Lisa Call

Structures #38
Textile Painting
©2005
43" x 42"

How It Began

Four years ago on February 22 I made my first blog post. I had been thinking about blogging for a while but without a digital camera it didn’t seem like an art blog was going to get very far.

I think we got bonuses at work or some other money fairy visited in mid-February 2005 so I walked into a camera store and bought a Nikon D-70 without doing any research on digital cameras, 15 minutes tops and I was out of the store with my new toy. I had a N-70 and knew the lens were interchangeable and that seemed like a good reason to buy another Nikon.

With my new studio I’m going to have to buy another lens. I can’t take photographs of my largest pieces with my 50mm lens (room isn’t big enough) and my zoom lens has crappy color (in comparison to my very nice 50mm, which I use for all my art photography). So I’m thinking positive thoughts for the money fairy to come visit again.

We All Love Stats

According to wordpress I’ve made 600 posts (the first few months were on blogger – once I got serious about blogging I quickly moved to my own install of wordpress.org).

There are currently 3,940 comments and akismet has blocked 19,741 spam comments from appearing. The spammers have the real people seriously out numbered. Ya’ll need to get busy.

According to my website stat counter I had 104,821 page views and 26,713 unique visitors in January and my traffic seems to grow fairly steadily over the year. I had a pretty big drop last may-july during my move as I had nothing to say.

Construction

With my construction I suspect I’ve increased traffic by doing a daily photo log of the action even though the art content has slowed a bit over the last 4 months. The next three weeks I’m not likely to have much access to my studio as they are doing drywall/texturing/painting in the existing part of the house, meaning my kids bedrooms will be my studio for a week.

Then the hardwood floor will be refinished and I’ll install carpet – all of which requires a large amount of furniture shuffling.

The timing is interesting because the deadline for submitting photos for the large pieces I’ve been working on the last few months is March 1. I have about 2-3 more hours of sewing and then it’s photography time. My goal is to do that on tuesday – so guess I need to buy that new lens tomorrow.

Hm… Anyone want to buy some art?

Not much still for sale on that page, I think near top priority once the studio is done is to make some more small art.

Markings #19    ©2008    56" x 58"

Beta Bloglines

For the last year I’ve let my blogroll mostly stagnate – not just on my blog but also in my feedreader. There is a proliferation of excellent blogs out there and I just couldn’t keep up. The dual maintenance of adding a blog to both my feedreader and my blogroll was too much to think about.

I want to catch up to some of the great blogs I’ve run across out in the wild and also by many of you that comment on my blog. The first step was to make this a manageable process and find a feed reader that would do these things:

• Keep track of my read vs. unread articles for me as I travel between home and work. This pretty much required it be webbased
• Have a simple mechanism for organizing the feeds, preferably drag and drop organization.
• Provide a mechanism to share my list of feeds so I could avoid dual maintenance.
• Provide an efficient mechanism for reading through my unread articles quickly.

Beta Bloglines is the only reader (out of the entire two I thought about) that fulfilled those requirements. Google reader is nice but it doesn’t provide that type of sharing I am after. If it had, I would have selected it.

This morning I finished moving my current blogroll over to bloglines and I’ve updated my sidebar.

My Blogroll

What I’ve left on my website are just a handful of my most favorite links (I wasn’t ready to nuke the entire blogroll!) That’s not to say I don’t love and read tons of other blogs and I recommend all of the blogs on my list.

I feel my blogroll is out of date. I know I ran across some really great blogs the last year and I failed to subscribe to them. So as I find them again, I will add them. Consider this a work in progress.

I’m not so sure about my organization of the folders. I had too many people in the ‘artist’ category so I broke it in 2 parts – it’s not very intuitive. So I suspect that will be changing when something strikes me as more useful.

What am I Talking About

If you have no idea what a feed reader is or how you might use one. Or even more importantly, how to make sure your blog can be read by a feed reader, check out Katherine Tyrrell’s, as usual, excellent post on how to do this. And don’t worry – by default blogger and wordpress.com blogs have feeds so you are probably fine.

Full or Short Content

My only caveat about her post, as I mentioned in her comments. I really don’t recommend posting only a short summary of your posts in your feeds. Interestingly I was planning to post on this exact topic as soon as I finished my blogroll update.

People are lazy. We spend inordinate amounts of time at my day job thinking about how to reduce the number of clicks needed to do anything in our products because people don’t like to click. They tend to stop doing things that require too much effort. In my opinion having to click an article and leave a feed reader to see the content counts as too much hassle.

I don’t share Katherine’s concern about the dangers or risks of content scraping. She has valid points for her – I just view it differently. Yes – people steal my content – but I do not believe it harms me. My images are hotlink protected so it’s just my words floating around out there on splogs and I just can’t get excited or worried enough about it to care. I don’t track them down and I don’t see it being a big deal. Maybe I’m blissfully ignorant, but blissful is the keyword and it’s working for me.

The big names I read, such as Seth Godin and Gapingvoid, all publish their full content. So I figure I’m in good company.

So as a reader that is lazy – I request and recommended your feed always be the full content of your site.

Markings #19

This is one of the 3 pieces completed in 2008 included in my show Markings: Repetition and Pattern, which closes on March 19th in Boulder.

I love this piece. I know, I’ve said that about many of the pieces in this show. Once I got the show hung my fear that this series was not so good evaporated. I’m pretty excited about many of these pieces and have ideas for more.

I love the red here. I love the small piece of blue-gray interrupting the pattern and making it more interesting. I love how I moved beyond straight horizontal lines between rows. It was a trick to construct this piece but it made for a fun challenging puzzle, part of why I love working with the construction processes I use.

 
Detail image: