’m interested to know what people think. Are there useful design elements or features that you miss from the old blog? If so, I’ll see if I can whip WordPress into shape.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2005. | Permalink | No comment |

Or, if you want to get technical about it, I made my first sale back in January.

Let’s go back to the real beginning. April 1st, 2004 was the day I posted the first image to my photoblog. The weeks leading up to that foolish day, I had been struggling mightily with the Greymatter software, trying to wring some sort of decent design out of it. I was happy with the final results, but the weekly process of uploading a new picture was, to put it simply, a pain in the ass. Lots of html code, lots of writing, lots of image preparation.

Still, I enjoyed doing it. I kept it up, posting one image a week, all the through late October. I wish I could blame the end-of-posting on the back-to-back business trips I took in late October and early November, but really, it was just another case of blog burnout.

So, there the site sat, forever displaying on the main page the last uploaded photo. Neglected but not forgotten – you can tell by the way I categorized the site on my main page’s redesigned index: “Optimistically Updated.”

And then, late in March, Oksana decided to start work on our taxes. While sifting through our small business’ records for the previous year, she encountered a suspect PayPal charge for $18. I didn’t know what it was off the top of my head, so while she looked over my shoulder, I logged into my account and checked its history. Problem solved.

Before I logged out, I noticed something – a balance in my account for 280-some dollars. What the heck? I followed some links and discovered that someone had placed an order for the Mendenhall Glacier Panorama print from my website almost two months prior!

I immediately scoured all my e-mail addresses that might be even remotely connected with the photoblog website… to no avail. I suspected one of two things had happened: Either PayPal screwed up or the message had been eaten by an over-aggressive spam filter. Either way, I was never notified.

The very next morning I sent an extremely apologetic message to the potential buyer. I told her that, even rushing things, it would still take at least a couple more weeks to fulfill her order. If she was tired of waiting, I would be happy to refund her money in full. I got an e-mail back that same day saying she was still interested.

I was relieved to hear that, but let me tell you: She couldn’t have picked a worse photo.

Of the reasons to create a photoblog, making money was low on my list. Much more important to me was having the structure and schedule in place to force me to sort and catalog my best photos. Some of the images I posted were poor scans, but I knew that if someone actually ordered something from the site, it would force me to take the time to rescan them, polish them up, and then archive the final – hopefully perfect – digital image.

The Mendenhall Glacier Panorama was a textbook example of an image that needed more work. Stitched from 13 photos by hand in PhotoShop, the original was nothing more than an experiment. A few friends saw it, though, either in the digital format or as some of the experimental poster-sized prints I had made at Ofoto, and they liked it a lot. Seeing it anew through their eyes, I thought it might be good enough to post on my photoblog.

With real money in the PayPal account, though, I took another look at it and decided it was a long way from being finished. Granted, other people might not have seen any problems with it, but my eye was always drawn to the blotchy colors in the sky and a few, still-noticeable stitching lines. I couldn’t, in good conscience, sell it for almost $300 like that.

As a matter or course, I archive almost everything, so it wasn’t hard to find the PhotoShop files of the original image on some old CD. Unfortunately, the final image had all the layers merged together and that made it nearly impossible to “correct” anything. I fiddled with some of the previous stages of the panorama – I had half a dozen different stages saved as .PSD files – but I soon realized that many of the worst errors had been created very early on in the process.

With building stress from a self-imposed shipping deadline, I finally decided to start from scratch with the original 13 images.

It took me about 6 hours, start to finish, to get it into a form with which I was happy. I still worried over a few things: The horizon wasn’t quite as level as in the first stitching, and a last-minute, impulsive color correction (a general lightening of the image and a very slight bump in saturation) had me second guessing myself. And because of a lack of photographic overlap between two of the original 13 images, there was still a strange gradient across one, tiny section of the sky. To tell the truth, I wasn’t “happy” with it so much as comfortable with it being “good enough.”

I showed it to Oksana, gained her approval, and uploaded it to Zazzle.com. Fortunately, I had taken copious notes when I had posted it to my photoblog and I had the exact sizes, colors, and paper quality ready to plug in. I was relieved to note that, in the six months since I had posted the image, Zazzle hadn’t increased their costs at all.

Though I had printed some items through Zazzle in the past, I never tried their high-end archival framing and matting service. I was fully aware that, if the quality wasn’t what I required, I might have to eat whatever slim profits I might make on this sale by ordering a second print from somewhere else. With time running out, I crossed my fingers and began the online ordering process.

And that’s when I kicked myself for not ordering a test print earlier. On my own order form, I had added a $35 shipping and handling charge which I figured would be more than enough to cover both the shipment to me and another shipment back to the buyer. Uh-uh. Zazzle wanted $49.99 minimum, $99.99 to expedite it, and to Alaska those were the sole options available.

Even though the expedited shipping would result in me paying money to sell this photo, I was willing to do it for this first sale. I was so worried that I wouldn’t be happy with Zazzle’s photo or frame quality that I wanted the security that the extra time expedited shipping would bring. Fortunately, Oksana talked me out of it. I placed the order at the $49.99 shipping price (7-10 days), e-mailed the buyer to inform her of her order’s status, and tried to forget about it for a week.

Nine days later, I came home from work to find a gigantic box on my doorstep – seriously, it was, like, 5ft x ft x 1 ft. I maneuvered it through the doorway in little herky-jerky steps and then let it sit, unopened, for at least an hour. Suddenly I was worried about what I might find inside. What am I going to do if Zazzle’s idea of a quality product doesn’t match my own? Did I over-brighten the final image? Oh, God, did I even remember to turn off that severe adjustment layer that allowed me to better see the stitch blends?

I didn’t actually get over my fears; I simply came to the conclusion that leaving the print in the box would be pretty stupid. After digging through a couple pounds of pink, Styrofoam peanuts, I finally dug out my 36″ x 8″ framed and matted print and It. Looked. Great!

It was hard to tell if the (admittedly very subtle) sky-stitch errors came through in the final product because of the texture on the paper – the same canvass-like texture that, in my mind, changed my picture from a photograph to a work of art. The brightening worked wonders – the shadow detail was much better than in the Ofoto prints. The mattes were laser-precise and their color, exactly as advertised, complimented the blues in the glacial ice well. The frame, though one of the least expensive models offered, was perfectly acceptable and the back side was even covered with black paper. With a wire already attached to each end of the backing, it was even ready to hang.

I was impressed. I only hoped the buyer would be, as well.

Never having sold a photograph before, I had to decide if and where I wanted to sign it. There wasn’t really any way to sign the textured paper and I was hesitant to sign the front of the matte – what if I messed up? That left the back, but it was all black…

Oksana and I brainstormed for a bit and we finally decided to print an adhesive label with our business logo and the name and number of the print at the top. I signed my name in the white space left below and we simply stuck it on the back. It doesn’t put my name out in front, but that’s fine with me.

With the print signed and approved, it was time to mail it off to the buyer. I suspected that FedEx or UPS would charge me my other arm and leg for shipping in back to the east coast, so I decided to try for the USPS instead. The box, obviously the standard for a 36″ square print, was just crazy overkill for my skinny panorama, so we attacked it down the middle with a pair of scissors, slid one end into the other, and liberally taped it back together.

The next day, at the post office, they broke out their measuring tape and wrapped it all around the box. Their limit was 100″ total; the newly-cut box came in at 96″. Sending it priority mail, with tracking and insurance, cost me only $22 – less than half of what Zazzle forced me to pay.

Later that evening, I sent one last e-mail with the tracking number to the buyer. She replied that I shouldn’t worry if I don’t receive an immediate happy e-mail when the picture arrived; she planned to be out of the country. About a month ago, I received a note in my mailbox confirming that the package had been delivered, but I have yet to hear from her.

Since then, I’ve been keeping an eye on her blog – she’s a fairly prolific writer – but I hasn’t yet slip any information about the print. I really want to send her an e-mail asking her what she thought about it, but I don’t know how to phrase it without sounding vain. That, and I worry that she may not have liked it.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2005. | Permalink | 3 comments |

Aug: 113 uniques, 1428 visits, 2726 pages, 4841 hits, 29.76MB bandwidth
Sept: 121 uniques, 1875 visits, 2496 pages, 3640 hits, 19.26MB bandwidth

What’s going on here? At first glance, it appears that I’ve had slightly more unique viewers to the site, but some of the other numbers don’t back that up. Visits are up, but numbers of pages loaded are down (as is the number of hits). Does this mean that the visitors I got in September weren’t sticking around to look at other photos? That might explain it, I suppose.

