The bane of our lives - android/ios apps

Most of us use mobile telephones, whether we are or are not photographers. I know I certainly do and I'm no exception. I'm a rather mundane ordinary fellow that wears glasses to read. I don't like beer, I don't like sport. I love working and earning money (well, maybe I am unusual because most people regard work as a necessary evil). Seriously, I do enjoy working. When I'm not working, I tend to get bored.

Meanwhile, back to the issue - mobile phone apps. It doesn't matter whether it's an Android-based phone, an iOS based phone or one of those strange Windows phones. I'm sorry - I can't really take a Windows phone seriously. I just can't imagine anybody wanting a phone where midway through a call, the phone freezes and needs to be rebooted or stops working entirely and needs the operating system to be reinstalled as seems to be the case with every Microsoft operating system I've ever seen. The apps are the weakest point of most of the phones.

Having a smartphone can be fun until things go haywire. On my Android as an example, the email app got an update that meant it burned through battery life in no time at all. The battery went from 2 days to 2.5 hours before it was flat. This is one of the problems - apps that have poor power drain features. This is why most iPhone users constantly seem to be plugging their phones in. My choice - just to remove the apps that burn through the battery.

The other day I thought it might be nice to play a game on my tablet (which is also Android). There was a spectacular selection and all free. Generally the games tried seemed to fall into one of several categories:

• Failed to install - quite a lot with high-ratings just failed to install, coming up with an error message. This made me look more closely at the ratings where I marvelled at how the ratings looked so faked. "Great game" is not a review. Google does not charge by the letter for reviews. 
• Ridiculous amount of advertising. The "free" apps are only free because they carry advertising. One app I tried had an enormous amount of advertising. Every 60 seconds the app would pause to show an advert. The app itself was pretty pointless - it had clearly been written as an advertising vehicle rather than anything else.
• Generally low-quality applications. I've tried quite a few that could easily have been better. It takes just as much time to write a good app as it does to write a bad app. From installation (which can take minutes) to deletion is usually around about 30 seconds.
• Many variations on exactly the same app. How many times can Jewel Quest be redone? It has been out as Bubble Quest, Bubble Magic, Bubble Cannon, Bubble Buster etc. Just changing the name slightly and the screen layout does not change the game. It's the same game copied and changed very slightly. 
• Ludicrous amounts of memory needed. What happened to the old IBM PC games that loaded in under a megabyte? Why are the games now so massive? 20mb is nothing - there are some now that are over a gigabyte. Some will claim they're 20mb then by the time they've downloaded their little extras, they're up to 70mb and beyond.
• OK applications? Well, the games tried were all hugely disappointing. Generally the only apps worth mentioning are those written and supplied by Google. None of the independent apps seem to perform at all well. Thus, I stick to the most mundane apps - the browser, gmail, navigation, clock etc. 

Now that's the free apps. There are paid apps but since all they will largely bypass is the advertising, are they really going to be so much better that they're worth paying for? Going by the example of the Blackberry I had a few years ago on which I did buy a couple of disappointing apps, probably not so it's not worth paying the money. The generally poor quality of the free apps does not engender belief that the paid apps will be any better.

I look at my smartphone and wonder sometimes whether I really need a smartphone when publically available wifi will help in most areas and since it's not essential that I actually have 24x7 access to email and so on. In days gone, I used to use the Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest apps. I deleted them all. Do I miss them? No. I don't miss Facebook pinging to tell me that somebody has uploaded yet another photograph of their cat taking a poo in the geraniums. I don't miss letting the burglars know when I'm not home by posting my location on Foursquare. I don't miss casually adding things that I had no interest in to Pinterest. I don't even miss the inane Twitter application.

Blogger spammed by Jetsli

They're at it again! The web bot spammers, that is. Every now and then my blog gets spammed by a web crawler. What the owner of the crawler is hoping to do is that by spamming a blog, the owner will become interested enough to investigate the site and then maybe purchase something from the site. It's just somewhat annoying for most bloggers such as myself.

