I’ve been dinking with the guts of the blog a bit. There’s one big change, but you won’t see it unless you visit on a mobile phone. If you do, tell me what you think.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at updating the blog format... This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. updating the blog format..

People and things that currently inspire me or include ideas and techniques I plan on borrowing. An occasional series…

Art Wolfe: now available, “stuff” from Art Wolfe via Cafepress. a good example of one of the sets of ‘tangibles’ I think is important to bring into the mix.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Inspirations. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Inspirations

People and things that currently inspire me or include ideas and techniques I plan on borrowing. An occasional series…

• Smashing Magazine: They do an awesome job of doing information surveys on specific topics, and creating a lot of tutorial material. I love how they help identify and promote good content around the net and aren’t “grabby” about trying to force visitors onto their site along the way (unlike sites like Endgadget, Gizmodo and TUAW, which far too often use third party content as a hook to generate their own page views)
• Craft and Vision: David duChemin’s e-books are really giving me ideas on how I can create information that has a distinctive style and a value to readers.
• Vlad Studio: this is a russian artist who does amazing work creating computer wallpapers. He was really the first person I saw with a financial model around wallpapers as both a marketing tool and a product — and he’s really good.
• Jeffrey Friedl: I discovered him because he’s written a number of Lightroom plugins I’m starting to depend on (especially his flickr uploader and his plug-in for geo-encoding using Google Earth. His financial model is really intriguing to me — pay what it’s worth. I’ve sent him some donations for his tools because they’re worth it, and I think there’s an interesting value proposition to be had here. Some folks are going to always pay zero, because they can, but if the suggested donation is $10 but someone thinks that’s too high, isn’t getting $5 instead of zero found money? It’s something I plan on experimenting with.
• Mark Williamson: Nature Light Photography. I love the design of the site, especially how the photos are used for the topics at the top of the page and the ajaxy animations. Very well-done and attractive.
• Serious Amateur Photography: love the design of the posters, and yes, that’s On The List because I like the price point and options it gives.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Inspirations. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Inspirations

To map a path, you not only must know where you want to end up, you have to know where you are. In fact, you really don’t need to know your final destination — it’s fine to say “let’s get to sweden, and then we can figure out where Stockholm is, and once we get there, we can find the hotel”. But if you map your route by starting at the wrong place, you’re screwed.

I’ve been spending time studying the analytics of my existing environment and trying to figure out what is working and what isn’t, why I like and what I don’t. It was about a year ago I decided to move from typepad back to wordpress and consolidate my presence on one blog on chuqui.com (I actually made the move in January). Overall, I think that worked very well; I like the platform and I like the technologies involved. I used an off the shelf wordpress theme that I feel worked fine in the interim with limited tweaking, and I can’t complain.

The numbers on the blog are decent. Since shifting from Typepad to Wordpress, feed subscriptions have grown from about 425 to 650 (+35%). 16,000 different people visited in 2009 (so far), a number I find fascinating. Traffic is split 40% referral from other sites (including clicks from twitter postings), 40% direct (primarily RSS feeds) and 20% search engine. The search engine number is too low, but I haven’t done any significant optimization for SEO.

An interesting tidbit is that 45% of the pages published get no (zero, none, nada) viewings; if you factor out pages published in 2009 and generating views based on RSS/Twitter, it’s more like 70%.

A typical posting has about a two week lifetime where it’ll get views based on being in your RSS feed or posted to twitter/facebook; after that, unless it’s got prominent visibility on the site, gets traffic from links from other blogs or search engines, it no longer exists.

In other words, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) matters, especially if you want to avoid having to constantly throw traffic out onto the RSS feed to drive views. At the same time, if you aren’t updating on a regular basis, you’re going to disappear.

My adsense advertising made me about $0.75 this year. I haven’t done any work to try to maximize this — it was literally a put-there-and-watch test — but that’s really pitiful. Part of that, I think, is that Adsense seems to work better in a non-geek audience; if your audience lives within the tech-geek echo chamber, Adsense might as well not exist. it is certainly not a panacea; hell, if anyone still thinks there’s a magic cookie where you put up a blog and money rolls in, they deserve what they get.