Last month was the month that I decided to submit the site to the major search engines. I’d been hesitating to do that because I was worried that my stats would be spammed by the ‘bots and random search inquiries. Shouldn’t have worried. Try as I might, I can’t find solid evidence that my submissions correlated to an any increase in traffic. In fact, only two search strings brought people to the site all last month (isabela de sagua and trinidad sunset).

Also, I finally think I tracked down some of the weirder referrer links to my sites. For instance, this site supposedly sent 35 visitors my way, but looking it over, it’s obvious that they didn’t. I’m 99% sure I’m the victim of someone spamming my referrer logs. Why someone would want to mask hits coming into website puzzles me. Do all the webmasters checking their stats really result in that much click-thru business? Seems doubtful.

My photoblog officially hit the halfway point this month – week 26 in a 52-week experiment. I don’t have any plans for increasing site traffic this month, but… well, that’s not exactly true. I still want to post each photo on Photo.net and I’ve found another site that seems a good match, too: A Picture’s Worth. But I’m feeling lazy, so October is likely to be another one of those changeless months.

I did have one other thought about the site, though. Ofoto and Sony’s Imagestation both offer vinyl and linen photo books. After a year’s up, I hope to be able to convince myself that it would be worth my time to create a physical archive of all this work. I’m thinking a photo on one side and the micro-essay on the opposite page. Wouldn’t that be cool?

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2004. | Permalink | No comment |

Oh, damn. I shouldn’t have used the second-person singular in the last sentence. First-person works better because I, myself, have each of those blogs!

Okay, so yeah, you know about the personal journal one; you’re reading it. And if you’re any sort of repeat offender, you know about my photoblog, too. But there’s a good chance that this will be your first introduction to Mindwheat.com.

Mindwheat is, for lack of a better label, a “Community Blog.” Four of my friends and I decided that Greymatter might be up to providing the interface for a site where we could swap internet links. If nothing else, the theory was that it would cut down on the number of “This site I found is so funny – YOU HAVE TO READ IT!” subject lines we get from each other in our inboxes.

Each of us five primary participants is an avid internet surfer and while there’s some crossover in the sites that we frequent, we maintain distinctive and diverse interests. We figured that Mindwheat might be a great way to share those interests and, after a month of steady posting, it looks like we were right.

There are profile pages on each of us at Mindwheat, but I think a short introduction might help you get a feel for who’s going to post what.

There’s Calder; He’s got the market cornered on the pro-Republican side of things. Maasman digs up all the cool music and Amelia is our resident librarian. Mike should change his name to Mr. Non-sequitur because it’s quite impossible to guess what his next post will be about. I’m all over the board, too, as I embrace my inner Liberal Artist, but if anything I’m more likely to gravitate to the multimedias (Did I just say “multimedias” – someone please interrobang that!) Oh, and for the record, all of us have a nasty habit of posting just plain goofy shit every now and again.

Mindwheat is a great site for me because I don’t spend hours writing and editing each entry. In 5 minutes I can post a quick link to something that I found interesting or comment on something someone else has posted. I’m don’t concern myself with improving my writing there nor do I worry that I might offend someone. If you read both A Midgett Blog and Mindwheat, you’ll likely find that my Mindwheat persona is the more irreverent one.

So, take a look at the site and see if you like it enough to grace us with a bookmark. Comment on an entry if you’ve got something to add, or give it a karma point to show how much you liked (or didn’t like) it. If you have any suggestions to make the site better, let us know!

Oh, and why is it called “Mindwheat?” Well, for the answer to that you’ll have to watch Doctrine.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2004. | Permalink | No comment |

July: 76 Unique visitors, for 174 visits
August: 111 Unique visitors, for 1387 visits

Holy schmoely that’s a lot of visits! What’s going on here? Well, let’s not get too excited – I’m pretty sure most of those visits are attributed to the new RSS feed that I put up. If anyone else is tapping into it like I am, they’re probably loading that particular XML file multiple times every day (I have my aggregator checking for updates every hour; that would be 24 hits every day.)

