How My Boobies Got Involved in Canadian Politics
Like I said the other day, I had this organic search traffic spike. Lots of people looking for Mike Crawley showed up, the majority of them from Google image search.
About 20 hours later, I saw the news that Mike Crawley has been named as the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada….
What this essentially means is that a whole lot of people were doing a quick spot of internet research on Mike Crawley, maybe looking for a picture of him to include with their blog post or news story, when they crashed into a couple of my photos along the way and got, um, distracted. “Important stuff, politics… oh look, boobies!” and so on.
So, if you’re here looking for Mike Crawley, Canadian politician, you just missed him.
If you want Mike Crawley AKA Photofrenetic, erotic nude and artistic nude photographer, then check out the gallery or visit his website.
That is all.
Pervs.
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WTF Happened There?
I just had one of those mad traffic spikes: not a StumbleUpon flashmob, not a run of Facebook click-throughs, but a burst of activity that comes mainly from organic search.
Look:
As it turns out, I had a lot of hits from people searching for Mike Crawley. Which isn’t surprising, because he’s an expert and because he does nudie photos.
There were a couple of hours there when it was all just busy, busy, busy – for this place, at least. I’m used to pootling along at no more than a hundred or so views a day most of the time, so this was pretty fucking unusual.
So who were those passing pervs? Will they be back? Did they find what they were looking for? What does it all mean?
CAPTCHA Your Future [Chaos Magick]
Just a thought:
Every day I submit several online forms with a “type the magic words” anti-bot security feature. Sometimes those words seem relevant to one another or to something I was doing at the time.
Are they trying to tell me something?
BTW, If I now say “yes,” then I’m officially a bit of a twat unless I’m suffering some sort of delusions. But I’m not, on either count, so hold your fire.
I’m proposing a kind of Chaos Magick.
What I’m thinking — and be just as aware as I am at this point that it is my brain I’m talking about and my brain that is doing the thinking, so there’s a bias in there somewhere — is that maybe if I recorded the words and what I was doing each time, I’d be able to see either
- an amusingly coincidental pattern [cool!]
- an absence of pattern, amusing or otherwise [ho hum]
- something else that I didn’t predict [awesome! unless it's scary]
As a total aside, when I tried to type “at this point” a couple of paragraphs ago, I typed “that is point” instead. My brain trying to agree with me, or just the usual sleep deprivation talking?
Anyway. So I will. Capture my CAPTCHAs, I mean. I can screenshot them all for a week or 2 and see what I get. Probably nothing. Maybe a nifty word cloud or something. Maybe the brain that’s so far at the back it’s actually part of my spinal column will pick up patterns the rest of me is too clever to notice. Gotta be at least as easy as Nostradamus.
Image credit: Accretion Disc
The problem with “free”
For a month or 2 (OK, maybe more – my sense of time is hazy when I’ve been procrastinating hard) I’ve been the proud owner of a free .co.cc domain name and free 000webhost.com hosting. I haven’t made any good use of it, but it’s sucked up a fair amount of my time: checking to see if the registration had been activated, requesting activation, waiting, checking to see if the nameservers had been updated yet, waiting, twitching, reading the support resources, visiting the non-existent site to will it into being with my steely gaze, emailing support and waiting a week for a reply.
All I wanted it for was to poke around: instal WordPress.org, play with themes and stuff, test things I wasn’t sure about before I did them anywhere important. I didn’t see any point paying for something I was only going to use for fun and exploration. D’oh.
Top quality fun and exploration are well worth paying for. I wouldn’t say “oh, I’ll only ever use free sex toys because they’re just for fun,” or decide that my walking shoes have to be free because I’ll only use them to explore. So why was I focused on getting my test on for free?
Because the internet’s sposed to be free, yo.
No.
In the end I got pissed off and paid about £20 of our quaint English pounds to some guys online in exchange for a year’s hosting package that’s probably a lot higher-spec than I need, and includes a free .com domain name registration. I didn’t compare web hosting prices and find the best deal, I didn’t ask all my self-hosting friends for recommendations. Shit, I didn’t even tweet for help.
