Lisa Call

Website

Some of you have may have noticed some problems with my blog/websites the last few days. Wordpress (the software I use to write my blog) is having some issues with taking up too many resources on the server where I host my websites. Oink Oink.

So the hosting company (I use lunarpages.com) quarantined the website and I have 2 weeks to fix the problem.

Wordpress is notorious for taking up a lot of CPU so I’ve cleaned up my site and put in caching and removed unused plugins and done everything I can think of and have read about online that might fix this problem.

So now fingers are crossed this will have done the trick and they will reinstate my site to it’s full working state because until they do I can not send out my studio newsletter. Oops!

Part of the solution was to remove most of the stuff from my sidebar. Sorry it is a bit bare at the moment. I’ll be adding things back slowly in a way that won’t hurt performance over the next few weeks. This is one way to update my website – because I have no choice!

In the meantime sorry for any inconvenience.

Pam RuBert sent me a few photos of my quilt at Quilt National. Thanks Pam.

Structures #55 at the Dairy Barn:

She said my quilt was front and center when you walked in the front door. Cool! That is the best of show quilt just to the right of my quilt.

I received a copy of the Quilt National Catalog yesterday and was happy to see my quilt made it on another 2 page spread. The color is off in the book – it is glaring primary yellow instead of the more greyed (but admittedly still bright) color that it really is. Oh well. It still looked great and I’m happy to have been published again.

 
In administrative news – my web hosting provider (lunarpages.com) is going to move my account to a different server in the next day or two. I have been unable to read email consistently for a couple months and they feel this move might solve the problems. Personally I think the problem is the IMAP server connection doesn’t like it that I log in from both home and work. But what the heck – at least I finally got them to do something about it instead of telling me over and over again it is not their fault.

So this means two things – 1) my website might be inaccessible for a while (although they claim not) and 2) my email has been really flakey for a few months – I’m going to try to catch up in the next day or 2 so if you sent me email and never got a response – sorry. Hopefully things will behave again soon – it is extremely frustrating not to be able to access ones email.

The spam on my blog has gotten out of control.

My stats show the number of unique visitors doubled between December and January (from 6,000 to 12,000). As lovely as that sounds I know the real problem is that my blog has appeared on a few splogs (read the link to understand how these annoying things work).

I discovered this because I have google alerts set up for my name and my website addresses (among other things). A few weeks after my blog appeared on these spam blogs I discovered the spam on my site skyrocketed. Most of it is caught by akismet but a few sneak by each night and it’s annoying to have to delete them.

To help combat this problem I’ve turned off comments on any posts older than 1 month. If you see an older post that you want to comment on you will need to leave the comment on a new post and just reference the older post. Sorry folks but it’s driving me nuts and many people suggest this will help.

For any wordpress.org users out there that want to do this – I’m using a plugin to manage this – you can get it here.

 
Second topic of not-very-exciting-art-content admin news. I’m working on my categories. Over the next 3-4 days I expect them to be in flux as I investigate some plugins for ordering and managing the categories in the sidebar.

I will probably be changing the categories on some of my posts, which could make them appear as new posts if you are using some of the rss readers. Sorry about that in advance. But when I’m done it should hopefully make more sense. If not to you, at least to me.

 
Art content coming by end of day – sorry for the boring admin stuff.

There are a lot of art related topics I want to talk about but right now I want to ramble a few seconds about blogging.

I’m always fascinated by what google search terms bring people to my blog. Pretty consistently the top search term each month is brick walls. With Eastern Montana and Hermit Island consistently on the list also.

So far this month contents of a fridge is coming in #2 and I’ve seen it on the list other months. I’m curious why someone would type that into google. What do you think they were looking for?

I wonder if the folks that find me via a random search ever stay and become regular readers.

I’ve been blogging now for over a year and a half and on occasion I’ll check my stats as I’m curious how many people are reading. While the unique visitors** is at best a rough guess based on ip address, but I’m averaging about 400-500 unique visitors a day and over 5000 a month. I find this rather astonishing.

While it’s really cool I have all these readers in the end I blog for myself – because it keeps me honest and keeps me focused on my art and it keeps me motivated. If you read gapingvoid.com (by blog marketing guru Hugh MacLeod) he calls this internal disruption and views it as the value of blogging in marketing. It’s not the audience that makes the difference – it’s how the blogging changes the company (or individual) that is doing the blogging.

The self inspection that comes as I sit down to write a post can have a pretty profound effect on how I pursue my art. And in general I find that to be a really positive thing.

But that said I also very much value the other artists I’ve “met” via my blog and through theirs. I’ve learned a lot from all of you and your support and compliments mean a lot. So thanks!

 
** I’ve had people ask this before – the difference between visitor and unique visitor – if you are using some of the free stat packages you will not get unique visitor counts but will instead get just visitor counts. This does not eliminate repeat readers during the time period. So if I were to come and read your blog 20 times in 1 day it would report me as 20 visitors. But if you have a unique visitor count it will only count me as just 1.

I’m back. Thanks to everyone for email and comments about enjoying my blog – they did mean a lot to me.

I’ve spent the last month doing a lot of thinking about my art and my art career and how this blog fits into the picture.