I am pretty excited about the 111 unique visitors, though. That’s almost a 50% increase over the previous month. As I implement more and more marketing strategies for the site, it’s getting much harder to evaluate what works best, but I’m cautiously optimistic that the RSS feeds are doing their job. Not to mention the RSS indices that I submitted my site to – each one seemed to at least send a few hits my way this month.

Another couple of notable events worth mentioning: Two people showed at least some interest in purchasing a print from the site. One was a friend-of-a-friend kind of thing that was specifically looking for pictures of Cuba. The other was someone that happened upon the site while looking for B&W photographs of Southeast Alaska. I didn’t have much to offer the latter, and so forwarded them on to my friend, Jeff, at Alaska Visuals. Last I heard, he hadn’t made a sale but was planning to upload a few samples that could be perused. And because the Cuba thing was for someone I knew, I uploaded some other Cuba photos for her to look at. She inquired more about one that was taken at the same time as Havana Nights, but I haven’t heard from her since.

I think it’d be neat to sell one of my photos off the web site, but that’s not really my motivation. I’m having a good time writing up the little essays that go with each picture and more, going through all the thousands of pictures that I’ve taken. It’s getting more difficult to choose the obvious standout photographs, too. I’ve previously digitized many of them, but of those, I’ve already posted the best. Guess it’s time to dig down into my negatives and slides and see what’s in there. I haven’t done that in a long time… I’m looking forward to it!

What to do for the next month? Well, I can tell you that I’m not looking forward to doing a lot of “extra” work to market this stuff. I think I’m going to cave in and do one of those free multiple search engine submission things. Yes, it’ll probably add a lot of ‘bot junk hits to my stats page, but they’re already mussing things up, anyway. Just about every webcrawler out there is listed in my statistics, but only Yahoo and Google actually sent surfers my way this month (for the following search strings: Isabela de Sagua, open shutter photography, photos of the church at Pisco, taquile, purchase Pisco online, photoblog, and playtime.) As long as people are searching for this stuff, I might as well let them do it from Ask Jeeves, too, right?

Oh, here’s another interesting stat: 83 of 111 visitors bookmarked my site. Again, nothing to get excited about. The same stat page for a different site I run said that 55 people out of 26 visitors had bookmarked my site. So, either it doesn’t accurately track that particular statistic or those visitors REALLY liked what they saw!

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2004. | Permalink | No comment |

Here’s the quick breakdown:

June = 83 unique visitors with 162 visits
July = 76 unique visitors with 174 visits

What’s interesting here is that the ‘blog indices in which I registered my Photoblog are still generating hits. Last month, I signed up in 20 or so indices. I’d say 15 hits on my site were from those same indices sending a ‘bot to check if the URL was valid. Since I didn’t submit to any new sites throughout the month of July, it’s arguable that I actually gained a few new visitors instead of losing 7 as the statistics indicate.

Looking over my list of referrers, I see a sprinkling of “globeofblogs,” “blogwise,” “linkexchange,” and “eatonweb portal.” Not a whole ton of hits, but at least they’re pointing some people my way.

I’m also noticing a few more keyword searches resulting in hits on the site. I¡¦ve got two each for “isabela de sagua” and “mendenhall glacier poster,” and one apiece for “nags head photo sunrise,” “isabela de sagua cuba,” “open-shutter photography,” and “pictures of el sano banano.” I know exactly which photos each of these point to — still no sales, but I hope they found what they were looking for. A couple people bookmarked my site this month, too — that’s a good omen for repeat visitors.
…
For the month of August, I’ve already implemented the next step — an XML syndication feed. The only change to the site will be a tiny little orange XML button at the end of each page. Getting this up and running was actually pretty easy since I had already sweated out the hard work on the ‘blog you’re now reading. What does it do? Glad you asked.

RSS, RDF, and XML feeds all do pretty much the same thing: They’ll let you know as soon as a webpage is updated. In order to do that, though, you’re going to need a new piece of software. Don’t panic! I’ll point you to one that’s free and easy to use.

What you need is a “news aggregator.” An aggregator is a program that probably looks a lot like what you use to read your e-mail, but instead of checking your e-mail, an aggregator will check all the RSS feeds you’ve signed up for. That’s where that orange XML button on my Photoblog (and the blue RSS button on my ‘blog) comes in — those are my feeds.

