Secondly, I’d prefer that you comment HERE on this site. When I write, a little stub get sent to LiveJournal. A notification also gets Tweeted. Friendfeed also picks it up. Facebook republishes my Friendfeed, but I also make it a point to “share” the link on my Facebook page too, so if there’s a photo you all get to see a snippet of it. Some of you subscribe via email, so you read it that way. Most importantly I want comments. And if that means you write it on a cocktail napkin and mail it to me, then so be it. But, if you can be troubled to leave them HERE then I benefit from the fact that other people will read what you’ve written and maybe have something to say about it too.

Thirdly, I’ve integrated lots of ways to login to leave a comment so that it’s easy. You can log in with Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, Disqus, Yahoo, Google, or any OpenID provider.

Finally, I think my comments are broke right now, and this is a test to see if that is true.

Update: I figured out what was wrong with the comments. Feel free to leave one and test.

Too many of you assholes see something on the internet and think, “HEY! I can do that too! I’m gonna be fucking rich!”.

No, you can’t. And no, you’re not.

Just give up now before you litter my precious Internet with your crap. And before you start saying “but my idea is new and better and different”, just stop right there. It’s not new. There is nothing new. It’s all been done already. Yes, all of it. And it’s not better. It’s not even as good. Someone better looking, with more money and more time already did it. An no one wants different. We say we do, bit we’re lying. If you make something different, that just means it sucks that much more.

Save us all the trouble. Don’t clutter the Internet with your crap. Just give up now and go back to eating Cheetos and playing “Left For Dead” on an XBox that you didn’t and could never have invented.

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As I see it, there are really only 2 options.

1. My own website powered by WordPress
2. LiveJournal

The big deciding factor between the two is whether I want to write in public or private, and how much I want to cater to lazy people.

First, the lazy factor.

I’ve found that, for entries about Life, I get far more comments in LiveJournal than I do on the same entry posted on my website. It seems that LiveJournal users are either too lazy to click the link and read at my site, or are too lazy to bother to comment once they do.

Question 1:
Do I want to cater to this? Do I care?

Secondly, there is security.

If I’m going to really get deep into the “locked entry” writing, LiveJournal makes the most sense because it has tons of features in this arena. It means that some people will be excluded if they don’t have a LiveJournal account or know how to use OpenID. It also means I’d lost a lot of control over the look, layout, and functionality.

If i just intend to write something locked once in a great while, I can find some other means for distribution or use WordPress password protection and not really worry about it. In which case, I could just write on my own website like I’ve been doing and call it good.

Question 2:
So I ask you, do you think I write enough about my personal life? Am I candid enough in public? So you think I’m too candid in public? Should many of my life entries have a lot more filter on them?

I’m really twisted over which way to go on this. Your comments are appreciated.

But I’m going to try anyway. NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month)! Sure, I missed two days this month already, but, at least I’m starting you out with the right expectations.

Every time I look at the “word” NaBloPoMo it makes me think it has something to do with blood. The “Blo” is obvious there. I guess I think the “Po” is some take on Phlebotomy. Who knows.

Last night I saw two amazing artists in concert.

First, there was Kaki King. She’s a brilliant, beautiful woman, with some mean guitar and a voice that is pure magic. She’s got some amazing music videos on YouTube worth checking out. The art of the videos themselves really compliments her talent. And, if you just want to be in awe of her guitarist prowess, check out this live clip of her playing on David Letterman. Simply amazing.

She was followed by The Mountain Goats, a totally different variety of brilliant. With strong lyrics and emotive vocals, John Darnielle leads the audience through an amazing setlist, perforated with Kaki King on guitar playing some of the tracks from their collaborative album, The Black Pear EP, including the amazing Mosquito Repellent (sorry for the bad audio in that link).

Aside from the show being incredible, it was performed at the Granada, in my opinion, one of the bestmusic venues I’ve been to in DFW. Not only is the building interesting well laid out, the sound and light techs there always perform an outstanding job.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, I got to claim the beautiful, amazing, incredible Erica as my date. She was dressed pulling no punches whatsoever. I considered taking a photograph to share with you all and then decided I would just keep this one all to myself. Consider my selfish. I don’t mind.

