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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
September Archived
1 October 2015
We published 71 stories in September at Photo Corners, all neatly archived as Volume 4, Number 9 in our archive as fresh as any monthly magazine's table of contents. If you visited us during September, you got to watch as we built the issue day by day.
That's one of the benefits of publishing on the Web. You don't have to wait until all a publication's signatures have been printed, folded, bound and trimmed to publish.
But having that sense of perspective only a periodical can give is one of the benefits of publishing on a schedule. We try to mix both approaches here so you get the benefit of both. Visit us daily to ride the wave, take in the archive to gain some perspective.
The September editorial balance included 15 Features, 26 commented news items, 24 Editor's Notes (including at least 89 items of interest in our Around the Horn articles), three reviews and three Site Notes.
Readership saw a very healthy bump from our inclusion in the new Apple News app.
OUR MOST POPULAR STORY set some records with 100 times (yep, 100 times) the number of readers we used to enjoy at the last place we worked. That was our main coverage of HP's new printers. Our accompanying coverage if HP's Instant Ink program and paper/ink technology were very close behind as well.
In second place, though, was our slide show of lilies. The slide shows score well but this was the first time one ranked that high.
Third place was won by our Saturday matinee featuring the Well in Washington, D.C. That was also the matinee that's been available the longest. The other three are climbing the charts right behind it.
But rankings are not everything. We're pleased to see the diversity in the top ten with news, slide shows, features and even Horn articles sprinkled in.
READERSHIP saw a very healthy bump from our inclusion in the new Apple News app. Healthy as in a 110 percent increase over last month, which was our previous high (ignoring the inflated stats from runaway bots we've experienced in the past). That means September saw our highest actual readership levels yet.
We didn't make any code or style changes to Photo Corners for Apple News. So we were a little wary about how well things might work. Things like slide shows and sliding panels of images. But everything worked. And when you click on the Read More links, you do actually see the page as we designed it.
Apple News just picks up our RSS feed, showing you the short description with a link to the full article, which is a plus for publishers. To read the full story, you have to visit our site (which explains how our readership numbers went up this month).
That's nice for ad-supported publications. But we aren't here for advertisers.
We designed Photo Corners to be read from the RSS feed with an RSS client (we ourselves us Postbox) that gives you the option of seeing the whole story, not just the one-paragraph description. You never really have to visit the site to know what's going on (although you can lose a weekend chasing things around here).
SITE TWEAKS beyond Apple News included our first poll with a little demo showing a variation of the simple technology we've devised to see what you think without twisting your arm.
We didn't deploy it this month but we have a little tip to share about the tweak we made to list the last updated time on the headline page. You may, from time to time, see an updated time with no new story. Since the time refers to changes to the headline page itself, look for a plus (+) sign in the headlines. We've probably updated a story. Hover over the plus to see what kind of update we made.
WE WON'T LEAVE YOU this month without thanking you for your support. Your subscription (and renewal) is more than a pat on the back to us. And when you purchase through our sponsored links, you vote for ad-free, reader-centric publishing that doesn't spend a second thinking up ways to tease you to click on something.
We're focused on the task at hand. Because that's what we both love.