I just got bored bored bored of the dicking around with this free stuff and decided I was happy to pay someone who would do it a little bit faster and better; then I paid the first people I googled who looked… faster and better. And they were. I still had to live chat with a techie about getting my domain registration arranged, but that was quick and painless and live, dammit, so I wasn’t left frustrated and grouchy.
Oh, my aching internet-addicted bones.
I’m not saying all free stuff is bad; I have some excellent free or “freemium” stuff that I’m very happy with and whose support service is actually quite supportive. But I don’t want to embrace the false economy of saving money by doing everything myself, when my time is worth more than the fee for assistance.
So this morning I looked at my situation and grokked this: I could spend a few hours messing with my new setup and export-importing all my content and adding plugins and dancing with widgets. Or I could spend some cash and have my new site set up for me. I’d been intending to do it all myself, to benefit from the learning implicit in any new activity. But I realised the knowledge to be gained is largely “how to point and click”, and I’m pretty sure I could pick it up whenever if I needed to. So again, I’d rather spend a little cash and save the hassle than spend the time (when I could be earning money or chilling with my family) to do it myself.
Problem solved through the application of cash. So if you have cash, great – your takeaway is to spend more of it on saving yourself for the good stuff. If you don’t have cash, that sucks and I’m on my way. Leave me a comment (or email me) about who you are and what you’re doing for money; I’ll get back to you and help if I can.
Image credit: Gisela Giardino
Mrs Anne X Ample’s favourite websites
In my Saturday afternoon ennui, I’ve decided to look up URLs that sound like unreal examples. Here’s what I found:
www.example.com
Like example.org, this has been reserved so that it _can_ be used as an example in documents, presentations etc without leading anyone to a random site.
A random site like these:
www.example.co.uk
Doesn’t seem to exist, but http://example.co.uk does & took me to a Smartways Technology webmail portal that looked cowboy compared to the company’s website.
www.anexample.com
Don’t go there. You’ll have to shut your browser down to escape…
www.notarealurl.com
Exists & is a blog feeding images of reality straight to your unsuspecting screen.
www.nothere.com
“No there” or “not here”? Discuss.
Exists & is one of those keyword results pages. All photography & art related when I looked at it…
www.something.com
Exists & is a blank white page with the word “Something” on it. In black. Times New Roman or of that font family, top left aligned. Looks like 12 point size, though that’s hard to say when you’re viewing online cos it’s pixels really.
Any other good examples?
Time for self-hosting? I need advice!
Today, this blog passed 10 thousand page views.
It isn’t a big number, and it’s page views (not the same thing as the number of identifiably unique visitors) but I was happy nonetheless. It’s nice to know that I’m not talking to myself anymore :)
When I started blogging all I was doing was posting spare thoughts, and photos from my modelling jobs when I worked with people nice enough to share the results with me. I had a handful of views a week. The only people I told about the blog were my friends and occasional photographers.
There was an occasional web traffic spike when something exciting happened (like my one and only burlesque performance, or our DIY home birth). Then I’d just had a baby and returned to work less than 3 months later; I rarely had the energy to write for myself when I’d spent all day writing for my living. But in the last few months, I’ve started to make time for this blog again.
The joy of blogging, to me, is that I do it because I want to, not because anyone else expects it. My recently-renewed blogging energy [or perhaps it's just the start of a manic episode] has made me think about what’s next: should I move to a self-hosted WordPress.org setup?
With WordPress.org, people who know tell me, I’ll be able to tweak anything I like and embed anything I want to. I can advertise the shiz I like, so I could earn back the hosting fees. I’ll be in control, which is not necessarily a good thing.
Here’s the problem, or the 2 problems really:
- I am not a web developer. My html is tourist-standard, I’ve never used WordPress.org before, and I know nothing about moving all this stuff over to another host. I’m scared I’m gonna screw it up.
- If I go ahead and self-host, I’ll feel obliged to try and make it earn me some money to cover the costs. Will that mean I start to see my blog as work? Will I start power tripping and checking my Klout more often than my email?
So I’m begging you, if you’ve already been there & done this, if you know what I need to know, please share it with me. I’m feeling kind of stuck and I’m not sure what I should do next. Help!
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