The only problem with such an amazing yesterday is that today stands such little chance of living up to that standard.

C’est la vie.

Google Analytics claims I got 16 hits to my entire Photoblog yesterday. This is typical for the number of hits it claims I get on most days that I post a less popular photo. It kinda make me tilt my head sideways a bit to think that I don’t have enough friends combined with people searching for photos of scantily clad women to get more than 16 hits total, but ok. Whatever.

WordPress.com Stats claims I got 14 hits on the same day. I’m sure there are some timezone overlaps, which might account for some. Additionally, I’m not sure that WordPress Stats counts hits to the Archive pages, of which Google Analytics claims I got 2. So that makes sense. The two jive with each other in that regard.

However, the photos that each stats program claims were viewed is quite different. Google only shows 4 hits to yesterday’s photo. WordPress only shows 2. WordPress shows lots of different photos that were viewed. Google shows 6 hits to the photoblog front page that aren’t indicated in WordPress.

As if that wasn’t all misleading and very skewed, the page itself has a view counter on it (visible below the photo). It’s presented there by a plugin that, supposedly, doesn’t count *MY* traffic (which WordPress.com stats claims to filter out as well). It shows 46 views for that particular photo.

To get one last point of comparison the web server stats show 53 hits on that particular image page. Now, this will count all of my traffic as well, and isn’t limited to just yesterday. With that in mind, 53 hits and the 46 views claimed by the view plug in seem to jive.

I can understand some discrepancy in the Google numbers, as some browsers don’t allow Javascript. But 4 vs 46?! That’s a 90% loss.

Even if I accept that 90% of all hits are on browsers that don’t support javascript or have javascript turned off, why aren’t the WordPress.com Stats correct? Can someone please explain this to me? Because it’s driving me crazy! Do I just have bad tech karma or are other people seeing this too?

Our data is on dozens of sites and for some it may be hard to keep track of every little thing you do online. [...] We feel some sort of internal need to share every single bit of our lives through every avenue we are afforded to ensure that every single person we’re connected to sees what we do. Rest assured. You are not that important. [...] Your friends will find you on the sites they are interested in joining. You don’t need to spam other sites with crossed data.

– CarpeAqua // Your Twitter is not your Blog is not your Tumblr is not your FriendFeed

Many of you think I’m a bit nuts for obsessing about separation like I do. Well, this is it! This is exactly why! Let’s say that, by chance, Mr. CarpeAqua finds my photography absolutely amazing but, despite that, he has no interest in knowing that I had no water this morning when I woke up. Maybe he could care less about my troubles with Portable Ubuntu, but finds my writing regarding my own internal struggles coping with a hectic life an an overactive brain (unlocked just to link here) incredibly interesting and enlightening. I’d rather know that he is uninterested in some aspects of me and that he is taking the bits and pieces of me that he enjoys and engaging himself fully in that than to know that he is so overwhelmed with information from me that he has no choice but to ignore it all.

I understand the need to cross-post data in cases where two services overlap and you want to participate in both. For instance, I want to share my photography with the Flickr community, the VFXY community, and with the LiveJournal community. So I post in my photoblog, and cross post to accounts on each of those services. But I try to do so in a way that separates content, either with communities, or with separate accounts entirely.

I’ve seen people doing this between Pownce and Twitter or between their blog and their LiveJournal account. This makes sense. In each of these cases the syndicated content is either a copy of the original, excerpts linking back to the original, or a subset of the original. It’s not a situation where multiple sites and multiple services are dumping all manner of content into one pile of madness. Imagine if my LiveJournal updated every time I posted a Tweet?

For those places where the lines are a little blurry I like digest posts. If I have a blog about my life, and I also happen to use Twitter to account for a very detailed breakdown of my life, making a digest of Twitter posts in the blog about my Life just makes sense. If I happen to use Tumblr to post interesting tidbits of interest to Technically minded people, then a digest of that finding its way to my Technical blog makes sense.

Having all of your content in every place all of the time is just silly, wasteful, complicated, and annoying. But, if that’s what you want, there are services that do this and do it well, like FriendFeed. Taking a look at my FriendFeed, you can see how annoying having everything in one place might be for someone who was only interested in black and white photography of the female form. But, of course, if you want EVERYTHING, then FriendFeed works for you.