Jetsli,de can join the likes of vampirestat, zombiestat and all the other blog spammers is spammer's Hell as far as I'm concerned. Eventually, Google will work out a way of blocking them but for the moment, it's just frustrating. For a long time this blog was spammed by some gangsters from Easter Europe. They had an opt-out on their website but as I have a policy of never confirming I exist by opting out from something I never opted to join in the first place, it was just a case of waiting for Google to block them. 

Google blocked all the other spammers. I guess in a few weeks, Jetsli will join the list of blocked domains. My other blog A Brit in the US gets typically 40 page views per day. Today it has 95 from Jetsli alone, bringing today's pageviews so far up to 127. That means that so far the blog has had 32 genuine page views - not 127. That's probably about right for an average day. It's not a blog I advertise or publicise or even update more than once every few months.

My immediate thought about the jetsli stuff is that something has gone wrong with their spam engine to be making themselves so visible as 95 hits in a day. This should - with luck - attract Google's attention and get them banished to the darker realms of the internet.

I have a dream that spammers and internet crooks of all varieties will be reincarnated as dung beetles. 

Introducing Dixie Nash - America's Biggest Girl Next Door

Dixie Nash is America's hottest new plus-size girl next door model. This is the girl that brings reality back into the over-air-brushed, pantomime world of modelling, photography and fashion. This girl is what America is all about. She's a happy, cheerful lady who's not shy to be a real person. She can burp and fart with the best of us.

I discovered Dixie Nash who lives in a trailer in the forests in deepest South Carolina, a few months ago. She was out hunting for possum for dinner and I was out prospecting for gold. For those of you that don't already know, I do head out and pan for gold occasionally. Thus far I've only found small amounts and not yet the mother lode. Dixie was stalking a possum when she wandered into my camp. We chatted and ended up becoming jolly good friends.

Dixie wanted to hit the Internet with photos and videos and since those are both things that I can do, I did some realistic images and videos for her. I don't go for all the glitzy Hollywood-style garbage. My photographs portray real life and real people in real situations without gloss and without frippery. They have been described as hard and graphic.

Dixie Nash has a series of videos out that are becoming increasingly popular. They can be viewed here: Dixie Nash Playlist. Indeed viewing of Dixie Nash videos surpass even the viewing of my photography instructional videos. This is a lady that's going somewhere. Keep an eye open for Dixie Nash and grab an autograph while you still can before she becomes too famous and too important to sign autographs.

A moment of silence

Today this is no blog posting. This entry is dedicated to the memory of those that have died in the recent rash of plane crashes over the last few weeks.

• Ukraine - Flight MH17 shot down - 298 killed
• Air Algerie Flight With 116 On Board Crashed In Mali - 116 killed
• Passenger Plane Crash In Taiwan - 47 killed

May You Always Walk In Sunshine 

May you always walk in sunshine

and God’s around you flow, 

for the happiness you gave us, 

no one will ever know. 

It broke our hearts to lose you, 

but you did not go alone,

 a part of us went with you, 

the day God called you home. 

A million times we needed you, 

a million times we’ve cried. 

If love could only have saved you, 

you never would have died. 

The Lord be with you

and may you rest in peace.

The truth we all love to believe

Believe - open your eyes and see. All around you is the work of the Great Prophet Falsidicus. Open your mind and see his great works. Listen to the tales of wonder and marvel at the claims of the Great Prophet Falsidicus. Keep your mind open and do not judge the claims of our wonderful Prophet Falsidicus. It shall come to pass as the Great Prophet Falsidicus declared it would - those that work the miraculous labyrinth known as the Internet shall become rich and the LORD shall grin and the people shall feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats etc.

What is constantly related is that a website will get visitors and visitors will get money or advertising clicks or whatever. Everything to do with the internet revolves around getting visitors to a website or Twitter account or whatever. The problem is that people will NOT magically come to your website or Twitter account or blog or whatever. They have to have a reason to come and "my site is super sexy and super interesting" is not a good enough reason.

