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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 2018
We've just updated Volume 6, Number 8 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 15 Features, 31 commented News stories, 27 Editor's Notes (which included 172 items of interest), two reviews and one site note for a total of 76 stories.
READERSHIP FIGURES remained constant from last month's increase, almost identical in site visits and pages downloaded even before final figures later today. Not bad as summer vacations conclude and everyone gets back to work one way or another.
TOP STORIES were led by our extensive review of Excire Search Pro followed closely by the LG Snap announcement. We're glad to see our review get that kind of attention after seeing only superficial coverage elsewhere of this important new tool.
Our West Portal slide show took third place, followed by our Ghirardelli slide show. Rounding out the top five was our coverage of the Epson FastFoto 680w.
Astute observers of editorial trends will notice we really didn't conform to one. Again. We think that speaks well of our editorial judgment. And yours.
THAT STORY COUNT up top was compiled a little differently this month. We've always built the index and then manually counted each category, comparing the total to our directory total for the month.
But that left a few things to be desired. Since we expanded our Around The Horn articles beyond just four, we estimated conservatively an average of five items per story. But it turns out to be over six.
Then, too, having the count after the month ends wasn't much use to us. It's better to know, as you go, what the balance is. Previously we were only able to look at the number of stories in the directory for the current month.
Editorial Count. As of last Tuesday, Aug. 28, with a few days left in the month.
So we built a Perl script to tell us, using a Keyboard Maestro macro (that indispensable macOS utility), what we've been up to all month. Instantly.
And we fleshed it out to show us percentages and a few other tidbits it was easy to divine.
It wasn't simple, though. We used three sources to derive our numbers, including a directory scan for particularly file name clues and a scan of the headline page index to grasp the categories (which are generally not revealed by a file name).
The new percentage breakouts were interesting. Features run about 20 percent with Editor's Notes at 35 percent while News items predominate at 40 percent. But consider that we published 172 items of interest in those Editor's Notes and you have to rethink our actual news coverage.
Those 172 items would be individual news stories on many other sites. So Photo Corners is bringing you a good deal more coverage than even aggregators. But because those 172 are succinctly summarized, we don't beat you over the head with them.
Consequently you can spend the same time with us and get much more out of it.
We know of two other photography sites that have tried to do something like our Around The Horn column. One tried to do it daily (and didn't make it a month) and the other tried to do it weekly (with not much more success). It was a lot of work, one of them admitted before giving it up.
But is it? Don't you expect a photography site to follow the field? To research it daily? How difficult is it to report back to you? That after all is the name of the game.
And, as those 172 items prove, it's also a large part of the fun.