blogs and other animals

[rderr.com]

I just got a question from Imms a new member. He was asking, "Whatsup???" with your blog. Question, how many use and find useful these various tools that the net offers? Which ones and why? Or, are youall like me and am happy with this navel gazing. Or have we already discus this and it's already been done.

Art is etc
RD

[grommet]

I don't blog.
It seems to be for people with too many friends and fans, so many they can't email. Or it's for people who are wildly creative and don't mind sharing the info that they've gleaned that's miles ahead of the pack-- a trend setter. The only blog I was associated with was an attempt to keep a large group informed because we needed help. That worked.
Otherwise it seems like a diary for an exhibitionist.;)
Just my 2 cents.

[evaldart]

The Blog...I loved Mcqueen in that movie...seems like they'd have remade that one by now, with all the proper cgi upgrades...and Will Smith starring.

[rika]

Interesting question. I started a blog about 8 months ago, just because I read somewhere that all artists should have one, so that their clients get to know the person better.
What I find, you need to spend a lot of time on keeping up a quality blog, and post quite regularly if you want any readers, feedback at all. There are of course those artist bloggers who seem to be quite happy with a monologue, but I don't see the point to that. I made a few friends, one even invited me to visit her if I ever went to her country. I find that most people get tired of it and give it up in the first year or so. Some develop a loyal following successfully, but that's rare.
I don't regret I tried it, but I'm getting tired of it, and may drop out soon. It's not for introverts, it seems voyeuristic once the novelty wears off. Extroverts will have a blast imo.

[cooljamesx1]

I read somewhere that all artists should have one, so that their clients get to know the person better.

that is if you think clients would like you...

[rderr.com]

quote Rika <<...not for introverts, it seems voyeuristic once the novelty wears off. Extroverts will have a blast imo...>>

Introverts perhaps we should have a few more of those around here.

Robert

[grommet]

Introverts perhaps we should have a few more of those around here.

Robert
Is this just a quip about a tendency toward brawling wordiness here, or something else?
--Haven't finished my coffee or brain-enhancing side of beef yet or I might know.;)

[StevenW]

Which ones and why?

I just look at the pictures, the rest is all vegetarian fluff. :p

[CroftonGraphics]

Hi I blog and screencast for my 3d graphics side of things sometimes. When I get a collection for my artworks photoraphed and on a new art site, I probably wont blog with that.

People like merlion here, all his links would be good in an art blog to help others.

If I were to see a blog by an artist, I would rather see it as a resource site for processes, links, news of other artists. I would not be so interested in creative passages, I would rather see that in their work.

Its a good place to put screencasts if you make them for others to see and also I actually find it a really good 'notepad' for myself too.

I often find a programme or useful link online, and forget about it or add it to my favourites list and forget.

With a blog, you can add things of interest that you dont have time to check but the entries will remind one and also help others.

[rderr.com]

Impressive....BUT I spent 5 minutes, downloading I'm not sure what, that is not a problem, and had nothing at the end. Lots of hype for little product. And, who sees this except those that are lead to it. Are there any "walk ins"? My web architect tells me that I get 30,000 hits a month. not sold a damned thing there.

rd

[Landseer]

Impressive....BUT I spent 5 minutes, downloading I'm not sure what, that is not a problem, and had nothing at the end. Lots of hype for little product. And, who sees this except those that are lead to it. Are there any "walk ins"? My web architect tells me that I get 30,000 hits a month. not sold a damned thing there.

rd

I blog with wordpress software, it's an adjunct to the web site, I find it's real easy to add content on the fly, edit etc without having to code on an html page. So if I want to just post a WIP photo or comment it's far easier and faster in wordpress than to go to ftp, locate the file I want to add content to, add the tags and text, check it, make changes, save.

30,000 "hits" means little, every time someone loads a page with 50 thumbnail images on it, that's 51 "hits" but ONE visitor, if 100 people do that it shows up as 5,100 "hits" so that may be why you seem to have so much traffic but not the sales to go along with that. Hhat you want to go by is unique visitor numbers, not "hits"

For my site, in Feb I got 120,174 "hits", but the real important column is the unique visitors- 2,835

Month----Unique visitors --- Number of visits ---- Pages ---- Hits ---- Bandwidth
Feb 2008 -----2835 ------------------- 4447 -------13691 ---- 120174 ---- 1.65 GB

Also, if you check your logs you may find a LOT of traffic from russia and other countries, in my case since I do not sell out of the USA I decided to add a block to my server to totally block not only most of those countries that produce a lot of wasted traffic such as Germany, France, South Africa, Spain etc but the troublemakers who hack or try to, spam etc from Russia (.ru) China (.cn) Poland and the like. I was able to add a few lines of code and now those countries are blocked, I see the denies in my logs with their ip's and looking them up most seem to be from Russia and Germany.

[CroftonGraphics]

Also,
Even if websites/blogs etc dont help you to sell onine,

(I wouldnt think sculpture does sell online, people want to see the real deal.
Perhaps painting/prints/photography does? Anyone?)

