UPDATE 20/10/2023: the new site can now be seen in “preview release mode” at https://snowhenge.squarespace.com. There are a still few things to tidy up before I transfer the domain name permanently.

This is my last post here.

To be more specific, “here” will soon no longer be here.  After several years of dithering, I have decided that I do want to maintain an internet presence, and I do want to continue writing and updating content. But I want to optimise my time towards content, not website design, construction and maintenance, so I have decided to cut the cord and move to Squarespace.  Squarespace is expensive for a pure “vanity site” like this, but so is my current arrangement. And Squarespace does all the heavy lifting for me.  I also considered Wix in its various forms, by the way, and it would have won, were it not for two things: it doesn’t support multiple blogs, and I’d already invested considerable effort in an aborted SQ migration two years ago, and I could just pick up where I left off. But otherwise I feel Wix is a better option.

What I do lose is a backend database on which I can build ultra-flexible pages, but a lot of complexity goes hand in hand with that.  Also most of the file upload and layout is manual and quite repetitive, instead of automated. But then again a lot can go wrong with automation.

I’ve migrated the last two years blog posts, and I’ll gradually add a curated set of older articles. I’ve also migrated the full set of “Photo Diaries” even though nobody looks at them. I’ve taken the opportunity to refresh and streamline the Galleries.

Hopefully now, SQ will handle cross-device issues gracefully, which is very hard to do when you roll your own.

So, in the not too distant future, http://www.snowhenge.net will take you somewhere else. Hope to see you there.  For the foreseeable future, this version will remain, though not updated, as http://www.davidmantripp.com.

a glimpse of the future

One last thing - a huge thank you to David at meirhosting.net for reliable web hosting and especially fantastic support over all these years.  If you need Webhosting or domain name registration, you couldn’t make a better choice, especially if you (unlike me) are in the UK.

It’s been a very long time since I posted anything new here. Despite that I’m still getting more than 0 visitors, so thanks for that. I have very limited time to devote to this, and recently what time I have has been fully dedicated to maintenance and redevelopment.

Over time I’ve received feedback on various points, such as the difficulty of leaving comments, overall design and adaptability to non-desktop devices. So, I invested a lot of time and indeed money into a project to transfer everything to a Squarespace site, where all these issues are taken care of. Actually the Squarespace migration is almost completed, but I’ve decided not to go ahead with it. Although there are a lot of positive points, and while it does offer a certain level of flexibility, finally it is all “cookie cutter” and I’m having to compromise far too much on how I want to present myself and my photography. Not to mention my opinions. And Squarespace is expensive.

So I went back to the drawing board, and now I’m actually well advanced in completely reworking my existing hosted site to use modern adaptive methods, as well as making use of some more advanced features of Expression Engine. It won’t look all that different, but behind the scenes it will be almost all new.

As for when it will be done, who knows. Now, it’s summertime, and tomorrow I’m off on vacation. Real vacation, not photography hell. It will be done when it’s done.  Thanks for watching.

Just a short note to whoever might be interested: this website runs on a CMS called Expression Engine. Way back when I first built it, it seemed like a good idea, and there was considerable synergy between my working life and my real life. More than 10 years ago I was creating and maintaining sites and services running not only on Expression Engine, but also Movable Type, Wordpress, and, Lord help me, Facebook.

Those days are gone.

Expression Engine is quite complex, and my tired, lazy old brain has quite a job keeping up with it. On top of that, as far as the actual front end is concerned, it is fully DIY, which means I need to keep up with HTML, Javascript (or whatever it is called these days), CSS and the latest Kool frameworks. Adding in my chronic inability to keep things simple, it just becomes too much. There are plenty of rough edges and outright defects in the current version, and of course not even a hint of a mobile-friendly version. And apart from that, maintaining my own virtual server is a pain.

And I just can’t be bothered with all this anymore. I want to spend what time I’ve got on content.

So, I’m experimenting with a completely new implementation on Squarespace, where most of the plumbing is handled behind the scenes, and mobile versions are created automatically. Of course this gives hand in hand with a certain loss of freedom, but that in turn might help to keep me on the rails.

It’s not going to happen straightaway, in fact I haven’t even decided if it will happen at all, but it is more likely than not.  If it does, much of the 18 years of blog archive will go away. I can’t transfer it automatically, so just some selected posts, including probably the last 2 years or so, will get copied over.

One decision I have made, following feedback and general evolution, is to pull the plug on Disqus Comments.  Sadly, since the EE-Disqus synchronisation plugin stopped working some time back, this means that comments made between around April 2019 and now have vanished. I will to see if I can copy them over, but since I don’t actually own other people’s comments, that might be a bit tricky.

On the upside, I have reinstated native comments, including anonymous comments. So feel free to give that a try. Hopefully spam protection works better with EE v6 than it did with EE v2…

As frequent readers of this blog will know, I’ve been undergoing an existential struggle trying to figure out what the actual purpose of all this is. Partly due to feeling that the blog part of the website is effectively just me shouting at clouds, I had reached the conclusion that I should stop blogging.  But there are still things that I want to write about. On the whole I enjoy writing these, so it shouldn’t matter too much if nobody reads them. But giving a lot of visual priority on the home page to writing, as opposed to photography, kind of amplified the negative feelings I was getting from the perception of no audience engagement.

