1384 - The Pink Wall

I’m still without my Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC - and I miss it. It’s such a versatile lens, and if it were actually working, it would be perfect 🙂

Well, I guess it will take at least another week until I get it back from repair. Until then I use lenses that I’ve not used in a long time. We had the Sigma 50/1.4 last week, we had a few images with the Nikon 70-300 VR, and at the moment it is the Sigma 28/1.8, another fine lens that’s just a little wider than normal on my D300. I’ve even tried the Sigma 8-16, but ultra-wide is not my thing right now.

My programming blog finally gets quite some traffic, and that is an interesting thing. It’s a low-volume blog where I publish very selectively. There is almost nothing personal, it’s mostly short essays about software, about programming, and then there is this really huge tutorial that I’ve written. Obviously it is not that bad, because in the meantime it got linked to from Sun/Oracle, it was recognized by the very developers of the software that I write about, and in Google you find it on the first page when you search for “GlassFish”, “Eclipse” and “tutorial”.

This tutorial and the followup, where I looked into what has changed with the recent software updates, draw almost all the traffic, and that amounts to pretty much the same as my photoblog. Cool 🙂

I have announced the tutorial on Good-Tutorials.com and Pixel2Life.com, two tutorial sites that bring in some traffic as well, but on the other hand, stumbling the tutorial is absolutely ineffective. Why? Too much text, too specific. If you’re looking for it, it’s exactly what you need, but if not, you couldn’t care less.

Bounce rates are lower as well and in general people tend to browse around. It’s also interesting that the tutorial draws a constant stream of visitors, and it has been doing this for more than three weeks now. When I do the same thing on my photoblog, publish a tutorial and announce it, I get a spike for about two or three days and then it’s over. Funny how different blog categories behave differently 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Juicy John Pink” from the 1969 Procol Harum classic “A Salty Dog”. Hear it on YouTube. Hmm … couldn’t remember this song at all 😄


There are 4 comments

Rick   (2010-08-01)

Well, I found your blog through a photoshop tutorial (http://manessinger.com/2008/05/571-them-there-eyes-ii.html) but enjoyed the daily stuff so much that it's now in my folder of bookmarked blogs and sites to check every morning. However, everytime I view this blog, I only every view the main page - never clicking through the other links, because I've seen every blog post since for about the last 2 years. Would this be a 'bounce' on your statistics? Could regular readers like me contribute to your higher bounce rate on this blog?

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andreas   (2010-08-01)

Firstly, thank you very much. As to the stats, yes, that would be a bounce. Stupid of me to have not thought of it: It's in the very nature of a photoblog to produce mostly bounces. Not that I care that much, it's a label after all. Call it "Visit to the Frontpage" and suddenly it sounds much more friendly 🙂

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Thomas   (2010-08-02)

I'll have to bring my trusty Canon 17-55 mm/2,8 to the repairshop pretty soon. Your post(s) seem to attest to my fears: how will I survive without it? A quick statistics tells me that I do around 85% of my photos with it. Nice, colorful bike! Looks a bit psychedelic with all that pink, but it certainly gets your attention... 😉

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andreas   (2010-08-02)

Well, you could always get that new Sigma 🙂 No. Just use the time experimenting. Use the most awkward lens that you have, abuse it, do things that nobody should ever do, look at what you get and enjoy it 😄

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