I’ve taken the wrapper off my newest site, dezendorf.net. At the moment, it’s a self-promotional page, but I have intentions to expand it over the coming weeks and months to have focused technical content, offering insight in how a small organization would be able to self-host reliable, mission critical infrastructure. I’ve started with a number of posts from this site, but it takes time to refine, edit and repost those articles as clear walkthroughs. Therefore, the site currently stands as a single page. More announcements on that soon.

It’s coming up on eight years that I’ve been trying to post a picture of the day to my photoblog. The beginning of it all was a shot of the gear cassette on my mountain bike, posted on March 17th, 2006, with a stated desire to learn as much about my new camera as possible before heading off to Spain for a two week vacation. Even keeping in mind that I only posted 5 days a week in the beginning, I’ve moved across the world 3 times since I started, I’ve switched out my camera body three times and I’m now in deep into my 4th major photo management/editing/workflow – I’m still averaging over a 70% posting rate. Not bad.

Here’s looking forward to eight more years. Ideally at 85%+.

As a friend said: “WHERE HAS THIS PAGE BEEN ALL MY LIFE”

http://xenon.stanford.edu/~xusch/regexp/

I know, right?

I’ve decided to move away from Google Analytics for all of my domains. There are many reasons for this change: I would like to make fewer external javascript calls, and I’m already making more calls to off-site stuff than I’d like. I also have other analytics packages running at this point (by virtue of CloudFlare), so I’m not giving up traffic pattern data entirely. The CloudFlare data isn’t as good as the Google Analytics data, but I’m not running a SEO campaign here nor am I trying to make a living with this site, so I was using less than %5 of the Analytics toolset.

I also decided to turn off Google AdSense.

You have to run Analytics to use AdSense, and AdSense is simply not making as much sense for me as it has in the past. I had thought that I would be able to fund parts of the monthly hosting bill with AdSense revenue, but that has not been the case. AdSense has been enabled on this site for many months, and it’s just not giving me the return I need to see to have ads on the site. If the site takes off overnight, I may turn ads back on, as hosting isn’t free, but for now, no more ads.

I’ve just flipped the switch to move this blog over to cloudflare. I did this awhile back for a test site I was working on, and it seems to be responsive and non-intrusive, so I’m going with it. And it’s fast. So fast.

I’ve been poking the photo blog over at gurufoto a lot recently, but most of the changes aren’t really visible. And that’s on purpose. I’m trying to clean up image handling, CSS options, and work better on larger and smaller screens.

The first major change is adding 3000px+ wide versions of all images going forwards. This allows me to scale up to the largest regular screens available today (2560×1440 or so) and still offer a sharp image, no matter the window size. I’m also using Adaptive Images to serve out dynamically sized images based on screen sizes – so an iPhone will get 768px wide version, a laptop will get a 1599px wide version, and and 27″ iMac will get the full size image. This keep bandwidth costs down for mobile users, and also helps with loading speeds.

The image element itself is setup with a width and a max-width setting, so it will expand to almost fill the window, no matter the size, and I’m trying to be better about properly screening and sharpening the images before they hit the blog. I’m working to get the number of external HTTP requests down – which means deciding between WordPress JetPack and Google Analytics. I’m keeping my eyes open for one that I can host myself. Ideas?

Ok, Marissa – you’ve won. I’m back on flickr. There have been enough rumors going around that you actually care about flickr that I started paying attention again, and then I saw this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marissamayer. You actually have a flickr photo stream, and you post to it. Not some PR flunky, but you. I look forward to what the future hold for flickr, and I’ll re-up my paid subscription when my free three months runs out. (That was damn clever, too).