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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.
August Archived
1 September 2017
We published 75 stories in Photo Corners, Volume 6, Number 8. That includes 21 Features, 27 commented News stories, 23 Editor's Notes, one review and three Site Notes. And now that those Editor's Notes are not limited to four items, they've provided well over 120 links to articles on other sites we found worth your while because they were worth ours.
Vacation? What vacation?
ONLY GOOGLE TOOK A VACATION, one we enforced on them for trampling our bandwidth in July. We took up the welcome mat so readers rather than bots could continue to enjoy the site and, well, we left it that way all month. Our first entirely Google-free month.
That (temporarily) eliminates our August stories from Google's search results (Bing has them though). If you use Google to search our site for the D850, for example, you won't find the stories we published about Nikon's new flagship. But we aren't in this to play games.
We're in it to help you enjoy the art and craft of photography. Often by sacrificing ourselves as examples of what can go wrong. More often than we plan, anyway.
You just have to keep tinkering.
Sometimes we get things right, too, though.
And it seems you agree. Without Google padding our (still incomplete) numbers, we achieved roughly the same number of visits as with Google. But we saved some bandwidth, hitting about the same levels we had from April to June and well about last year. And we still managed half a million page views.
SO WHAT WERE you reading?
Our leading story, getting three times the clicks as the second-place finisher, was our matinee featuring Russell Brown's eclipse edits. Second place was the announcement by Adobe of its partnership with Hootsuite. And third place was taken by our story about the Leica V-Lux Explorer Kit. Fourth was Canon's Portrait Tour story and fifth was the Whitewall survey.
Notice anything about that list?
We did. Everything on that list got a big assist from social media play, primarily from the companies behind the products. We do notify the companies that we've published a story about them and some of them actually spread the word.
Good for them, good for us. Good for you, too.
Our features don't get that kind of boost, of course, but they continue to attract readers just below the level of the promoted content. Our slide shows and matinees remain popular features and our new shorter features are making friends, too.
WE DID UPDATE our Copyrighter Pro for subscribers and we managed to tweak our left margin index. Sometimes small changes like that are particularly pleasing. Why it takes so long to realize what a difference they might make is another story. But that's the case with interface experiences and usability design no matter how big or small the project or company.
You just have to keep tinkering.
And so we will. That "aimless" activity is the key to creativity. And that beats taking a vacation.