Another issue is how to find out how many actual visitors the site is getting. As an example, an old Weebly site which was paid for had some of the worst hit counters ever seen. That was clocking up around 200 hits a day yet it was not resulting in any calls whatsoever. Out of desperation, Google Analytics and a W3C counter were added which pretty much agreed with each other that the actual daily viewer rate was probably 3 or 4 actual viewers a day. That's far less than the rate Weebly reported.

Even Google Analytics and W3C are probably not that accurate. This blog according to the blog stats gets around 5,000 page views a month. How many of those are bots clicking on and off without a human reading is unknown. Yesterday the visitor figures looked like this according to Google Analytics.

There were apparently 11 visitors out of 14 that seemed to be real to Google Analytics. The other 3 were just bots which came up as bounces. The actual blog figures differ. They recorded 194 pageviews yesterday while Google Analytics recorded 11.

With all these conflicting figures - no two hit counters can ever seem to agree - it's very hard to see how many viewers any website actually gets. The key question is - how much money do websites make. Money is the important thing. As mentioned before the old Weebly site was not generating any business whatsoever. As it didn't generate business, there was singularly little point in continuing to run it and even less point in paying any of the associated fees for domain names nor for the webspace.

Out of interest a Bravenet counter was tried on two blogs. Clearly the Bravenet counter didn't work. Either that or there really were no hits. This is not a realistic scenario as a friend just said they enjoyed the latest blog article. Clearly some hit counters just don't work worth a hoot.

Put a website up and people will come. No - it doesn't work like that and hasn't worked like that no matter what website has been up. The only time a website gets guaranteed hits is if, for example, a former associate is stalking the owner and constantly visiting the site. That tends to show up rather well - particularly using W3C counter as below.

Clearly the person whose site that was, had a bad stalker problem that month. That one city/site/individual was responsible for probably 75% of the hits that month. This is another reason that web hits are unreliable. Any hits from a stalker or bot that repeatedly visits (who knows - the stalker could have been a web bot) tends to throw all the figures from being interesting to being worthless. That kind of worthless statistic could well lead to bad financial decision making if relied upon.

Having had websites of different kinds for the past 15 years it's quite clear that unless the website is associated with a well-known brand that few people are actually going to look for it. Indeed, this blog went viral when it was listed on a Romanian website. The posting that went viral was The Digital Scam. This rapidly gained 1,500 hits and keeps gaining hits. That has made no difference to the profitability of this blog at all. During the time it went viral, the advertising gained no extra hits. Indeed, it's debateable as to whether it ever would given the number of people that use adblockers on their computers. 

So, the myth put out there by the Great Prophet Falsidicus is that websites will make money. To be blunt, they don't. There's more chance of finding money on the ground while walking through a public park than there is of making money off a website via carrying advertising or advertising products sold by the website. Each generation believes the lie put out by the lying damned prophet. Each generation has a new lot of suckers willing to believe the internet is the key to untold riches and that they will be the next Bill Gates. 

Nobody is going to look at your Foursquare page. 

Nobody is going to communicate with you on Twitter unless you put a ridiculous amount of work into it.

Nobody is going to look at your website no matter how much you advertise it.

Nobody is going to buy your products or services based on what you put on some damn website.

Nobody is going to give a hoot about how much money or time or effort you put into a web presence.

Do you still believe in the Great Prophet Falsidicus that there's money to be made from the internet? If so and you are making enough money to live on from the internet then you're either incredibly lucky or a great scam artist.

The worth of a resume and the worth of the internet for resumes.

A long time ago, on my photography website, there was a web form. Quite often people would fill the form with applications for non-existent jobs. Some even included their social security numbers. No jobs had been advertised and no positions were vacant. It was very strange. 

Roll on a few years and my position ended so I began to hunt for work. The basic doctrine was to fill out applications on a rather worthless government website and press send. There was no personality nor human interaction at all. Indeed most resumes go through resume scanners that filter out the most useful applicants and give the HR guru only the applicants that have the right words on their resume and of course those words are kept secret.

After a few months of doing the worthless exercise of sitting on my backside filling out silly web forms and doing a lot of copy and paste, my email inbox began to fill with spam. Fortunately, foreseeing that I'd opened a new email account. Even with spam filtering in place it was soon filled with a sea of junk amidst which it was impossible to see communications from potential employers. The account was deleted and not a moment too soon. Every few moments my phone would ping and it would be another junk email that said something to the effect of "now how about applying for these jobs too".

In the end, I came back to my original article about job hunting and took another look at the resume. With online applications, nobody seems to bother with the resume - they just want the forms filled and not the resume. Having ceased to fill in forms pointlessly and having decided to focus more on the kind of job I need rather than applying for just any old job, I took a new path. Or rather, I took an old and well trodden path that everybody has forgotten about. 

My path to work started in the middle of May when I decided to do some voluntary work. This is a very important thing to do for several reasons. 

• First, it shows that you're not an idle bum just waiting for the phone to ring with offers of work. 
• Second, when you do start work, it will give you a bigger tax break. 
• Third, it gets you into a work circle - when you're out of work, you lack work contacts and these contacts are when are needed to get work. 
• Finally, it gets you into a work routine. It's too easy to laze in bed until mid afternoon without work then stay up til the wee hours playing video games. 

During my time in my voluntary job, aside from using the careers dept of my former college to run through my resume for me, I used the Human Resources department at my voluntary job. In fact they looked with wide eyes and told me to check their website as it was updated every Tuesday. They did suggest some minor changes but these are probably more personal preference.

So, how should a resume look? The format is essentially like this:

• Your Name
• Phone Number
• PO Box or email address
• City
• 
  
• A statement of objectives. This has to be good and the HR person I spoke to said "This gets you hired". This is the first thing that they look for so it has to be good.
• 
  
• After this, a list of key skills. Apparently Microsoft Office has to be there even though everybody and their dog does Microsoft Office or derivatives thereof.
• 
  
• Then a list of prior employment but not necessarily in chronological order - in order of relevance to the position applied for.
• 
  
• For each job put the company name, city, dates and position. Then put 3 salient points about what you did for that company. They have to be short and punchy. I got mine from an online reference. Heck, I couldn't pick out key things as I had to do a bit of everybody's job as well as my own.
• 
  
• Under that, education - just institutions, qualifications and year completed. Course content is not required.

That's it - you're good to go with a resume. My personal preference is not to quote an email address. There's so much recruitment spam that it's no longer worthwhile giving an email address. My favorite response to the email address field is "I.dont.use.email@phone.me". This is what I do for online applications. Online applications aren't worth crap anyway. Nobody will ever read them in the vast majority of cases.

Where my successes come from are from the oldest trick in the book. I put on my uniform from my voluntary job, including my name badge and head to people's offices. The kinds of place I want to work are similar to the kind of place I'm volunteering in. Needless to say it's all professional medical stuff. I had some business cards printed that give my name, my desired job function and so on - all with a nice logo and a website. I paid $15 for 250 business cards and $4 for a domain name. The website is a freebie website. If a company won't take a resume then like as not they'll take a business card. 

Remember to be nice to the receptionists. They might not actually be receptionists. I spoke with one lady behind a reception desk and suspected she was not the receptionist but a director. My resume was refused so I handed her a business card. On my way to the door I was called back and asked for a resume which was apparently going to be submitted to the Human Resources director. Another reason to be nice to receptionists is they are your bridge to seeing other people. Don't burn your bridges.

Hitting the road and meeting people, I got far more feedback but more importantly I was seen by people. I was seen by a lot of people. My name will begin to ring bells - I know that fellow - I met him once etc. This is infinitely more productive than sitting on your butt playing online application form games. Make a list of places you want to work and head out to them with resumes and business cards. The larger places will probably have online only applications so put those on the back burner and concentrate on smaller companies that don't waste everybody's time with a website.

Yes - 90% of your business cards will go straight in the trash. 90% of your resumes will go straight in the trash. In fact, probably 97.5% will. All you need is one company to say yes. That's all you need. Don't print too many resumes. Keep a copy on your phone in case somebody insists on having it by email (and keep a throwaway email address specifically for that). Finally, if somebody tells you that online is the way to get a job, please feel free to correct their erroneous thinking with a good hard slap around the head. I have never got a job through anybody's rinky-dink website. I have only ever got jobs from personal contact. That includes all my jobs over the last 10 years.

