Dunbloggin?

All my pictures are falling
From the wall where I placed them yesterday
The world is turning
I hope it don’t turn away

Many, many years I started up this blog with the idea of sharing thoughts and ideas with the wider world. Originally it was part photography, part generic, but the generic part withered away over the years. It got bolted on to a pre-existing hand built photo gallery site, itself the descendant of a site which first saw the light of day in the mid 1990s.

Well, it didn’t work. Communication has always largely been one way. Traffic has fluctuated a bit but generally crawls along at about 20 visitors per day, none of whom remain for much more than 1 minute. So either my navigation design is exceptionally bad, or the content is extremely uninteresting.

Daily visitors since the start of the year. No idea why it peaked on my birthday

Speaking of content, for the blog it roughly splits into posts on travel, a bit of photo geekery, hardware & software review, photo book reviews and ill-advised opinion pieces. The category that vastly dominates in visitor statistics is of course hardware & software reviews (and associated rants, my short frank exchange of views with Ed Hamrick of Vuescan still gets a ridiculous share of hits). The category I prefer, photo book reviews, gets no interest at all.

And speaking of no interest, there is no denying that the stats say that the very least interesting part of the whole website is my photography. In the rankings since January, the highest rated photography page is in position 24, with 38 views. The Photo Diary section, which I put a lot of effort into, has, over 21 entries, received 0 comments. Thanks, fellow photographers! Of course, adopting Disqus might not have been an ideal strategy, but at least it saved me from the filth of spam I had to wade through before.

The Swiss have the longest attention span. Or maybe they read slower.

I guess I’m a bit of a throwback to the early days of the web, where we had webrings and stuff and people liked to help each other out while riding their unicorns over endless fields of optimism. According to Wouter Brandsma, who I’ve been following on and off for many years, the blogging community is also close to becoming thing of the past. He may well be right.

Nevertheless, I have always had this idea of a community of peers in the back of my mind, so when I’ve promoted other photographers over the years, I’ve not done it with any solid expectation of a returned favour, but with the vague idea of building relationships. But it would have been nice to just sometimes get a mention, to boost my page views a bit, even from people claiming to be friends. Of course many of these are “friends” only when they’re selling something, and their promises are pure vapour. Possibly they consider that linking to me would devalue their brand? [I did have a couple of paragraphs cheerfully ripping into a number of specific individuals here, but finally decided there’s no point. They don’t read my blog and even if they did they’d assume I meant somebody else].

But surely some people have tried to push some of their audience my way? Well, of course. Lots of them. There’s Andrew Molitor, and … er … that’s it. Well, quality trumps quantity. And there are others who have kindly and constructively encouraged me behind the scenes. I won’t name them, as it wasn’t public, it didn’t really arise from this web site, and they generally don’t have much of a web presence. I suppose the web isn’t very topographic.

So, what next? Obviously I’ll need to buy me some new fake friends, but my idea is to shut down this expensive to maintain and time consuming to run website and replace it with some image galleries on some cookie cutter system. Probably Adobe Portfolio, since I already pay for it. I can’t deny that with my current cobbled together site, photos are perhaps not presented in the best light.

Then once that’s done I can shut the world out.

Though my problems are meaningless
That don’t make them go away
I need a crowd of people
But I can’t face them day-to-day