Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author

Photo of the Day: Red-Necked Phalarope

chuq — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Also seen at Radio Road on my recent trip, this is a gorgeous red-necked Phalarope (male, in breeding colors), a spring migrant hanging out here eating bugs on a short stop on his trip north. He’s a smallish bird, and they can be fun to watch, because as they swim around a pond, they’re madly paddling their feet under the surface, which churns up currents which help push stuff up to the surface where they can grab it and have it for a snack. Think of you you look in a pool madly trying to tread water and you get some idea of what’s going on down under where you can’t see…

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What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been…

chuq — Sun, 20 May 2012 23:34:27 +0000

I’ve been working on this site redesign for a couple of months now. I keep finding myself muttering “but it’s just my personal site” under my breath, because the scope and complexity keeps growing, and part of me wonders whether it really needs to be this complicated.

The fact is, yes, it does, and most sites these days are going to end up at least this complicated if they’re done properly. That’s the key, of course. It’s easy to do these things poorly, or skimp on content, or on details. Which is what I found I’d been doing, thanks to the “this is good enough, and I’ve these other things have to come first. But some day…” excuse.

It’s been an interesting, and occasionally humbling, project to question everything, tear it all down to the basics, and try to put it all back together well, not just “well, good enough…” — but to be honest, I’m liking the result so far.

Once again, the grand chart of this project:

Things marked red are now complete, and for the first time, there’s more items resolved than added. It’s that first “over the hump” moment, and that feels good, even though objectively I know it’s also misleading. Yellow items are the “these are involved and will take me a good while to figure out” items. I’ve talked about the curation stuff a bit, and you’ll notice I haven’t even started breaking it out into pieces yet. The other pieces will get some blog time as it makes sense, but all of these are fairly involved projects in their own right.

The orange items are all new from the last time I showed this diagram, and they involve stuff that tie into the site, but aren’t necessary a direct part. Broadly broken into three areas, they are SEO and Social Media (aka “marketing and promotion”, aka “how do I grow the readership and get what I’m doing noticed without being seen as a scummy spammer?”); purchasing (aka “sell you a print, sell you a T-shirt”, whatever this means….), and the third is advertising and sponsorships (aka “can this thing pay for itself some day?”). All are long term investigations, with the SEO/Social Media being first. Does this mean I’ll be doing advertising on the site? I dunno. Am I going to start pushing print sales? I dunno. That’s why I need to investigate it — but my philosophy of not turning the web site into something that looks like a bad Vegas cathouse is unchanged. I’m not interested in trying to generate pennies by pissing off the readers, I have no intention of turning the site into one of those places that annoys the crap out of you before letting you see stuff — but I do want to see what might make sense that’s compatible with my view of how this all works. What’s that mean? Hell, I dunno. And I don’t expect to answer the question soon.

The blue items are the pieces still in progress. If you look closely, you’ll probably notice that most of those items involve writing stuff.

This is why I took the blog vacation; I hit that point in the process where I needed to revamp the guts of the site. Testing on an offline copy showed that I couldn’t just plug the new wordpress theme in to the existing setup, because I couldn’t get the new blog page to take. Why? I dunno. It was faster and easier to export the content and load it into a fresh installation of WordPress. That, however, meant I either needed to freeze out the blog (aka “go on vacation”) or try to keep both the old and new versions in sync. Given I knew I had enough time to either write for the blog or do the work needed to upgrade it (but not both), it was a fairly easy decision to focus on the update.

As it worked out, my timing was just about perfect. I figured I’d be ready to upgrade on Sunday, and I upgraded on Saturday night. Everything worked as it did in rehearsal, although I ran into a couple of things I didn’t catch in the test version — some 404s because of glitches in the export/import process — and it took me a couple of hours to identify that, and another hour to fix them. Not bad at all, actually.

One open issue I’m looking at, but one you shouldn’t see — in the admin area, I can lock up the browser to the site if I try to open up a page while another page is loading. That feels like some javascript thing, and it didn’t happen on the old theme, but I don’t know if it’s the new theme, or one of the plug-ins, or just karma. I’ll dig into it down the road, right now, that’s very manageable.

The last month has been a busy time with the blog, but not in ways you’d notice unless you’re a stalker (or the Googlebot). I spent a chunk of time going through everything on the blog and deciding what to keep and what to kill. Ultimately, about 13% of the posted blog entries were deleted. Sorry, people who think words have to live forever, some words deserve to die, either because they’ve become irrelevant or they sucked all along and deserved to never live.

