This post is a quick departure away from photography into the technology world that is part of my day job. It may be of interest to some of you.

Today marks the start of a new hosting infrastructure for my personal domains. I have been hosting my own webserver hardware at a collocation facility for about 7 years. The remaining webserver hardware I still have at collocation is starting to show its age and I'm afraid the end is near for my last surviving box. At one point I had 5 servers in collocation when I was running a web hosting business. I closed up shop about a year ago and decided I needed to move everything off the old server hardware before it dies of old age.

I have been playing with cloud based hosting solutions for over a year now and I have tested the cloud based server solutions at Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. For my server switch I decided to go with the Rackspace cloud solution. I have used them in the past for clients and I have found they provide better support and I also like their management tools better.

The one major change with moving to a cloud based solution is that I also needed to change the operating system I used for my servers. I have been using FreeBSD as my main server OS for over 10 years. Sadly the FreeBSD platform is not widely supported in the cloud infrastructure. That may change in the future as some very smart people are working on the problem. I have been experimenting with Linux for several years and also received a Red Hat certification over a year ago. So with this move to the new server hardware I have decided to commit to moving everything over to CentOS (the open source version of Red Hat.) This move gives me the ability to stay current with my certification and also keeps my skill set more marketable in the future.

This type of hosting solution is overkill for most users, but I like having the ability to manage the server like it was my own hardware. This is one of the main reasons why I like these cloud based solutions.

If you are interested in hosting your own website, feel free to contact me and I can help point you in the right direction. In the past couple of years there have been some great advances in webserver technology and solutions and if you are interested in hosting your own website it is now easier than ever with solutions provided by companies like Wordpress .com, Squarespace.com, or Typepad.com. Many of these solutions are also available for free. If you have something to say or if you are a photographer, something to show. There is no reason why you can't have your own website.

Last week I ran a test to measure my sphere of influence with this website. I was also testing a new web analytics package called Woopra. A free trial can be found at woopra.com. In my last post I went into a little bit of detail about Woopra and the benefits of using an application like this. Trey Ratcliff from StuckinCustoms.com did a nice review of the Woopra service and posted an example of how the service works for a site that actually gets some traffic.



When I started my test I was under the assumption that my sphere of influence was about 10 dedicated followers and a sphere of marginal interest up to 100.

I had four tasks setup for my test. One write an article, two measure the results for a day, three promote the post via twitter, and four report the over all results.

Well after writing the article I had one hit to the page for the first day (page number 4 listed below.)

 

The next day I ran a small mention on Twitter (which is feed onto Facebook as well.) After that mention I gained 4 more hits to the page and all of them came from Facebook (NetworkedBlogs is a Facebook app.)
 


All total I received 6 hits to the page in the days since I published the article. I didn't reach my core of 10 people I estimated, but with numbers this small a margin of error can be huge. It also probably didn't help that the article was not that interesting to begin with unless you are a web analytics person.

After running this test I was able to determine that essentially my estimates for dedicated followers was somewhat accurate. However, I'm now thinking my sphere of marginal interest is much lower. In a nutshell I have very little traffic to this website. I knew that already since I never promote this website. One interesting item I found is that when I take into account all of my traffic for the various images I post in the MyDrive project. I'm able to reach more people. When it comes to images I consistently get about 20-30 page views for new images within the first couple of days of posting. When I post articles it is much lower. This test has confirmed a couple of key facts. I have a follower base as close to zero as you can be. I can either keep things the same and talk to my very small circle of friends, or can I increase this base to a list of 100 dedicated fans?

At work and with my various clients I tell them how to increase their traffic using all the standard techniques of engagement and promotion. I have also done this in the past with other website I have started or managed. Here is one example, I started www.altenergystocks.com and took the traffic from 0 to 10,000 page views a month in about about a year. I ended up selling that site to the current owners. Can I do the same with this website? Since I know I'm currently talking to myself here, I guess it is more of a question to myself. It would be an excellent case study that I can use and point to for the future. So here begins my journey to gain my 100 dedicated true fans.