So yeah. Reading the thoughts of others on this has encouraged me to separate even more. If you can’t handle a few more adds to your LiveJournal friends list or a few more notches in your Google Reader, then maybe you aren’t all that interested in the first place.

No, I don’t have 1,350 unread items in my daily folder. I’ve read all of those already. The first time you suggested that I did, I reread all 1,350 of them. The second and third times I thought you were just trying to be certain. The fourth and fifth times you brought it up I thought you were being funny. Now this is just ridiculous.

(Actually, Bloglines claims I have 1,414 items in my Daily folder that are unread. But I decided to clear out a few of my subscriptions before taking a screenshot. A guy can’t give away all of his secrets.)

Further more, Bloglines claims I have 11,032 items in all of my folders that have not been read. That’s absurd.

I’ll continue to deal with this digging for gold to find interesting nuggets through today, but if it’s not cleared up by this evening, I’m going to find another RSS reader. I’m very tired of the problems Bloglines has been having lately.

If you look at the code, “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/ is really just a bunch of pieces of really bad, procedural, brute-force style coding tied together with a thin thread that they call an API and wrapped in enough global variables to leave even the most experienced coders in a state of confusion. However, it offers the most out-of-the-box functionality, is easy to extend if you don’t try to write good code yourself, and, despite its highly inefficient code, it still runs faster than most other alternatives. Therefore, it powers this site, and will be powering my new Photoblog.

I wrote a plugin to give WordPress a few more features that I needed in a Photoblog that weren’t available from other plugins or in the core WordPress system. It took me a while to convince myself not to write the code well. After several frustrated and failed attempts due to the poorly written WordPress core, I eventually decided to look at the code as a short term solution that was allowed to break all of the commonly held conventions. 30 minutes later, I have a very handy little plugin. I figure, if I’m still using the code 5 years from now and haven’t updated it enough in that time-span to understand what it’s doing anymore, I can easily rewrite it in another 30 minutes.

I have a few more changes that I need to make to the plugin so that it can lend a hand on other sections of my site. Once that’s done, I have a few more cosmetic changes to make to the site and it’ll be ready to go live. I’m very excited about this.

I’m not sure if I should release the plugin or not. I’m sure other’s considering “PixelPost”:http://www.pixelpost.org/ for their Photoblog needs would find it useful, especially if they are already fans of the WordPress feature set. I’m reluctant, however, because the code is so bad. Then again, if you’re using WordPress you’re either oblivious to bad code, or using it knowing that the code is bad as I am. In both cases, the feature is probably more important than the method of invocation.

Those of you that miss it, fear not. My regular photography posting will return soon — even sooner when I learn that people actually do miss it. I’ve got a new place to hold it all that will allow me to better express this art, and to find other like-minded people to share my work with, to support my work, and to better myself from. As soon as I unveil it, I’ll let you know.

This time, pouring out from the back room, was the beautiful, soulful voice of “Arielle Silver”:http://www.ariellesilver.com/ (on “MySpace”:http://www.myspace.com/ariellesilver) accompanied by rich, fluid bass and percussion with subtlety and finesse, something sure to make the misses a very happy woman. I’d never heard of them before but I’m glad I found them there. The poetic lyrics, complicated melodies, and tight rhythm give them polished sound of “real musicians” yet leave them with enough of a raw edge to keep them interesting. Give them a listen, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. They are playing tonight at the “Standards and Pours”:http://www.standardandpours.com/ coffee house and are currently “touring all over the US”:http://www.ariellesilver.com/calendar.html. Find out when they’ll be near you and check them out.

In this morning’s dose of the world wide web, I learned that David Hobby, photographer for the Baltimore Sun and creator and author of “Strobist”:http://strobist.com/, is feeling the pain of “putting in too much personal time for not nearly enough money”:http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/07/strobists-next-phase.html, something I’m all too familiar with.

