The Blognosticator’s first anniversary

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Blognosticator-gone-private.

I had been blogging for Graphic Arts Monthly for three years until their demise in the Spring of 2010, and then for What They Think until that fall and they could not continue to support my work. So, I took The Blognosticator private, posting these blogs on my own site, and hoping for the best.

Today I have posted my 94th blog entry on the site, and have also passed my 14,000th visitor. That averages out to 7.833 blogs-per-month (bpm) and 1,166 readers per month (rpm). That’s pretty impressive in my book.

I often wonder what drives me to do this. I suppose it’s my desire to tell stories, to explain things, to teach. Maybe I want to make my mark on cyberspace. Who knows?

I have learned a lot about the interests of my readers. Many of you are graphic arts professionals, photographers, graphic designers, and people involved in “the trade.” Others are casual passers-by.

My most popular blog, by far, is the one I wrote about how to read a micrometer. That blog has had more readers than any other, and it continues to be found by people searching for that topic.

My second-most-popular is the blog I wrote about Van Gogh’s Starry Night at the  Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Hundreds of photographers flocked to my blog about using the iPad as a receiver for photos from my EyeFi card (over 200 in one day alone). I still get a lot of traffic on that entry, but only a fraction of the huge volume who read the blog on the day after I posted it.

I have received the greatest coverage in industry mentions on my GREP blogs. I am a fanatical GREP user, and have had a delightful time exploring the power of that functionality in InDesign and also the recently-updated Tex-Edit Plus text processor (thank you Tom!). I’ll be writing more about GREP functions again soon.

My Mr. Curmedgeon rants have caused some minor stirs in the industry. Quicken updated their dumb Quicken 2007 for Macintosh (not as a result of my blog, I assure you). Though it now works in Lion, it’s still just as dumb, and it can’t remember window positions or dimensions in (can’t they just make it do what it used to do?). Brain-dead software reins at Intuit!

Pocket Wizard has agreed to replace my Flex TT5 transceivers with a newer model that they hope will please me (and I hope so too!). They have been exceptionally gracious and helpful.

InDesign CS6 claims to be better at making ePubs; I remain skeptical, but will report back on that topic as soon as I get some experience with it.

On my new cameras and gadgets blogs, my GigaPan panoramas have gotten some good responses here and on the GigaPan web site. That has been a really fun adventure, and one that I plan to continue into the future. Hardly a day passes that I don’t try to get a new GigaPan image going. And my early test of the Lytro has been followed by thousands. I still use that clever camera, and continue to be impressed by its technology.

I have learned a lot about spam. I signed up for Akismet, a paid service that filters blog comments to eliminate/reduce incoming spam from writers who are trying to get their comments into blogs to promote I-don’t-know-what. Akismet has filtered 13,000 spam messages for my blog in 12 months. Sometimes they identify over 100 a day. It is astonishing to me that blog spam is so pervasive. The ratio of spam-to-legitimate visitors is nearly 1:1.

Most spam comes from Latin American “sources” most of which are fake web sites with no particular content. I don’t understand the whole phenomenon, as it doesn’t appear to yield any result for anyone. Brazil is the single largest source for these. It just makes no sense. Bravo to Akismet!

I am heartily flattered that you read my work, and I promise to keep it up. In the coming weeks I plan to show some new work from the mountaintops around San Luis Obispo, and perhaps a few panoramas from the Puget Sound, where I am headed in August.

I’ll be testing a new approach to photographing fine art and printing it on my Epson wide-format printer, and I hope that my work is completely successful so that I can help others who are trying to do the same.

So, please stay tuned as The Blognosticator continues into its second year!

And keep that spam coming! Akismet loves it!

 

About Brian Lawler

Brian Lawler is an Emeritus Professor of Graphic Communication at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and was a Guest Professor at Hochschule München from September, 2021 to September, 2022. He writes about graphic arts processes and technologies for various industry publications, and on his blog, The Blognosticator.
This entry was posted in Art, Business, Curmudgeon, Mistakes you can avoid, New technology, Panoramic Photography. Bookmark the permalink.

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