I’m also on a bit of an upswing on the photography side, having taken stock, and got a better feeling of what I want to do with it. One thing is to be a tiny bit more self-publicising, hence a return to a (restricted) presence on facebook (because that’s where all the photographers I’m interested in hang out), and another is to give most of the upfront real estate here to photos. And finally, to curate a bit more which photos can appear in the random-selection featured spot. So, here we are. Snowhenge dot net v5.5 or something.

snowhenge dot net, before (left) and after

I’ve tidied up a few other things along the way.

I’m much happier with the new look, I may finally have got close to what I always wanted. Hopefully a few other people will like it too.

(Crosspost - the majority of my small RSS feed subscriber community do not subscribe to my TEOH channel)

I recently received my annual web hosting invoice for this site. This, together with domain name registration, costs me around £100 per annum. And, by the way, if you’re looking for a reliable independent web hosting service with excellent technical support, full features and non-USA hosting, I can safely recommend Meirhosting.

The reminder that all this costs money as well as time gives me cause to reflect on why I’m doing it. My data on Google Analytics makes quite depressing reading: I get very low traffic, my most popular posts are the few dedicated to gear, and the least popular are those talking about photography and photographers in general. Earlier this year, the stats were trending upwards. Now they’ve slumped.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics. According to Google’s monthly view, of the 40-odd visitors I get daily, 75% are new. So they don’t come back :-(

AWStats shows a similar story - the levels are pretty flat.

I’ve maintained a website since around 1996. I registered the snowhenge domain in 2001, I think, and the earliest version of snowhenge.net went live in or before August 2001, according to the Wayback machine. I added blogging through MovableType in mid 2003. My first post was made at 04:32 PM on 17th July 2003. Apart from a pause of a few months in 2007 when I transitioned to Expression Engine, and switched hosting, I’ve been adding material fairly constantly. So far there are 673 blog posts. There have been several design overhauls and refreshes, but the current look has been around for 4 or 5 years. The photographic content has changed over time, as I tried to improve presentation and focus, and the non-photographic stuff has dwindled to very little. The one constant in all of this, though, has been the flatlining statistics.

The Grey Period: snowhenge.net in early 2003

My original motives for having a web site included a large part of experimentation with web technologies, which fed into my various “day jobs”. This is now gone, my day job has no need for such frippery. So it is now essentially a platform for publishing and talking about photography, and the arcana surrounding photography. The question is, then, is it working? At present the answer has to be no. There’s very little conversation, although what there is tends to be of above average quality, and statistics on my galleries show little interest from the outside world.

So why so little traffic? A number of reasons spring to mind: the content is uninteresting, I’m not an engaging writer (or photographer), it’s all too self-serving, it’s all too idiosyncratic or weird, the presentation is poor. Or, also, I have no reach, I don’t publicise the site well, my search engine optimisation doesn’t work, I don’t network enough. Or the site performance is bad and the navigation is confusing. Or the Disqus comment platform is unpopular and puts people off. Probably a combination of all of these factors means that the site fails to get noticed in the vast ocean of similar voices clamouring for attention on the web.

So what next? Should I just call it a day? It would be a shame, after close to 20 years of uninterrupted web presence, then again you could say after 20 years of failure I should have got the message. I could run a survey to see what my audience thinks, but there’s a bit of a snag in that plan. And then again, I’m not even sure I could keep up with things if I started getting a lot of feedback.

It’s clear that one criticism could be that the site is too generalist, that is has a split personality. This is true enough, but it’s not accidental. It reflects my personality: I’m not just interested in photography - far from it - and not even in one particular field of photography. Personally I find that photographer “portfolio” sites get boring pretty quickly, however good the photographer is. I like to understand some of what makes the artist tick, not just photographers, but writers, musicians too. And I’m interested in science, and in much else. So the somewhat “warts and all” approach is me basically trying to create the type of website that I’d enjoy visiting. Seems I’m in a minority! One reason I axxed my Facebook page is that I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable about the wide cross-section of “friends” I had: I felt that by posting stuff on say, Antarctic science, I was letting down people who followed me as a landscape photographer.

The ultimate goal of snowhenge.net is to promote my photography. That isn’t working, and the years are ticking by. My feeling at the moment is that I’ll give it another year, and seriously put some effort into improving traffic. I don’t hope for thousands of visitors - I’m happy if just one person gets some benefit from an article I post - but I don’t want to carry on shouting into the void. So in the coming weeks I need to settle on some realistic expectations and measurable objectives, and work out a plan for achieving them. If trends start to improve, fine. Otherwise, in one year it will be time to call it a day.

This is the point where, ironically, I ask for feedback. It would be great to get any opinions, suggestions thoughts, advice on all of this, but also just to let me know that you’re reading my writings and getting some sort of value out of it.  There are many blogs which I read frequently, but never comment on. Maybe it’s a similar story here.

Hey, maybe the problem is that all my posts are too long ?