New Twitter Phillosophy

In order to achieve the elimination of Twitter spam bots, I've engaged ManageFlitter. This is a handy utility that is now fully manual. It used to be automatic but Twitter decided automation was not to be recommended - not without reason. Thus I'm now weeding through my Twitter accounts trying to eliminate all the spam bots my accounts have acquired.

Back in the bad old days, I used automatic follower adders to add Twitter followers, not really caring much whether the followers were worthwhile or not as I figured there must be a few good apples amidst the bad. Since then my thinking has changed. @EmeraldEspinoza had 3916 accounts that it was following and 3865 that were following back. Today using ManageFlitter, this has been reduced by 1,000 accounts that were either spam, tweeted only in a foreign language, had no personalization at all or had been inactive for 30+ days. I shall rerun this over the next few days until all the garbage accounts are gone from the list that I am following.

My theory is that if I stop following all the garbage accounts and stop following people back automatically, I should be able to see what the health of the account is. Emerald's Gazette has had just 17 views to date which would indicate that it's not reaching real people and I suspect followers may well be put off by two things - the number of spam accounts I'm following back and the fact that my auto-tweeter goes off 20 times a day. I need to reduce that to about 4 times daily so that I have just five daily tweets. That keeps the account alive.

Really and truly, I have too many Twitter accounts as I'd set them all on automatic. Automatic broadcasts, automatic follower adders etc. I doubt there was a single genuine reader. I'm slowly working through them all with my new philosophy that if people want to follow they can but giving people a reason to want to follow which is the automatically generated daily newspaper. I'm also planning to interact a bit more too - even if it means I have to monitor half a dozen Twitter accounts.

The goal? Simply to get more readers for my blogs. More readers is just pure fun. I have no idea how many readers I get at the moment. Most of the time the comment section is devoid of genuine comments. Thus either everybody agrees with what I say or nobody is reading despite what the hit counters (none of which agree on figures) are telling me.

So, the new model - eliminate the junk accounts that I'm following on Twitter. Reduce automatic tweets to a minimum. Use automatically generated daily newspapers to encourage interest in both blogs and the newspapers. Respond to genuine Twitter followers. Hope that the new rules of engagement increase blog popularity. Of course this philosophy will be followed through with all the existing Twitter accounts. Indeed, if some have no following at all (which is likely) they might get eliminated. To that end, today I unfollowed about 4,300 accounts that hadn't tweeted in the last 30 days, didn't tweet in English, were identified as spam accounts or had no profile image. I expect the bots will still follow me now that auto follow/unfollow has been disabled. I don't care about the bots - they're non-human so as long as they don't annoy me, they can follow me.

Second figures review

Zephod's gazette series is having mixed success. The readership figures as of 9pm on June 21st are:

Zephod's Book Gazette (Fridays) 15 views

Zephod's Business Gazette (Mondays) 20 views

Zephod's Governor Watch (daily) 60 views

Zephod's Medical Gazette (Wednesdays) 18 views

Zephod's Photo Gazette - formerly Zephod's Gazette - (Tuesdays) 72 views

Zephod's South Carolina Gazette (Thursdays) - 21 views

Zephod's Sunday Gazette (Sundays) - 23 views and one email subscriber

Zephod's Travel Gazette (Saturdays) - 18 views.

It's all interesting stuff and tells me two things. Firstly that Zephod's Photo Gazette and Zephod's Governor Watch are much more popular than any of the other papers. If this trend continues then I'll probably just keep Zephod's Governor Watch and Zephod's Photo Gazette going and quietly stop publishing the other 6.

My other Twitter accounts are linked individually to just one newspaper. Those seem to be getting even lower viewer figures. I suspect that those accounts have largely non-human followers. Perhaps the biggest problem with Twitter is that a goodly percentage of the accounts are fake. They're either 100% automated or they're dormant spammer accounts.