Last night after my monthly photoclub meeting I was driving home listening to a recent episode of This Week in Photography. In that episode Frederick had an interview with the CEO of Woopra, John Pozadzides aka John P. Woopra is a web analytics company that offers a tool to help webmasters track and visualize their website traffic and statistics. I was a beta tester of their software about a year ago and found that the tool was great for tracking your website statistics. It is superior in many ways compared to tools like Google Analytics. I especially like the real time nature of the tool where you can view the live hits to the website as they happen However, when they left the beta stage they only offered a paid version of the service. At that time I was unemployed so I never signed up for the service.

In the interview last night I learned that they have since moved to a freemium model and they now offer a free version of the tool. So this morning I re-enabled the tracking code again and I'm giving this tool another test drive.

I have always treated this website and blog as a testing ground and have installed and tried various software plugins and packages over the years to test the effectiveness of the tools for eventual use for client websites. I have not really put much effort into generating traffic for my own website so I may have some difficulty giving this new web analytics tool a proper test drive. Since I'm in a testing mode with the tool I figured I would try a little experiment to measure my sphere of influence on this website.

There is an internet meme that has become popularized by Keven Kelly called 1000 True Fans. A summary from his website states that:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Ctein is a photographer that I follow and has taken this same idea and stated he only needs 100 fans to continue his photographic work full-time.

If I take the concept of fans and apply it to my own work I estimate I currently have about 10 fans. I don't think all 10 would be willing to buy my work, but I know that they are consistently interested in what I say and produce photographically.

If I look at the comments and mentions I receive on Facebook, Flickr, and this website I would estimate that I'm at least on the radar screen of interest for about 50 additional people. I may even go as high to estimate my total sphere of vague interest is 100 people. Am I right?

As I said, I never really tried to market or increase my sphere of influence, so any influence or interest I  currently have is based on doing the bare minimum. 

So with this test I want to check if my assumptions are correct. Do I really have a sphere of influence of less than 100 people or is it more (could it be less?) This also brings me back to the install of the Woopra software. With this post I will gauge what my true sphere of influence is and hopefully the analytics tool can help to provide that information.

With this test I'm going to do the following:

1. Write this post (which is done)
2. Check the traffic to the post for a day with no additional promotions. This post will automatically feed into my RSS feed (which has about 15 subscribers) and will automatically feed into Facebook (with 171 friends.)
3. Tomorrow I will post a link to this article in Twitter to my 360 followers.
4. I will then analyze the data and post a follow-up article letting you know how it goes. I will also show how I used Woopra (and other tools) to track my sphere of influence.
   

So flashing back to my old DJ days... with a mic check, testing 123, is this thing on?

I'm starting off my podcast reviews with one of my favorite podcasts on photography. The LensWork podcast is produced by Brooks Jensen from LensWork magazine.

The premise of LensWork and the podcast is that photography is more than just another way to feed your gadget addiction. Photography can be a way of life. Brooks is concentrated on sharing and exploring the aspects of leading a creative life and he shares this through his media.

Here is a statement from his website:

Beyond cameras and equipment, beyond film and chemistry, beyond pixels and technology lie the mysteries of the creative life shared by those who strive to communicate and express themselves clearly - fine art photographers, commercial photographers, amateurs and professionals.

These podcasts are a mix of storytelling, philosophy, and an exploration of the creative life. They are usually about 3-5 minutes in length and Brooks shares his years of knowledge on various aspects of being a creative professional and artist.

A recent podcast episode titled Controlled Accidents describes his thoughts and the philosophy of Allan Watts in his book Zen and the Art of the Controlled Accident and how it affects his artwork. The art of seeing something beautiful out of the "random slop" that is out there to photograph. Making controlled accidents give us the ability to let go of our control and to open our mind. This is when your artwork comes alive.

In another recent podcast titled Knowing the Thing, Brooks gives you the importance of knowing a subject rather than being able to classify the subject. True knowledge is found when you go beyond being able to classify a thing. It is when you understand and know the behavior of a thing. This can be applied to your art making tools but also to your subjects. When you know a thing you can take that intimate knowledge and create something more compelling and be able to share a unique vision and mastery of a thing.