, the online prescence will help people to remember you, ie if they have your business card from a gallery or show, and will use your online prescence for reference. A blog will give people a sense of your directions/viewpoints, perhaps that will help sales? I dont know.

For me, I use a real life sketchbook for sketches and a blog for words and links as I cant read my own writing, lol. And fortunately/unfortunately, if you write a link on a real life sketchbook, you dont get a pop up appearing in the air yet, lol.

[rderr.com]

Found over on another thread and have moved here. rd

re: what use the blog? Exactly what I want to know - I just started one and don't have any visitors. Help!

www.pamelaniskanen.blogspot.com (http://www.pamelaniskanen.blogspot.com)

I think you have hit one of the major problems square on the head by posing the right question in the wrong place. Were to go. It all seems so chaotic and arbitrary.

RD

[rika]

Found over on another thread and have moved here. rd



I think you have hit one of the major problems square on the head by posing the right question in the wrong place. Were to go. It all seems so chaotic and arbitrary.

RD

My blog was originally on Blogspot, but moved it to Wordpress, because I had no success in attracting any traffic to it. Wordpress has nice features that can be useful to you, like all kinds of statistics, you can monitor the posts you had comments on, etc.

[Landseer]

Also,
Even if websites/blogs etc dont help you to sell onine,

(I wouldnt think sculpture does sell online, people want to see the real deal.
Perhaps painting/prints/photography does? Anyone?)



I sell my sculptures exclusively on-line, they sell well. I sold many thousands worth on Ebay alone last year. Without exception every client has said the pieces they received were better than they expected and better than they look in photos.
Issue is, it takes maybe a year or more to get a new domain or web site established and "connected", that is to say- in Google, search engines, linked to by other web sites etc and to get traffic.

EVERYONE looks for .com if they can't remember your url, if they can remember the name like joes-statues they would try joes-statues.COM before they would ever think of trying obscure ones like .net .info .name etc so don't get a domain you plan to use alone- in anything other than .com or you won't get any traffic to speak of.

I had a .info for a few years, the traffic was almost zilch, that's probably why .info was on sale at registrars.

[Julianna]

I just got a question from Imms a new member. He was asking, "Whatsup???" with your blog. Question, how many use and find useful these various tools that the net offers? Which ones and why? Or, are youall like me and am happy with this navel gazing. Or have we already discus this and it's already been done.

Art is etc
RD

I use http://wordpress.org/ for my general blog (http://blog.juliannayau.com), and the "stories" function in Drupal (http://drupal.org) for the blog posts on my sculpture website (http://sculpture.juliannayau.com) (which runs entirely on Drupal).

Wordpress is a very lightweight piece of software, installed on your server, for blogging. I like it because it has good support and tons of plugins and themes. They also offer hosted solutions (at wordpress.com, I think).

Drupal, on the other hand, comes with everything but the kitchen sink. It's better for a full website, but probably overkill if you just want a blog.

If the thought of installing software on a server frightens you, try something like Blogger (http://www.blogger.com), which does all of that for you.

[Landseer]

I went to look at Drupal and gee, the first line I see is;

Update: Drupal 5.9 has been released to correct a vulnerability that was inadvertantly left in Drupal 5.8.

Then there's this, which may be the entire history, and maybe industry standard, but still disturbing;

Contributor Links
* 174 Pending bugs (D7)
* 140 Critical issues (D7)
* 837 Patch queue (D7)
* 320 Patches to review (D7)

Boy, if that piece of 'promotion' doesn't prompt people to immediately join I don't know what would!! :rolleyes:

Joking aside though Drupal looks like a very large versitile piece of software, I might even look into it more when I have time to see what it might do for me or what additional site content it might allow.

As far as wordpress goes, I never had any problems installing or updating it, it has excellent instructions, typically the only real issues one might run into with it is you somehow don't set directories or file permissions correctly, or you don't enter the server address/your user name/ password correctly and it can't connect.
Someone here has their site on wirenine, I went to look at it a month ago and switched to that host, their customer support is great, they even have a message board like this one where you can interact with the owner and staff personally, and they have a live-chat help line.

I moved to them and used their free control panel to control panel site transfer service, and my entire site, logs and everything was transferred over to them within the hour, it was so seemless I was getting confused because it looked like it was still on hostingit365. Everything worked perfectly.

[Julianna]

Yeah, the security upgrades are a bit scary, but I don't worry about them overly. They're usually very quick to post a fix and notify users, and because the installed software doesn't advertise that you're using Drupal, or which version, exposure is quite low.

I'm glad you like Wirenine! I'm the one who's on there... I suggested them to other people, and some of the less "techie" ones are a bit frustrated by what they're calling poor responses and harsh policies. I don't know what they mean by poor responses, because they've always been quick and got the problem solved...and the policies aren't any different than other hosts. It's good to know that there are some other people out there who are happy with them!

[Landseer]

Yeah, the security upgrades are a bit scary, but I don't worry about them overly. They're usually very quick to post a fix and notify users, and because the installed software doesn't advertise that you're using Drupal, or which version, exposure is quite low.