Needless to say, I'll have another look at the newspapers in about a week when they're all a month old and will see about reducing to those that people actually read. I could probably do exactly the same with my Twitter accounts and reduce those to the accounts that actually have some human interaction.

Night Sky Photography

For a long time night sky imaging has interested me. When living in Wales, I used to walk across Fairwood Common at night having caught the only bus that ran in the evenings to Three Crosses. After that it was a 3 mile walk to my home - a car being out of the question. During those walks, frequently due to the low level of light pollution it was easily possible to see the Milky Way clearly. At that time, however, I was not really doing much in the way of photography having lost my taste for it the first time somebody persuaded me to do it professionally.

The Milky Way is a truly splendid sight - a band of fairy dust that stretches from one side of the horizon to the other. Taken with enhanced color, the Milky Way looks spectacular. Many times there have been some very admirable images of it that I've seen. The problem is taking pictures for myself of the Milky Way. It's OK to admire somebody else's work but it's something I - and no doubt - you want to do.

My first attempt at night sky photography was when I was down in Key West in March of 2012. I had intended to visit my parents in Britain but encountered a lady and ended up spending a very pleasant week in Key West with her. During that week I had a go at night sky photography, the sky being quite dark. It's one of those images that I just wish I could go back and retake.

The exposure on that photograph wasn't really long enough to bring out the sky properly. Whether there was too much light pollution is unknown because it was 2 years ago and I can't remember now. Recently however, I attempted a better sky photo more locally. The following image was shot over the Lake Murray Dam. Sadly, light pollution there was severe as can be seen from the image.

It's possible in both images to see that roughly the same area of sky has been photographed (almost two years apart). The light pollution is appalling. Clearly something needs to be done in order to take a good sky image.

Looking at the light pollution, it seems largely to be sodium or mercury lighting. This comes from street lamps and represents light that is being wasted by shining it upwards where it's no use to anybody. This in turn means more powerful lighting is needed to illuminate the things that need to be illuminated. A simple reflector installed on each street lamp to aim the light down to where it's supposed to be would mean less powerful lamps would be needed. That in turn would mean less energy would be expended. That in turn would mean less of your tax dollars are wasted. What that orange glow represents is wasted tax dollars. It also means more fossil fuels burned by power stations in order to light up areas of the sky needlessly.

In a casual online search, the subject of Sodium/Mercury blocking filters came up. It seems that there are companies selling them. Indeed, Cloudy Nights has a review of one. Astronomik even sells one. The problem is that they are all behind the lens filters and not in front of the lens filters. This causes all kinds of problems with the lens mechanism as they're designed for use with telescopes. They're also frightening prices.

In the ideal world, from my base in Lexington, South Carolina, I would drive up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and spend a few hours one night taking photographs as there are no big towns or cities anywhere near the middle of the mountains that can cause sufficient light pollution to worry about. That though is a run of about 185 miles in each direction or for me about 20 gallons of fuel at around $3.50 a gallon - not to mention about 4 hours driving each way. That makes the $200 of a filter seem almost worthwhile if an hotel room is factored in as well. There is, however, a snag - the filters only fit Canon EOS cameras that use EF lenses. The XT uses EF-S lenses which would as mentioned before have an issue with the lens mechanism.

Thus, it looks that the only way to get good sky photos is to head away from the Lexington/Columbia/Lake Murray area. There is reportedly a private observatory in Newberry though it doesn't have a website associated with it. The night sky must be better in Newberry. Maybe one day I might head over there. Truth be told without a job I'm limiting my milage in order to conserve money until I can get a job though with the sexism I had the other day, it could be a while.

Sexism and Racism in action in the worst state of the union

As many of my readers will know, I'm currently looking for work. My last position was a temporary job that ended in February. Since then I have been hunting for work. When nobody is responding to applications, it really hurts when within two weeks interview offers are received and then rescinded based on my gender.

I won't mention the company names but I will say that both were within the Greater Columbia South Carolina area.

In the first instance, I received a message that I should ring the company to book an interview. When I did, I was told there was no vacancy. That stunned me and I had a friend of the other gender ring and my friend was told - apply - there was a vacancy. If that wasn't sexist, what is. What does it matter what's between anybody's legs for an office job?

