I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m spying on you! Well, sort of, in a very anonymous kind of way. It’s helpful for me to know what visitors are looking for when they come to my website, and how many visitors I’m getting. That kind of thing. So to help with that, I use Google Analytics. That tells me most of the things I’d want to know about visitors to this website.

The number of visitor is always  quite interesting. Peaks in the visitor rate, as shown above, can normally be correlated to events or Oxford college balls that I have photographed, and are people who have coming looking for their ball photos. These peaks often start building during the ball – people expect me to work fast to get the photos online!

The more amusing details that Google Analytics tells me are search terms used to find my website. As expected there are are lot of “acooldryplace” and variations on that them. My favourite of those was “the pretty cool place photography” – obviously I don’t come across as very cool. My site is also popular for those searching for “trash the dress” photography, “ball photography oxford” and even engagement and wedding photography in Oxford, but the rarer hits are the more interesting  – “screen printing wedding stationary”, “bean time lapse” & “tutors at Oxilp” have all been used and followed to my website. I know why I have come up for all of them, but I can’t imagine I rank that highly in any search engine for those terms.

If you’re looking for screen printing wedding stationery or bean time lapse I can help. I have no idea of the tutors at Oxilp, but I hope to see you at one of their balls.

I decided that the end of the year was a good time to update my portfolios, so have finally made a start on doing so. However, I got distracted by the side issue of how to best present them. Rather than using Simpleviewer, I have switched to Autoviewer to make the images much larger so that you can better appreciate them.

To date I have updated the trash-the-dress portfolio, and made a start on the wedding ones. I’ll be doing the rest over the next few weeks, once I’ve sorted out my Tax return.

It’s not as dramatic as the picture makes out, but the observant out there may have noticed I’ve made a small change to my website addressing recently. In case you’ve missed it I thought I’d tell you about it. It’s not really worthy of a blog post, but it was that or tell you about my new kitchen floor.

Firstly, the blog always was at http://acooldryplacephotography.com, while the client area was at http://www.acooldryplacephotography.com. This is all nicely consistent now with the www. Although I believe the website still works without it anyway.

Secondly, the pages of the website and the blog posts, all have nice little wordy addresses now (like /a-change-of-address ), rather than the rather cryptic numeric ones (like /?p=213) addresses. It make is easier to remember where you are.

Both changes are pretty cosmetic, and neither of them should affect the operation of the website, or your links to it. Although you may want to update your weblinks if you’re anything like my slightly pedantic 2 year old daughter, and it is going to bother you.

Having a small baby to keep me up at night has its advantages. I’ve finally got my new client-area to the point where it can “go live” on the this website. Hopefully, it should all work seemlessly, but if you notice any glitches please let me know so that I can fix them as soon as possible.

I’ve still got a number of improvements planned, including password protection of galleries and adding new payment options like GoogleCheckout. I also have to make the gift vouchers available to buy using this system, and add their use as payment to the checkout. Despite the work needing to be done, I’d prefer to be in bed at this time of night (3:45am) rather than improving my website.

Photo: David Reece, used under Creative Commons Licence.

The Tate Modern in London is currently having an exhibition contrasting contemporary street and studio photography. As part of the exhibition they are showing work submitted to a moderated group on Flickr. I submitted my signature photo to this group and it was accepted, so it is now being displayed on a monitor in the Tate Modern from time to time. The image above is screen shot of it being displayed on their website. Below is the screenshot when the mouse hovered over my picture.

From the submitted photos, 100 will be chosen by a panel of judges for inclusion an exhibition photobook. I’m quite hopeful I’ll make the final cut. We’ll see…

Website changes: I’m currently working to change my entire site to be the same style as this blog. At the same time, I thought it would be a good idea to give the shopping-basket side of things a bit of a facelift. That’s going to take a little bit longer as I’m now looking to incorporate:

1. A database to make order management easier, and allow customers to review their order status online.
2. AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And Xhtml) to make the user interface a bit slicker.
3. More checkout options, I’ll be adding GoogleCheckout in addition to PayPal

Hopefully these changes won’t take too long. But until the updates go live you can continue to use the old site for buy prints and if you’d like to pay with GoogleCheckout then just drop me an email.

Website hosting: I’m pretty happy right now with my webhosting, if I wasn’t I’d move it. I’d go as far as saying that I’m sufficiently happy with the webhosting company (Floppynet) that I’d recommend them to people. So far they’ve dealt with all my support requests, however stupid, quickly and resolved any issues equally fast. When I exceeded my bandwidth limit and the site went down, they put it back up on request before I’d even paid the extra to upgrade to a higher month bandwidth. All very nice. They might not offer what you are after, but for basic hosting I’d say they’re pretty good. Now, I’m recommending them because I think they are good, but because a friend asked about them and is planning on signing up his site with them, I did a little research. It turns out they’ll also pay me for recommending them. I see this as a bonus, and I wouldn’t recommend them just to get money – they don’t pay that much! So take this as a genuine recommendataion, but if you are going to sign up with Floppynet, I’d be happy if you would do so via the link on this page.

The techy bit: To do so, I’ve modified the Suckerfish WordPress Plugin by Ryan Hellyer. I wanted more flexibility over the number of primary menus, and also wanted to add custom menus. There still scope for a lots of improvement, particular is user-friendliness, but I’m happy enough with what I’ve achieved. Rather than release my own version, the “Suckerfish WordPress Plugin 2″, and have him and I developing in independant directions, I’ve emailed it to him to incorporate any of my better changes within his next release.

The purpose of this blog is to talk about photography stuff, both my personal playing and the work I do as part of aCoolDryPlace Photography. I guess when I do post it will be because I’ve done a shoot or the like and I want to share about how it went, or because I have a new camera related toy.

I wonder when I’ll next post?