I’m not sure I came to any conclusions or definite ideas but there are some murky thoughts that are starting to take shape and I’ll be talking about them over the next few weeks as I get back into blogging.

A couple notes about admin changes going forward:

-At one point I posted that I’d only be responding back in the comments section instead of sending private email. I didn’t do a very good job following through on that but my goal is to follow through with this in the future as I really love the conversations that can occur this way. If you ask me something or comment about something look for a response in the comment section.

-I was posting up to 5-7 times a week before I took a break. While I do love writing about my work I felt at times the blogging was done in lieu of doing the artwork. Now I’m going to try to focus on a better balance. Going forward I’ll probably only be posting 3-4 times a week (or maybe less). I’ll just have to see where it goes. I do want to avoid feeling like I have to post every night.

I thought my first post should have a photo but I haven’t taken any over the past month so here is a photo from 2002. It was taken from the top of Crystal Peak and the view is of Quandry Peak.

I have decided it’s time to take a sabbatical from my blog. I need to spend time thinking about the purpose and my goals for this blog as I don’t feel I’m as focused as I used to be.

Thanks to all of my readers for your supportive comments. Check back in about a month (late May or early June) for an update.

At Melody’s request I’ve created a button for my blog. Now she can have something other than my red signature on her side bar. Everyone else is welcome to add this to their blog links also.

 
The html code you need to add this to your page is as follows. You can copy and paste this code and it should work. Let me know if there are problems.

<a href="http://blog.lisacall.com/"><img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5412/875/320/lisaCallBlogButton.2.jpg" alt="Lisa Call's blog: New Work and Inspiration" /></a>


Update [8/3/06]- the following code will only work from a blogger.com blog.

If you have a blog elsewhere you will need to upload the button to someplace you can access it and modify the URL for the button in the code above to reflect the true location of the button.

I spent the weekend updating my website so it has the same “look and feel” as my blog. It was a monumental task that I have been avoiding for several months but I’m thrilled to have it finished. There are quite a few new images in the galleries and lots of new information on the other pages. Some day I’ll get all 56 (and counting) Structures quilts on the main website but the 20+ I have on there now are a good start.

You’ll notice that my blog is now more seamlessly integrated into the website and my menu bar for the website is part on the blog also. So readers and click back and forth between the main website and blog with ease.

If you run into any problems or have suggestions please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me.

 
Now that this major diversion is mostly finished (I do have a list of half a dozen little things to tweak that I’ll get to over the next few days) I have a few more days of prep work for my solo show. And then finally I can get back to my studio and make some new art. I’m most looking forward to becoming reacquainted with my hand dyed fabric and design walls.

As you can see I’ve updated the look of my blog. And it looks good in firefox. Internet Explorer isn’t quite cooperating yet, but hopefully soon. Bright yellow forms and a messed up header, as css works differently in IE than in most other browsers. Sigh…

Very little sewing is going on as my websites are getting updated.

[Update: the bright yellow forms in IE are gone. It was a problem caused by the google tool bar and autofill function. I've disable the autofill highlighting as it is just downright ugly. See here for an explanation of what all this means, if interested.]

[Update #2: I think I've got the headers fixed in Firefox and IE (on windows). Hurray! Thanks for all the feedback everyone. If anyone with a mac sees a problem I'd appreciate knowing.

Only glitch I know of: If a user resizes their text larger in anything except IE the text in the header is going to end up being partially hidden. I could take my text into photoshop and incorporate it into the image but if I do this the text isn't searchable by google. Hm - I guess I might have to do this - but not today.]

I spent the evening getting my blog in shape. Many of the new features are in the sidebar so if you are reading this with an rss reader you might need to hop over to the “real” blog site, http://blog.lisacall.com, to see them.

Look Categories! One of the main reasons to switch to Wordpress was for the categories. All my postings are now sorted out so in addition to viewing them chronologically (in the archives), you can view by category. Want to see all the posts where I’m showing my work “in progress”? Click on the “What – The Progress” category. If you hover your mouse over the category title it will give you a brief description about what each one is about. The number following the name indicates how many posts are in that category.

My blog’s tag line has always been “The how, why, what, where, when and who of my artwork.” Now I’ve separated it out into those categories.

Search! While blogger had a search feature I turned it off as there are spyware issues with the blogger navigation bar. Now I can again have a search box for my blog, thank you Wordpress. [To avoid the spyware don't click the "NextBlog" button on the blogger navigation bar.]

A bio! I finally wrote a blog bio and there is even a picture of… me. Yikes. I talk a bit about my artwork and why I have a blog.

Fully restored content! A few months back I did a very stupid thing and accidentally deleted 5 months of posts. I’ve now restored all of the old content (I have a few more comments still to add in by hand but I’m almost done). So if you are a new reader and have some free time check out the archives for Feb-July.

Featured posts There have a been a few postings that I wanted to keep a more permanent link to for new readers. Like the pictures of my studio. Check out the “Featured Posts” list for this items.

This weekend I’m hoping to update colors and header of both my blog and website. The goal is for them to have a similar “look and feel” (the geek buzzword of the day). I’ve got to get rid of this green background – it’s just not working for me. Maybe purple…

Hope you enjoy the new stuff!