In the second instance, I received a message that I should ring the company to book an interview. I did and had a very surprised sounding woman on the phone who proceeded to give me an interview date and time. About an hour later, she rang back to say the interviewer would be out of town on the interview date and that she'd call me back. Well, she didn't so I called them and was told they still didn't know anything. Then I called again the next day and they still didn't know anything. Clearly somebody was trying to blow smoke up my backside.

And I almost forgot this one. Another company held a group interview. During the group interview it became obvious that the gender bias of the group was 6 of one and 2 of the other. Needless to say, the 2 did not get the positions. The company was uni-gender.

My friends who are not caucasian have even more difficulties. Believe it or not but the Ku Klux Klan is still alive and well and actively recruiting. They have but one agenda - to suppress the non-caucasian population. This goal is actively aided and abetted by small employers that often refuse to employ black people. Look at medical offices as an example - how many of their front desk staff are black or male or black and male? How many Attorneys have black or male staff on their front desk?

In the news recently there was a tale of the Klan recruiting in one of the smaller towns in South Carolina by leaving gifts of candy on people's doorsteps. It seemed to outrage the media but it just seems quite normal from what I hear from my non-caucasian friends and from my own experiences. How many times do I see a confederate bracelet or a coiled snake logo in a day? All signs of the Klan.

South Carolina has had a reputation for being the worst state of the union ever since it started that ridiculous Civil War back in the 1860s. How South Carolina could get away with thinking slavery would ever be OK is beyond me. Economically it doesn't even work because once you have slaves, you have to look after them and so on. It just doesn't work.

Dragonfly Photography by Vic Berardi - eBook Review

This is a very short eBook by Vic Berardi. Clearly it's a first eBook but despite that it's reasonably well laid out and reasonably well written. The photographs are more why somebody would want to read this book - not so much for the text, which is worthy enough but more for the photographs which depict an uncommon subject well.

In the short 18 page eBook - about 60% of which is devoted to photographs, there's a section on equipment that follows the useful information that dragonflies are at their best in sunshine and 70F weather and usually around midday. The equipment page is going to date very rapidly which is one reason it's better not to state equipment other than "I used a camera and a lens".

Pretty well immediately the author leaps into digital camera forum logic when stating that it's harder to get a good 11x14 print from a smaller camera. Really and truly most people don't ever want to print to ludicrous sizes. 11x14 is a ludicrous size. Most people want to view on their tablet or to print to 10x8 to fit one of the numerous dollar shop 10x8 frames. People don't keep prints very long; hanging them with enthusiasm and tossing them out when after becoming bored with them.

The next page is clearly a brag page in which an expensive looking and heavily camouflaged camera, lens and tripod are on display. Looking at the list of equipment, indeed it is a brag page. This is the point at which it's generally OK to yawn and turn the page. Realistically, a list of expensive equipment is more likely to repulse a beginner reader than inspire. It certainly repulses this reviewer.

The page on sharpness following the brag page is more of an exercise in using excess words. It looks at this point that the text is best skipped but that wouldn't be a good way to review the book. The style is very beginnerish and could do with a lot of condensation and removal of personal pronouns. There is advice to use F11 for medium sized dragonflies which is interesting but incorrect. F11 is the point at which many lenses begin to lose sharpness. Sharpness is greatest at about F8 but is less on either side of F8 though a lot depends upon the lens. Thus giving information based on one selection of lenses is not good advice for all lenses. Universally, F8 is sharpest though the more is spent on a lens, the greater the chance that F5.6 and F11 will also be equally sharp. Lenses get progressively less sharp across the frame the wider and narrower the aperture gets from F8.

After this the author advocates using a tripod for all dragonfly images. This is baffling. How the author can achieve good insect images without being able to follow an insect to a landing spot to take a photograph before the insect leaves is baffling. This is not explained in the book. 

