4339 - Looking Into the Setting Sun

2018-09-05

Welcome to the other side! Glad to see you 😅

From now on I am deliberately handicapped when it comes to judging how many readers I have. I still see stats in feedburner (that’s a Google service that I’ve used since 2006 to give my RSS feed a constant, never-changing address), but other than that, there is no Google Analytics, no StatCounter nor anything else. In other words: I can’t track you.

It’s not that I couldn’t do it on a static blog. Everybody does. It’s only that I think I don’t need that any more. I’ve done it for a long time and I’ve learned that I cannot increase my readership without investing a lot of time. And even then, there is an upper limit, that I can’t break with my type of content. In its best times the blog had about 500 readers per day, on good days a few thousands. 90% of them came for a handful of posts.

I had one of the first “user experience reviews” of the Nikon D300 online, and for one lens, the Tamron 17-50/2.8 VC, I had the only review for a long time. I did some comparisons between DxO versions, I produced some Photoshop tutorials, and that drew most of the traffic.

If you’ve done that for a few years, it stops having appeal. It is just work. As I always say, thanks, I have a job 😃

I’ve also stopped having ads on the blog. I used to have amazon ads, mainly as a means to link to music, but I’ve removed them as well. They didn’t earn me money anyway, and nowadays they would make the blog count as “commercial” - with all the implications this has in times of the GDPR.

Therefore: if you like what you see, and if you want to do me a favor: drop me a comment 😀

There are 9 comments

Anonymous Fan   (2018-09-05)

Congrats on the successful transition of your blog! BTW:
“If you you leave an email address”.replace(“you you”, “you”);
:-)

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Andreas   (2018-09-05)

Thanks! Done.

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Anonymous Fan   (2018-09-05)

One more thing, Chrome seems to have a problem with your smilies.

Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/qKsWYLS Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/3UsCXdB

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Andreas   (2018-09-05)

I see what you mean. Yes, it is a little early to go for native Unicode emoji rendering. I’ve just seen this post on the GitLab blog: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/30/journey-in-native-unicode-emoji/

It’s from end of May this year (Gulp!), and the author describes how they have to use fallbacks to SVG in certain situation.

I won’t do that. What are the options really? A complicated solution like that on GitLab, hard to maintain and fragile over time? Images instead of Unicode characters, with all their bandwidth implications? Hosting a web font myself (under the assumption there is one)?

It’s all a problem, but I have good reasons to assume that the problem will simply go away. Yes, it’s early, earlier than I’d have thought (thanks for the hint!), but at least so far I will try to sit through.

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Richard   (2018-09-06)

Hi Andreas, I like the look of your new site and my bookmarks took me straight to it, so no problems there. I can report that your emojis are working for me, both in Safari and Chrome. The pictures are of course excellent as usual.

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Andreas   (2018-09-06)

Richard,

thanks a lot for the feedback. With every comment I’m learning something. You’ve specified an email address, and - lo and behold - I have forgotten to automatically strip them in my comment harvester :) It’s fixed now.

As to the emojis: that you mention Safari, makes it clear you work on a Mac. Lacking polish, that’s never been a problem on a Mac. No, I suppose the anonymous fan, who shared his emoji problems, is working on Linux or on an older version of Windows. Windows 10 has no problems either, and on Linux you can seemingly install some extra font and then the problem is solved.

Anyway. I see no good option but to just go ahead and let time work :D

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Anonymous Fan   (2018-09-07)

Yes, my screenshots were made on Windows 7. Never mind that old crap then :-).

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Andreas   (2018-09-07)

Interesting. You seem to have no problem with the comments form. It uses CSS grid, a standard that was just released in February 2018. Looks like you have a modern browser.

Unicode emoji rendering seems to be a matter of fonts. Have a look at https://superuser.com/questions/183446/emoji-characters-not-displaying-correctly-on-windows-7

See also the second answer in that thread. It recommends installing the “Symbola” font. Purportedly that fixes Problems with emojis. They won’t be in color though. Sorry :)

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Anonymous Fan   (2018-09-10)

I’m using the newest versions of Firefox and Chrome, of course. They do still run on Windows 7 ;-).

Also, CSS grid layout seems to have been supported in Firefox and Chrome since early 2017.

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