A few site updates

I took some time to tweak a few things here on the blog and my photo sites. Here’s a quick summary:

First, I’ve spent some time setting up some things over on my smugug photo site. you can now purchase prints or downloads of images.  I’ve also created a gallery of free downloads sized for use as wallpapers for your computer; these have a small watermark but are licensed via Creative Commons. I’ll try to add images to that collection every week or two, and if there’s one you’d like to see available as a watermark, feel free to ask.

I also decided that Google Buzz has none, and so I’ve removed references to it from my site. The content that I used to point you to (primarily the shared items from Google Reader) are now being posted to my twitter feed via twitterfeed. That’s one less place I have to worry about trying to convince people to subscribe to, and it seems the appropriate place for this. Since twitter gateways into facebook, that content also ends up there as well. The big trick in trying to figure out where to put stuff is how to allow people to get access to the parts they find interesting without shoving lots of duplicate entries into their faces or making it an all or nothing situation for them. I think the current setup (Blog for longer form writing, twitter for casual, short form chatting and “hey, this is interesting” linking) makes the most sense.

I’ve also started hanging out in a couple of new places, and so they’ve been added to the site in the About Me areas: I’ve liked JPG Magazine for a while, and now that it’s back moving forward and I have some photography I think is good enough to share, I’m starting to dip my toe into the community there. And there’s a new photography discussion forum sponsored by the Stack Exchange folks, and it seems to have good content and conversation, so I’ve started following that and contributing a bit as well. You’re encouraged to check them both out and maybe decide to join in the fun there with me…  I’ve cut back some of my activity on Flickr, but I think that’s temporary while i figure out how much time I want to spend there and what I want to do while I’m there. We’ll see.

I’ve also made a slight change to the “Stuff to Read” section on the blog, it now has a listing of the most popular pages on the site over the last 90 days; since those are the pages most people are coming to see, I think it makes sense to promote them a bit, so that section is now showing the pages you find most interesting as well as the pages I think are worth reading.

The new blog design is now about 2 months old, and I have to admit I still like it and I think it’s accomplished the goals I set out to in the redesign. I like how images are displayed a lot better. The number of people subscribing to the blog hasn’t changed (but I didn’t expect that), but page views are up about 14%, while number of pages read per visit is up almost 20% and the time spent on the site per visit is up about 6%. Since I felt the big issue with the old site was that people showed up ti see a specific page and never saw any other content (and therefore had no reason to consider subscribing or reading any other items), these are all good indications that the new design is helping people see some of the other content and some are exploring a bit. I’m also quite happy with the increased views of images both on flickr and on smugmug. the real draw is always good writing (and good images), but neither does you much good if it’s hidden from sight by a bad site design, so I think this is a nice step forward.

And onward into fall!

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