RSS feeds have changed the way I surf the web. Instead of roaming across the same sites every day to check to see if there’s anything new posted, I now let those same sites come to me. Every hour my aggregator goes out and checks for new content from sites like Slashdot, Wired, C|net, and the SciFi channel. If there’s something new, I’ll see a popup appear (much like an MSN Messenger message) near my taskbar. When I have a spare moment, I can open up my aggregator — it stays active 24/7 in my system tray — and read the newest news.

Okay, let’s talk specifics. I’m using an aggregator called Feedreader. You can head on over to their site and download a free copy right now. Once you’ve got the downloaded file on your computer, you can double-click-install it just like any other program. After that, fire it up and take a look around.

(By the way, this is simply the aggregator I’m using. There are plenty of others out there: Feeddemon seems to be one of the best, but it’s $30 after a 20-day free trial. A friend of mine is using Pluck – an aggregator that works as a plug-in for Internet Explorer. There are also plug-ins for Outlook, as well, and even web-based aggregators like Bloglines. If you really want to get into RSS, Google is a great place to start!)

Now that you’ve got Feedreader (or some other aggregator) running, you’ll have to supply it with an RSS, RDF, or XML feed. Don’t be alarmed — all it’s really asking for is a URL. Take my ‘blog for example. See the blue RSS button on the front page? That little button has a link to the RSS feed that Feedreader needs. There are a lot of ways to get that information into your aggregator, but because each person’s setup can be different, I’ll give you the only sure-fire way I know of:

* Place your mouse cursor over the button, but don’t click.
* Look down in the status bar at the bottom of your browser — the URL to the feed will be displayed
* Open up Feedreader and click the “New Feed” button.
* Type in the URL and click Next, then Finish

That’s it! Do the same thing with the XML button on any of my Photoblog pages and you’ll already have two sites that will notify you whenever they are updated (as long as you keep Feedreader running in the system tray, that is!)

What other sites have RSS feeds? You’d be surprised! Many, many sites that have dynamically changing content already use RSS feeds. How can you tell? Easy. Surf on over to the site in question and search the page for either “RSS,” “RDF,” or “XML.” If that doesn’t turn up anything, scan the pages for a button much like the ones I’ve used. If you still find nothing… well, not everyone is as cool as I am.

Just to get you going, here are a few of the feeds I most enjoy:

‘Blogs
Wil Wheaton dot Net – The journal of an actor turned writer (My hero!)
Neil Gaiman’s Journal – The journal of a fantasy and comic book writer
A Midgett Blog (‘natch!) — The most important journal in the world… to me.
A Midgett Photoblog (double ‘natch!) — See the world through my viewfinder

Technology
Wired News — Breaking Technology news
Slashdot — News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters
Dan’s Data – This guy really knows his stuff
Gizmodo — News and reviews of tech gadgets, delivered in an irreverent style
Engadget — MORE news and reviews of tech gadgets, less irreverent
PhotographyBLOG — What’s new in the world of Photography
Digital Photography Review — Very detailed reviews of digital cameras
Dynamic Artwork — There are some great Photoshop tutorials here

Entertainment
Boing Boing — Interesting links around the Internet
Sci-fi Wire — Science Fiction news
Slashdot: Games — Computer games
Penny Arcade — Online web comic and discussion about video games

That should do it. I’m really impressed with this new way of getting information — so much so that I’ll be starting up whole new ‘blog soon (stay tuned!) In the meantime, if you have any trouble getting started with RSS — either in using an aggregator or in modifying Greymatter – please don’t hesitate to ask me for some help.

Oh, and one more thing. I want to apologize in advance for the extremely ugly subject lines in my Photoblog’s RSS feeds. When I originally set up the site, I wasn’t expecting anyone would be reading the raw HTML code. Asi es la vida… at least you should be able to see a nice little thumbnail of each week’s photos.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2004. | Permalink | No comment |

Who-za-whazzit?