On the other hand, my limited (very, VERY limited) tests using Amazon affiliate links netted about $40. That won’t pay the rent, but it will buy the occasional photography book (which I can review and generate affiliate links, which…); and since it’s literally a free option for readers, there’s little downside.

About 40% of my total pageviews are to the front page (http://www.chuqui.com); I’m not entirely clear why. Adsense revenue generated by the front page: $0.00. Talk about a waste of real estate.

Most popular content: all over the place.  No real trends, which is probably good, because if my hockey writing was clearly my most popular material, that’d be bad for business.

Over on twitter, I’ve passed 1,000 followers, which just stuns me. That’s double (or more) what it was six months ago.My flickr viewing stream has a solid, regular pattern, and in fact has better SEO than my blog does — more on that later, and that’s not a bad thing, it just needs to be understood (and it can be leveraged).

My interpretations of this?

“Just posting” isn’t enough for what you publish to have an audience. The good news is that the blog format encourages conversation and allows for a less structured writing style. The negative is that if that’s all you do, most of the words or pictures will get seen for a short period of time and then effectively go away.

There are options to mitigate that. On a technical level, SEO techniques help improve visibility through the search engines. Good site design can help make content accessible to a user who visits the site, but the blunt reality is that people who visit the site don’t explore; they read what they came to see and leave. you can reduce that with careful planning of your home page and your posting-detail page, but still, expect “stick around and enjoy your stay” to be a tough sell.

I’ve decided that one way around this is repackaging. Tidbits does interesting work with their e-books, and I’ve been watching David duChemin’s experiments with fascination, and I think this is a very interesting technique to explore. Content creation via the blog, which allows you to explore a topic in depth and over time, in a conversational and non-linear style, and then pull that content back together into an e-book where you can structure it and polish it and then publish it in HTML and/or PDF and then feature that publication on the blog entries where the content came from. The “typical” user won’t wander the blog to read the entire thread of postings, but I think if they find the content via search or from a link from another site, and the page they land on has it available as an extended article — that I think is a workable distribution for longer and more complex material.

It makes it easy for the viewer. If you make it complicated, they won’t. And you get a bit of the best of both worlds, the informality and interactivity of the blog format, and the formal “published” format for easy distribution — and for someone to come and grab later if they’re not part of the immediate conversation.

And since it is now in a tangible (albeit e-published) format, I think it is easier to make an argument that it has some value, which if you want to convince someone to exchant something of value for it, can’t hurt.

And it can be made to work with both text AND images, and adapts well for creative commons rights usage. You can get paid via an ecommerce solution as well as a donation model, depending on what you want to do, or even give it away and use sponsorship or advertising models if you want.

And that seems to be the starting point for the whole shebang, no?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Understanding the starting point. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Understanding the starting point

It should come as no surprise that anything I’m planning for the future involves the internet.

I suppose I could decide to move to Astoria and go to work in Starbucks. That’d be a perfectly acceptable second career — and if my other plans don’t work, it might still happen. That’d take a lot less work and planning, though, so I don’t have to think about that quite yet.

What I’ve known for a long time is that whatever this is going to be, it’s going to have a strong online component, which means a well-designed and well-built web presence. I use the term “web presence” here, not web site, because while a web site is a key aspect to this, nothing stands alone in the internet any more. You always have interfaces to other services, whether it’s social networking (Facebook, twitter), or communication (gmail) or to leverage other services instead of building your own (flickr, Smugmug, Cafepress, etc).

Because building a web presence to support this second career is going to be a large and complex beast by the time I’m done, and because one option both Laurie and I are looking at in the future is “build web sites for companies in Astoria” (or “build web sites for photographers”), having a portfolio site I can be proud of is crucial, and having the documentation on the how and why of the design and build process is a useful sales tool.

Besides, the conversation I hope this generates will help make it a better and more useful site; incremental feedback and early discussion is a lot more useful in fixing and tweaking when it’s easier and early.

So this is the second track of discussion that’s going to start showing up on the blog; there is the “why” of the second career, and here, the “how”.

But neither of those matters without the most important part.

Next up: the what. Because this all has to be about something, or it’s really rather silly to do.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Designing a Web Presence. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Designing a Web Presence