One other thing I’ve been doing is studying the analytics on the site.One thing that stuck in my mind was that half of the entries on the blog saw ZERO traffic over the last year. That fact has driven my to a lot of thought and research into ways to help the worthy content find an audience (and if the content isn’t worthy, why should it exist?). One great unanswered question for me is whether having all of that low-value content helps or hurts you in the eyes of the Google and the Bing, but that’s a question for another day.

Much of the work has been backward facing: cleaning up what was there, deciding how to organize it, cleaning up some of the formatting and editorial issues, and generally cleaning up what’s already here and trying to make it a better asset for the future. The other piece of the project was making decision on future direction and branding, look and feel, and starting to put those pieces in place.

Hence the blog upgrade. It’s still wordpress, refreshed. I’ve switched from my old theme (Dandelion, available from Themeforest) to Photocrati. I like both themes; I might use Dandelion again in some future project, and Photocrati, so far, has worked as well in reality as I hoped it would after I evaluated and chose it. It’s nice and flexible without having to go in and hack, and I think it’s image management and support is much superior to Dandelion. It’s weak spot is probably fonts, but I won’t complain about using Verdana for the body font (at least for now), and there’s an update to it coming, and I’m looking forward to seeing what new features show up (Typekit, maybe?)

I’ve also done a fair bit of work on the look and feel, bringing the overall design forward towards where I expect it to finally end up. Note that it’s not done, not remotely. I still want to rebrand everything (“chuqui 3.0″ is going away, it’s time), but I’m still working through exactly what that is going to be.

Some of the new design elements are in place, because it made sense to do them while the hood was open; the color scheme (and the death of the stark white background page; I’m so tired of that online), switching to Verdana, and a larger, more open text typography.

Yes, this “incremental redesign in public” probably annoys some folks, but I see no value in doing it all in secret and springing it on folks four months from now. I might as well do a piece at a time and be able to take advantage of it as we go along. Living with it along the way allows me to decide what things work and what needs tweaking, and get feedback in the process as well.

Now that the blog update is done, the future phases should all be things I can do without interruption here; much of the work before me involves refining the redesign and working on the branding, as well as content discovery and visibility. The fact is, if you’re using the default blog format, your discoverability of content sucks. And if you go off and look at your analytics in detail, you, too, will probably find a huge chunk of the words you wrote might as well not exist, because nobody’s ever looking at them.

And that’s the current monster I’m looking to slay here, and it’s going to take some thought and a lot of sweat equity… So, off to slay another monster…

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been…. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 20, 2012

chuq — Mon, 21 May 2012 05:42:05 +0000

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Things You’ll Find Interesting May 20, 2012. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Photo of the Day: Short-Billed Dowitcher

chuq — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:55:44 +0000

Photo of the day is back. This is a new image, I finally had a chance to pick up the camera and headed out to — the sewer plant — sorry, water pollution control plant. Radio Road is in Redwood Shores, and the outflow ponds are a great birding area. Most sewer plant outflow areas are, when they’re open to the public. It’s that time of year when the shorebirds show up in their Sunday best, and this dowitcher is no exception.

There are two dowitchers you’ll see in the Bay Area, short-billed and long-billed. Telling them apart in the field is much of the time problematic. One reason I went to Radio Road was to take shots of them so I could come home and try to figure them out with the guides. I later checked with one of the experts, and I got about 80% right.

True to form, the long-billed’s bill is longer in proportion to the head than the short-billed, but not enough to be something you can easily figure out in the field, even if the two species are next to each other. Short-bills tend to be orange on the belly with spots, while long-billed are more rufous with stripes on the chest.

This is why most birders ID them most of the time as Dowitcher SPP, or “oh, hell, I have no idea, but it’s a Dowitcher’. But every once in a while, it’s a fun thing to give it a look and try to tell them apart…

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Photo of the Day: Short-Billed Dowitcher. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

And I’m back…

chuq — Sun, 20 May 2012 06:36:52 +0000

And I’m back….

And the blog has been upgraded with a new look, based on a new theme, and the underlying infrastructure has been updated. The last week has been about working down in the basement, dealing with utilities.

The new WordPress theme is Photocrati. On top of that, I’ve done some of the redesign that I’ve been planning, but not all, and I’ve updated a lot of the overall content of the site.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the progress. It’s not done, by a long shot, but this moves things forward in a number of significant ways, and was the big thing blocking a number of tasks I had on the list. Some of the tasks got done in the last week, but it’s still a work in progress.