All right, let’s back up, shall we? If you’ve been following along in my ‘blog, you know that I’ve been trying to increase awareness of my new photoblog website. Well, when I was adding my site to all those ‘blog indices, I noticed some of them were asking for a different configuration. Instead of simply listing my blog in a yahoo-like directory, these sites wanted to track the actual updating of my blog, instead.

I did a little more reading on the topic this week and a couple evenings ago I stumbled onto a page full of news aggregator applications. A news aggregator is, in this humble but frequent web-surfer’s opinion, a very cool thing. My daily online rounds include many sites that have dynamic content (Slashdot, Fark, Penny Arcade, and others) and I waste a lot of time browsing through articles that don’t necessarily interest me. What I hadn’t really noticed was that almost all of them contain an innocuous little RSS link hidden somewhere on the page.

Most of the news aggregator screenshots I looked at seemed very complicated. I didn’t want to get in over my head, so I grabbed the simplest aggregator I could find (EffNews RSS Reader) and deigned it worthy of an install. Two minutes later, I was draggin’-‘n’-droppin’ RSS links and seeing what it could do. Soon, I had a view of all these sites’ headlines arrayed out in front of me. Now (in one window, mind you!) I could browse the topics of almost all the sites I frequent in a given day. I was surprised at how simple it was to set up, but I suppose that’s because EffNews wasn’t loaded down with things like “useful options.” Not the most impressive piece of software out there, but it did allow me to see the potential.

I went back to the big list of aggregators and looked for something else, something stronger for the manly surfer that I am. The next download – FeedReader – was a keeper. Not only did it add a more user-friendly interface, but I also got an integrated browser, customization options, and (the winner by a mile) Messenger-like, pop-up notifications. Now, whenever one of my favorite sites is updated – I’m notified almost as soon as it happens!

This was cool and all, but would I be able to do the same thing with my own web log? That research took a couple days, but I finally figured it out. All I had to do was upgrade my Greymatter software from version 1.21d to 1.3, get my hosting provider to install a PERL module, install the gm-rss.cgi mod I found on the Greymatter Fourms and troubleshoot the easy-to-get-mixed-up instructions.

But it works now, and that’s what counts. If you want to try it out, download yourself a news aggregator and then find a way to import into it the RSS/RDF/XML link over there on the left (drag-and-drop may work, then again you might have to type in the URL by hand.)

So at this point you might be asking yourself, “Self… why did he go to all that effort?” The answer is two-fold, my ‘blog readin’ friend:

1) Now I can feel better about discontinuing the infrequently-used, but still a pain-in-the-ass guilt trip known to all as “The E-mail Notification of Blog Updates,” and
2) This was really just a trial run so that I’d know how to set up on my photoblog in a couple weeks!

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2004. | Permalink | No comment |

Here’s the quick lowdown:

June 2004: 83 visitors, 160 visits
May 2004: 37 visitors, 116 visits
April 2004: 21 visitors, 60 visits

On the surface it looks as though I’ve yet again doubled the number of unique hits on the site, but the straight numbers are a little misleading. About 18 to 20 of those 83 hits are probably from ‘blog indices verifying my site when I initially signed up with them at the beginning of the month. Still, even taking that into account, it looks as though registering was worth the effort as the indices do seem to help boost the overall number of unique visits.

As you can see from the image to the left, most of the incoming visits are still coming from my web log. That makes sense, considering I do these write ups each month (not to mention the link on this page directly to the photoblog.) The big surprise, though, came in the last couple days of the month when I logged almost as many visits from http://www.le-cam.org. I visited their site, but I still have no idea why they linked to me! If you can make heads or tails of that particular French rowing fan site (or more importantly, if you can find the link back to my photoblog), please clue me in!

Interestingly, it doesn’t appear as if anyone arrived at my site this month via the results of a web search query. After last month, I expected to see quite a few more Google hits on the site, but I guess those “Sally Lightfoot Crab” keywords were just a fluke.

For July, I know I should be exploring a new tactic, but I think I’m going to continue as is. Rather than try to rationalize a reason why, I’m just going to admit that I’m feeling lazy. I still want to submit the site to search engines, but I think that should be further down the line. I also have at least three other plans, but they’re going to involve a lot of motivation I don’t currently have. (I want to research and implement automated RSS feeds, create html metatags for each entry, and submit every picture to Photo.net.) All those sound like too much work too soon after my vacation, so I think I’ll just let it ride for another month.