For the photographers in my readership, “Strobist”:http://strobist.com/ is a website that encourages the use of small, inexpensive, off-camera flashes and simple light modifiers in a manual fashion to allow lit photography to become a often used tool in every photographers repertoire. David offers “well written instruction”:http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101.html, provides a wide range of “well explained examples”:http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/on-assignment.html, gives his opinion on a big selection of “related gear”:http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/04/gear-articles-and-reviews.html and is holding a “lighting boot camp”:http://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/06/lighting-boot-camp-archive-page.html where he encourages his readers, assignment after assignment, to take the flashes off their cameras and make some incredible images. Check it out! It’ll change the way you look at flash photography.

Unfortunately for this budding new blogger, David is learning that most people these days expect handouts and a free ride and are rarely willing to part with their own money, time, or resources when they don’t have to. Despite thousands of new readers all scraping together equipment based on David’s simple suggestions and millions of hits to his website from all parts of the world, he’s making very little from his affiliate banners, product links, and advertising. Why? Because people are too lazy to be bothered to use a link from David’s site to buy the products he recommends.

I make it a point to use links from David’s site (or other sites like his that I support) even when purchasing products he didn’t recommend because it’s important to me to have such a valuable resource (and others like it) continue to exist. It’s important to me that a place like Art Six exists that, even when it’s a longer drive than other places for me, I still make the effort to get out there and I always leave a good tip. While I’m grateful that Arielle Silver was able to gain some exposure last night, it really made me sad to see so many people enjoying this music and yet so few willing to drop a few bucks in the tip jar or buy a CD. Jess and I bought a CD and a small tip, though it doesn’t even cover their hotel room for the evening, let alone gas, food, equipment and a decent wage for the three of them.

If you don’t support the things you love they will go away.

h2. the future.

In the not too distant future, I will be represented online in the following fashion:

* revjim.net
** The public side of me: technology, life, politics, humor, electronics, poetry, pleas for the baring of breasts.
* djamesphoto.com
** The business side of me: Portfolio, Rates, Events, Sales, Projects, Travel Notifications
* somedomain.com/someclevername/
** The starving artist side of me: Photoblog, Five-A-Week, Donations, Casting Calls
* un.dis.clos.ed.com
** The intimate side of me: more intimate aspects of my life and personality
* myspace.com/revjim
** Links to the public side of me (and, under filter, the intimate side)
* myspace.com/djamesphoto
** Links to the artist side of me
* revjim.livejournal.com
** Links to the public side of me (and, under filter, the intimate side)
* djamesphoto.livejournal.com
** Links to the artist side of me

My public site will frequently link to my business site through the use of images in the article, as well as links in the side bar, and random images in the side bar. My artist site will also link to my business site with each posted image, as well as in the side bar. Somewhere deep in the bio pages of my business site, my public site and artist site will be linked to as well.

h2. the question.

So, there’s only one remaining question to be determined: Where do I put my starving artist site?

Since my business site is merely the hopefully profitable wing of my artistry, it makes sense to include it with the business site, perhaps as a subsite within my business site. However, displaying VERY edgy images, asking for donations, making casting calls, and looking for subscribers are hardly “business like” things to do.

Since it’s more an aspect of who I am and what I do, including it as a part of revjim.net makes a lot of sense too. People who take interest in my life and my opinion are also likely to take interest in my art and my vision. Therefore, I may find more patronage in this setting than I would from a site where I look more like a professional begging for handouts.

However, the artsy side of me and, therefore, my artsy work tends to draw an entirely different audience. Therefore, it may be better to keep it separate from revjim.net in order to attract more visitors and patrons. An alternative is to place the starving artist site at another domain all together, but that just seems silly.

Another alternative is to give djamesphoto.com a very edgy, quirky, honest yet still professional feel. In other words, state clearly on djamesphoto.com that photography is not my only source of income and, in fact, is not really a source of income at all. Allow djamesphoto.com to be artsy, seek donations, subscribtions AND paid customers all in one shot. Stop trying to “act professional” and just be who I am using the separate domain names to provide a separation of audience.

h2. the poll.

[poll=5]

Your opinion is very important to me, so please vote.