So if you’re normally an RSS reader, wander by the site and take a look, tell me what you think. Especially go look at the new photographer section, but the support material on all of the menus got rewritten and updated, too.

I’ll talk more about what I did and why, and what still needs to be done, but I have a couple of inevitable gremlins I’m trying to chase, such as why some images in the wp-uploads area are 404ing but others aren’t. And of course it worked just fine on the staging server. Of course…

But first, sleep. A few broken images can wait.

Updated: those images are 404ing because, it turns out, they didn’t migrate from the old site to the new one, so they are, in fact, MISSING. So much for 90 minutes of tearing my hair out in a .htaccess file. Most of the images migrated just fine; a few did not. why? Dunno. But that’s a pretty easy fix (for the morning).

Duh. check the EASY answer first.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at And I’m back…. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 13, 2012

chuq — Mon, 14 May 2012 03:15:10 +0000

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Things You’ll Find Interesting May 13, 2012. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Predicting the conference finals..

chuq — Sun, 13 May 2012 23:48:11 +0000

Well if there’s ever need of proof of why I don’t make a living betting on hockey, the second round can be used. I was 4-4 in the first round (and happy to get there, given how unpredictable the playoffs have been). Luck wasn’t so kind to me in the 2nd round.

In the West, I predicted the Blues and the Predators. Please stop snickering.

In the east, I thought it would be the Flyers and Rangers.

So I’m 1-3 in the second, and 5-7 for the playoffs.

I don’t feel too bad. I expect whoever wins the major hockey fantasy pools this year is doing so with a dartboard. So it goes…

So now, we’re down to four teams, and the conference finals. Let me place the kiss of death on a couple of teams and predict them to win:

In the west: Phoenix and Los Angeles. Goalie Smith and the mission from god squad, vs. Goalie Quick and the Lombardi mob. Much as I’d love to see the Coyotes continue to confound the critics who wish they’d shut up and fail already, I have to give this one to the Kings, primarily because I think Quick is on a mission from god just like Smith is, but I think the Kings are playing better hockey. We’ll find out starting in about 30 minutes… Call it six games.

And in the east? The more I watch the Rangers, the more I believe in them. More importantly, they believe in themselves. And the more I watch New Jersey, I won’t take them lightly, but I just think Lundquist can and will out duel Brodeur, and the Rangers are playing better hockey. So Rangers in five.

So my call for stanley cup final: Rangers/Kings. Which should make NBC happy, and generate some really good (and low scoring) hockey.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Predicting the conference finals... This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 12, 2012

chuq — Sun, 13 May 2012 03:15:09 +0000

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Things You’ll Find Interesting May 12, 2012. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Photo of the Day: Sea Otter and her pup

chuq — Sat, 12 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Oh, heck. too cute. Here’s one more of this sea otter and her pup….

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Photo of the Day: Sea Otter and her pup. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 11, 2012

chuq — Sat, 12 May 2012 03:16:30 +0000

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Things You’ll Find Interesting May 11, 2012. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Photo of the Day: Sea Otter and her pup

chuq — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

While nursing the pup will hang onto the mom. She doesn’t let it go far, but in this case, the two were playing “you practice your floating”, but every time it got a little distance away, she hauled it back in where she could keep a paw on it…

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 10, 2012

chuq — Fri, 11 May 2012 03:15:09 +0000

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Things You’ll Find Interesting May 10, 2012. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Photo of the Day: Sea Otter Snacking

chuq — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Here, the otter has cracked open lunch and is enjoying it. This gives you a nice shot of her cradling her rock. The otter will hold onto the rock through multiple dives for snacks.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Photo of the Day: Sea Otter Snacking. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Things You’ll Find Interesting May 9, 2012

chuq — Thu, 10 May 2012 03:16:02 +0000

Here are some items I found today that I thought you’d find interesting.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Things You’ll Find Interesting May 9, 2012. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.

Photo of the Day: Sea Otter Napping

chuq — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Sea Otter week continues… Sea Otters don’t come onto shore much, so they sleep in the water. One of the things they will do is wrap themselves in a kelp plan before napping, so that it keeps them in place so they don’t float off in the current.

This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Photo of the Day: Sea Otter Napping. This article is copyright 2012 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.