Actually I went to look at some of the sample sites and those DID say something about software from Drupal way at the bottom, a while back hackers got into hundreds or thousands of message boards with a certain version that had a bug- all they had to do to find the sites that used it was google for the search term "powered by..." the software name and version which I have forgotten now, and they found all the sites that had that version!


I'm glad you like Wirenine! I'm the one who's on there... I suggested them to other people, and some of the less "techie" ones are a bit frustrated by what they're calling poor responses and harsh policies. I don't know what they mean by poor responses, because they've always been quick and got the problem solved...and the policies aren't any different than other hosts. It's good to know that there are some other people out there who are happy with them!

Oh yes, you were the one then, yeah it's a good host, and I save more now because I was able to use their domain add-on feature to virtually host a couple of other domain names instead of hosting them too, real slick!

[Julianna]

Actually I went to look at some of the sample sites and those DID say something about software from Drupal way at the bottom,

You got me all paranoid and I checked my sites...you're right, one of them does say "Powered by Drupal". It's merely in the site template, so it's fairly easy to remove the tagline.

[rderr.com]

I sell my sculptures exclusively on-line, they sell well. I sold many thousands worth ...

Landseer,

We could all take a page out of your book in several ways. I unfortunately have had to take my blog off line because it was squatted by, well, squat. Even here is not immune to spamers.

Robert

[Landseer]

Landseer,

I unfortunately have had to take my blog off line because it was squatted by, well, squat. Even here is not immune to spamers.

Robert

All you have to do is install the free plug-in akismet, and/or turn off comments entirely- no spam either way.

[Landseer]

Oh yes, you were the one then, yeah it's a good host, and I save more now because I was able to use their domain add-on feature to virtually host a couple of other domain names instead of hosting them too, real slick!

Well, things with wirenine have degraded considerably after I bought a new domain name and opened hosting for that too on wirenine, I uploaded a tar.gz backup of my entire site and it wouldn't unpack because their security doesn't allow access to unpacking tar.gz files, so I had to have them do it.

ALL I asked for was to unpack the archive, waited 2 days for support to respond, when they did it was with a question;

Hi,
Please kindly let us know if you wish for us to restore the full cpanel backup or untar the file contents for you? We will proceed as soon as we get a response from you.

Ok, so I thought I'd have them just do the whole thing and said go ahead and do the cpanel restore so everything is in it's place.

Two days later I get;

Hello,
The backup is from a different domain , would you like to change your primary domain with us ?

NO, again I told them I wanted TWO duplicated web sites fully hosted, and that eventually- months from now the old domain would no longer be hosted and simply redirect to the new.

So then they write the backup has been restored, then I discover my original site/domain is totally inaccessable via any means, so another support ticket on that, and I get this response;

Hello,
Your DNS was removed because you requested the backup to be restored on the 2nd server. Your original domain is on the personal plan which allows only 3 databases, and if we update your plan on the server your databases will be lost.

That was wrong too, I had their plan that included something like 38 databases not 3

I also get this;

Hello,
You requested a full cpanel restore of the backup, not untar the archive.

We use clustered dns, and restoring a full cpanel backup on any of the shared servers overwrites the dns entry from the previous account. What you tried to do caused the backup to overwrite the dns entry, and you did not notify us if this was a restore from your other account that already exists on our servers.

We will update you shortly once the issue has been resolved.

So like how the hell do they really expect anyone to know how their servers are run and that duplicating a site with them overwrites the first??? I never heard of this in my life, this was two indepent stand-alone domains fully hosted individually and they screwed up and act like it's MY fault.
Even the cpanel versions are different, one is standard the other is some amateur looking deal with big icons and only 5 databases included, now for higher cost.

I'm going back to the previous hosting which has a better package.

[WBK]

quote Rika <<...not for introverts, it seems voyeuristic once the novelty wears off. Extroverts will have a blast imo...>>

Introverts perhaps we should have a few more of those around here.

Robert

You probably have more then you think...
:)

[rderr.com]

You (intro verts??? hehehe) probably have more* then you think...
:)


WE'VE HEARD IT FROM THE HETERO*, THE HOMOS, THE EXTROS AND NOW FROM THE INTROS. Lets all come out of our closets.

Robert

*Should that be plural? There may be more than one of you out there.

bob

then?? Butter watch out WBK or 'tlouis will get you.

rd

[Tlouis]

Right
I've clobbered more than one with a dangling participle.:eek:
Lou

[Julianna]

Landseer, sorry to hear that Wirenine wasn't being very helpful. My friend has been frustrated with them too, but also had the same problem with the prior host. I guess you get what you pay for, and I'm starting to think that I'm okay with them because I can solve most of my own problems.

And re: blog spam, I'm using Wordpress with moderated comments and pingbacks, and a slew of anti-spam plugins: Akismet, JS SpamBlock, Peter's Custom Anti-Spam (a CAPTCHA plugin) and Simple Trackback Validation. The odd comment or pingback still slips through, but only about one every week or two.

[Mr. Malloy]

I've never done that. I suppose that I should blog. I just don't have the time. This is the main reason I don't do U-Tubing. I also don't watch TV i find all that a waste of time. I do like to come to this site daily though and I do a fair amount of research on line. I do email twice a day. does that make me a hypocrite?