Technical Testing Tribulations

ay back in November I finally staked my claim on a corner of the internet by registering and hosting a website under my name. I had stalled for almost a full year, thinking there was too much I would want to research before pinning down a registrar/host. Turns out that was the easy part (once I realised I didn't need a slew of dedicated servers in the former Soviet Bloc).

After choosing DreamHost at the recommendation of a friend and a popular website (Lifehacker, who recently re-affirmed DreamHost's dominance), all I had to do was learn how to code an entire website. And not just any website, one that would display a photographic portfolio dynamically and interactively and [buzzword] and [so on]. Ok, so I haven't quite gotten to that part yet, but the site exists and is a decent placeholder.

The holdup is that I'm the sort of person who can't just throw up something pre-fabricated and call it a day, I have to learn how to code the entire thing myself, learn databases and cascading stylesheets, from scratch. Maybe once I've done that I could take an easier route, but without understanding the background it seems too much like cheating. Besides, most of the point was giving myself opportunity to learn, given that my photos probably aren't going to start flying off the shelves (there are some up, but they, too, are placeholders).

So in the meantime I've just been using the web export feature in Adobe Lightroom (a god-send for those of us who like cataloging, integration with other applications and services and powerful but simple tools). The problem I'm leading up to is that I'd like to stop hosting the photos I use in blog posts on Picasa and move them all over to a dedicated storage folder on my website. Heck, someday I should move this blog there, too.

The problem is that to use a photo in a post, I need to have a link to the .jpg file that will never change, or at least use a relative link to just "/kitten.jpg" rather than "http:// blah/folderA/section56/kitten.jpg" and so on. So that's one solution. But I also need the photo to link to a gallery view on my website, so that the clicker can browse through other photos from my blog, and also use spiffy navigation controls to browse by keyword or just mosey back through other parts of my portfolio.

I'm not going to list how much of that I have no idea how to accomplish, because it's too overwhelming. But, I've written an entire blogpost about it now, so that will hopefully motivate me.

Oh, and the reason there are random photos of pie here is because they're hosted on my website, just... not very sophisticatedly.

Lessons learned

Commenting and leaving your website/blog info here and there on the interwebs can actually generate traffic. So sayeth my recent interpretation of the data I've been collecting on this very blog. Before you freak out, no, I can't tell exactly who you are, and if you're on the web you're spreading information about your surfing habits all over the place anyway. I left a comment over on Meredith Farkas' blog, Information Wants to be Free after the CIL2010 conference along with my blog address, and got a few clicks off it. That's certainly one way networking works, and why we should form connections online. (There's a building slowly on top of foundations metaphor here somwhere)

Posting links on certain days of the week, and times of day results in different levels of click-interest. I got a ton of clicks yesterday, and I suspect this is because people were le bored at work on a Monday. I'll have to devise a controlled experiment to test this theory. Maybe posting the same number of links of similar type every day? There are also notable changes in click frequency based on how I've "sold" the link in my tweet or text.

People are more likely to respond to a post or a link if they can see that others have done so before them. Facebook posts with lots of comments or clicks get shuffled to the top in the "Top Stories" feed, and if there are several comments saying "omg, so cool" and "this is great!" everyone else will click, too.

Which brings me to the irritating point that people are frequently more interested in visual content than in text. (this post is already screwed) This generally makes it difficult to communicate information to people because they are lazy or unwilling to go through all the trouble of reading. The blog Information is Beautiful takes advantage of this by posting awesome graphs, diagrams, charts and whatnot that are visually interesting, full of information, and make their point. I admit that I am also guilty of this trend. When I go through my Google Reader feed at lunch every day I beeline for the "pretty" items, the webcomics, and posts I know will be brief.

I'll just conclude by saying that posting interesting, wordy content and creating a reader base isn't as easy as one might think.

(if I put a kitten here, would you be more interested? another future study.)