Just to give you an idea of what this means… in the articles that I’ve written and photographs I’ve posted in the last 6 days alone, I would have made $6.81 so far. Or, if you look at my top ten posts of all time (since I started counting, anyway) I’d have made $111.06 so far. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but, I assure you, it adds up quite quickly. And it costs you, my dear reader, a tiny, puny, insignificant, $0.01. That’s 0.25% of the cost of that latte you bought at Starbucks this morning. In fact, if you view five of my photographs each week for an entire year you will have paid me a WHOPPING $2.60.

Here’s the real kicker, if every person who has ever visited my site, in passing, or on a regular basis, had given me a puny $0.01 per visit, I would be able to quit my job, take photographs full time, and be giving away free photo sessions and prints left and right.

So do me a favor and sign up for “IndieKarma”:http://indiekarma.com/. It doesn’t take long, you’ll get $1 for free, and even if you don’t ever put any more money into your account (and why wouldn’t you since it’s such a cheap, effective way to support the sites you visit on the internet?) at least you’ll have donated that $1 to the sites that enrich your life on a regular basis.

So I’ve added IndieKarma to this site. You’ll see the banner pop up at the bottom of your browser for about 15 seconds every time you visit a page here. Additionally, I’ve signed up for a donations account myself and intend to keep funds in my account so I can support the sites that I visit easily and without hassle or effort.

Do it for me? Pretty please? With a cherry on top? I’ll be your best friend?

But I still read because, when I do find something interesting, it’s really, really interesting. Like these tidbits:

* Make Right-Clicking in Windows faster by “disabling the SendTo menu”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/windows/windows-tip-disable-the-send-to-menu-157977.php.
* Does an RSS reader make life on the web more livable for you? If so, how do you deal with sites that don’t offer an RSS feed. You can “track website changes with FeedWhip”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/news-aggregation/track-website-changes-with-feedwhip-157963.php and get update reports via email. Or, “use DeltaSpy”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/news-aggregation/track-web-site-changes-with-deltaspy-158016.php to track website changes and get all of the updates you’re interested displayed on one page. Or, see them in your RSS reader just like everything with “FeedYes”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/rss/create-an-rss-feed-without-an-rss-feed-159455.php.
* Do you cook often? Learn “how to peel a potato in one easy step”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/cooking/video-demonstration-peel-a-potato-in-one-step-158620.php from the same people that taught us to “fold a t-shirt”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/household/folding-tshirts-fast-151214.php with lightning speed: the Japanese!
* Edit digital photographs quickly and easily with “Pixoh, the online image editor”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/photos/edit-pictures-online-with-pixoh-158753.php.
* Did you know you can now “send money using PayPal and your mobile phone”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/paypal/paypal-via-your-cell-phone-162417.php?
* Learn how to “repair a drywall hole”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/household/weekend-project-repair-a-drywall-hole-164828.php, “get in on the Yahoo! Mail Beta”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/yahoo-mail/get-in-on-the-yahoo-mail-beta-169223.php, “overcome procrastination”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/procrastination/wikibook-on-overcoming-procrastination-169192.php, “build a loft”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/how-to/how-to-build-a-loft-169215.php, “save money on your taxes”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/taxes/tax-tips-own-your-own-business-169450.php, and “wake up and GET up when you really want to”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/sleep/how-to-get-up-when-you-really-want-to-169533.php.

As you can see, LifeHacker is a great resource. But I find myself *dreading* going through it because there are a lot of posts on any given day and over 75% of these posts are not anything I’m interested in but I have to read in to each entry in order to determine that.

This is why I’m always trying to find new ways to separate the things that I write, the images that I display, and the information I provide on my website(s). Sure the “write for yourself” mantra is certainly one worth repeating, but, without organization and clear thought there’s no point in putting your writing online, as it’s unlikely that anyone else will ever bother to comb through it all to find the bits that are interesting to them.

Yes, I comb through LifeHacker, and that fact that I do so despite the trouble it presents is an argument against separation. However, I don’t imaging everyone is as diligent as I am about looking for useful information. On top of that, I imagine there are lots of good things on LifeHacker that I miss entirely, because I was either skimming too fast, didn’t read the right words within the first few seconds, missed a link burried in the article, or simply gave up on LifeHacker that day because its folder was more than I could bare to look at.

So if you find something interesting at “LifeHacker”:http://lifehacker.com/ be sure to let me know. I may have missed it.