There are over 600 episodes on his website and I have listened to all of them, and many of them multiple times to try to squeeze as much knowledge as I can out of his wisdom. If I could only subscribe to one podcast on photography I would make this one at the top of my list.

You can find out more details on his Website and you can subscribe to the podcast via the following iTunes Link.

One of my hard drives died last week. However I was not that concerned about about loosing my data since I have several layers of backup and redundancy. I'm now feeling very safe and confident with my current home data backup solution. When I moved to an iMac as my primary home computer I took a look at my old backup solutions and made some refinements to my backup strategy.

Here is an executive summary for those that don't want the details. If it is not in at least 3 places it doesn't exist: Time Machine, Drobo, BackBlaze**, and DropBox*

Back in summer of 2004 I first learned about podcasts. I don't remember how I learned about them but I started to listen to Adam Curry's podcast called the Daily Source Code. During this time he was living in the Netherlands and producing a sort of audio diary with commentary about his life, technology, politics, and music. His almost daily show was a welcome break from the drivel that was on traditional radio. Over the next couple of months I would search and find additional podcasts to help with my hour long daily commute.  My commute has changed to a two hour daily commute and my podcast listening has helped ease that burden.

In June of 2005 Apple updated iTunes to automatically sync the podcasts with my ipod and this is when the popularity of podcasts started to take off. The ease of adding these new shows to the ipod was a great boon and it simplified the process of finding new shows to add.

For the past ten years we have been sharing Easter with our family friends. My daughter recently turned 14 and our friends have three kids about the same age as my daughter. They have gotten a little too old for Easter egg hunts. Last year we started a new Easter tradition of doing an Easter egg hunt using a GPS device. This went well and we decided to try it again this year by searching for some gocaches.

Jeff had a handheld Garmin and I installed the c:geo go app on my Droid phone. We planned on going to Harpers Ferry WV on the weekend and we looked up some local caches on Geocaching.com. 

Each cache has a set of GPS coordinates and maybe a story or hint as to where you can find the cache once you get within range.

The start of a new year gives me time to reflect about the coming year and also about the year past. What went well and what didn't. The last year was a tough one for the family and I. This time last year I had a single goal, to find a new job. I accomplished that goal in the middle of July and I'm happy to be fully employed again, unlike many people in the current economy.

My creative photographic output also suffered for the first half of the year. I guess Maslow knew what he was talking about. While I was unemployed I took consulting jobs to help pay the bills and I also toyed with the idea of taking some paid photographic jobs. I shot several events and portraits last year with the idea to build up my photographic portfolio. This portfolio could be used to help launch a photo business. During these small odd jobs I quickly confirmed something that I already knew, I don't want to make a business out of my photography. I like having my photography as a hobby and creative outlet. Turning it into a business and becoming a professional photographer is just not for me. I'm happy and proud to call myself an amateur rather than an aspiring professional.

Back to my goals for this year, I have found that the goals that have the highest likelihood of being accomplished are the goals that are written down. So with that thought in mind here are my goals for Twenty 10.

One of the reasons I had for converting this website from a photography portfolio website to a blog was to give me a central location where I can post my thoughts and writing. At one point I was maintaining 3 different written blogs, a photoblog (which I'm still running at mydrive) and a static photography website. One of my goals for this year is to write more and a having a centralized location will help me to fulfill that goal.

During my day job I program and manage several websites. That provides a great deal of information that I can write about on a regular basis. So I recently created a Technology category that will I will use to record my thoughts about technology, software, hardware, and the like. Here is an ideal example lesson learned (or maybe re-learned.)

As we enter a new year and a new decade everyone starts to think about changes... changes to habits... changes to goals...  and in my case changes to websites.

I have been wanting to update the structure of my website for sometime and a new release of the Movable Type content management system gave me a good excuse to make some updates. With this change I decided to merge my 30seasons.com blog into my main manderson.com domain. This website will be my primary home for all my photography, writing, and links to my social media presences on the internet.

The first round of updates have been completed and I plan on additional changes over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.