Hey, you know what? Even a falloff in the number of hits would tell me something… Oh, that’s right. I wasn’t going to rationalize. Never mind.

—

Two P.S.’s: First: Yes, I know it’s not July 1st anymore (despite what the first paragraph above says). I’m having terrible cable modem troubles and haven’t been able to reliably connect to the web. The good news is that tech support will be here “sometime within 24 to 72 hours.” Second: Props to Mike for helping me figure out why the last three entries are showing up on the front page of my blog — I completely spaced the fact that Greymatter operates by date rather than by entry. (I posted the last three entries on the same day — just before going on vacation — before immediately closing them. When it came time to update the photoblog, I could simply hop online and open each entry again.) Fear not… the photoblog should fix itself with the next update.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2004. | Permalink | No comment |

The final count of unique visitors for the month of May was 37. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll recall that April had just 21. Remember, too, that April’s numbers were essentially “unadvertised” hits (those that came off the links I semi-discreetly placed only on my own web pages), while May’s included a mini-campaign to tell my online contacts about the Photoblog (via this ‘blog, e-mail signature tags, and changing my contact name in MSN Messenger to “photoblog.arlomidgett.com”).

Looking over the details of my statistics, it’s interesting to note that the majority of referral hits came from the web log you’re reading right now. Those days where I wrote about the Photoblog site show definite spikes – 19 alone hits came from this ‘blog’s index page. The next biggest link referral came from www.arlomidgett.com, no surprise there.

Something I didn’t notice before were the number of return visitors. April had 60 visits from the 21 visitors, while May had 116 visits from 37. I can make a loose assumption that there are a fair number of people coming back to see more. That’s great!

Still a way to go towards fame and fortune. To compare, let’s look at a couple other sites I maintain:

Blog.arlomidgett.com (this site) scored 123 visitors / 275 visits in May (up from 87/138 for the prior month.) Why so much higher? I’d like to think it’s because I made an effort to post more often in the month of May, but I have a feeling it’s only because this ‘blog has been around for year. I’m sure it’s just that there are more people that are aware of it. Besides, there’s a lot more text for web crawling ‘bots to pick through – I get a lot more hits off of search engine results on this site.

Also, the ‘blog got a respectable amount of referral hits from www.52magic.com in May, though I have absolutely no idea why!

Continuing up the ladder, www.arlomidgett.com scores even higher on the hit list: 570/740 for May vs. 557/793 in April. There’s no mystery there. Besides the friends and family who have become accustomed to visiting, my humongous wedding page is a search engine magnet and pulls in quite a few hits. For the curious: “armpit,” “Galapagos,” and “porcupine” consistently top the list of search results. The latter I can understand, but “armpit?” Must be Boomstick.

Okay, back to the matter at hand. Buried down deep in the Photoblog stats is a small indication of a bummer – it looks like the ‘bots have found the site. It’s inevitable, I suppose, and not altogether bad, either. More visitors means more chances that someone will buy something, but I had expected the search engine angle would yield the biggest results and therefore wanted to save that experiment for a later month. It’s going to be more difficult to gauge the success of other stat-increasing strategies when the hits from search engines start to pile up.

So far, there have been only a few search engine referrals. Two searches for “sally lightfoot,” and one each for “sally lightfoot crab,” “sally lightfoot info,” and “arlo trinidad.” Hmmm. Looks like crab pictures are in high demand… though I don’t quite know what to make of the last one. Funny thing is, I was planning to post my favorite Trinidad photo this Thursday!

For what it’s worth, my stat tracker does sort the ‘bot hits out from the more important visitor statistics. I feel pretty good about the 37 total unique hits that the site tracked. Sure, sure. The total would drop a bit if you were to take into account visitors checking in from different computers, dynamic IP allocation issues, etc. But that could be said of the first month’s stats, too. Let’s just say it’s a 76% increase and call it good.

Despite the search engine setback, I think I’ll to stick with my original plan. For June, I’m going to publish a link to my Photoblog in every ‘blog index I can find. Yahoo’s directory seems like the logical place to start, but please let me know if you can think something better.

© Arlo for A Midgett Blog, 2004. | Permalink | No comment |