Similarly the exposure section mentions taking bracketed exposures. Yes - certainly if there's time. Most likely there won't be time though. The photograph below is an example (not taken by the book author) of a quick photo. A few seconds later the butterfly was gone. There would not have been time to focus manually. The focus was automatic as was the exposure. In insect photography there are a lot of failures. This was not a success - the depth of field is too narrow. This was done with a consumer grade lens and a consumer grade camera though. The next photo would have been perfect had there been time to adjust the aperture.

The author makes complications that need not be there and doesn't acknowledge the dumb luck also needed in dragonfly photography.

Following this, the recommendation is made to use a flash. Not just any flash but a top of the range flash which is an unnecessary expense. By this point it has become apparent that the book is more of a show-off exercise by the author than an educational exercise which is a shame.

Next the author suggests using a 36 inch collapsible reflector. Trying to picture an insect staying still while the author erects a tripod, focusses manually, sets the flash up and sets up a reflector in order to take the perfect photograph beggars belief a little and begs the question as to whether the whole book is a tongue-in-cheek send-up of photography.

There's advice on composition which is all well and good and accompanied by some excellent photographs but insects move so quickly that composition is just dumb luck. Two to three seconds is the most many insects will stand still. If focus can be achieved with the chosen focus point then that's the best that's achievable in terms of composition.

A section on dragonfly behaviour that's woefully short all but wraps up the book. The final page give places to look for further information on dragonflies. Sadly there's no information given on where the reader can read a better book on photography.

Overall, while the author has included some very nice dragonfly photographs and has been quite impressive by assigning names to each species of dragonfly, the photography section of the book reads more like a child in a playground saying to the other children: "look at what I got". In terms of photographic advice, the book seems poor. It is not a book that can be recommended to beginner photographers nor even to expert photographers. At best, it's one man's view on how to do photography.

Tinker Tubes - eBook review

At first glance, Tinker Tubes seems to be about constructing photographic lighting stands etc from inexpensive PVC piping. This is not a new idea and is one that has been bandied around many times. At one time even I had a go at building a background stand using PVC piping. The results looked good on camera but the actual robustness of the system was poor. Perhaps using heavier gauge piping would have helped although it would have driven up the cost and not been much lighter than the system I ended up buying from B&H. Having said that, the versatility of using PVC tubing meant that it could be reconstructed for other purposes and hence it became my target stands on the rifle range - for which it was eminently suitable.

Reading through the eBook, it is all about building things out of PVC piping. Now when a plastic piping constructed leaf bag holder collapses and dumps leaves all over the lawn, it's not a big deal. When a plastic piping constructed lighting stand drops an expensive flash unit on the ground, destroying it or worse, a plastic piping-constructed background stand or reflector stand collapses on top of a model, that's a disaster. Aside from potential litigation from an injured model there's also the cost to one's reputation caused from employing such a Heath-Robinson affair. Even if the model is a member of one's own family, the collapse of a dangerous-looking plastic structure would put them off from wanting to model again.

The book was written quite some time ago and was probably originally a printed pamphlet at some time - possibly even published as a free handout with a photography magazine. It's quite an interesting idea and one which I have played with myself before finding that even under its own weight, plastic tubing bows severely. All I found plastic tubing to be good for aside from its original purpose was as a cheap target stand on the rifle range. Even then, it wasn't that cheap if one of the joints was hit by a stray bullet as a single joint cost as much as an 8 foot length of piping.

I can recommend this for entertainment value. I would question the wisdom and desperation of somebody willing to build such contraptions as listed within the book. When written in 1982, people were nowhere near as litigious as they are now. For historical reading this is good. For the current litigious climate, it's probably unwise to do other than to laugh at the way we used to do things.

Has digital imaging heralded a downturn in photographic quality?

Today an article stated that somebody had taken 80,000 pictures with their digital camera over a period of ten years. That works out at 22 photographs a day. This claim is something that seems incredibly far fetched. Indeed, more than just far fetched, it sounds like an addiction problem that needs medical intervention.

Just how many of those 80,000 photographs were actually worth taking? A few years ago I was asked to photograph a wedding. I believe I took 500 images over the process of that wedding which was rather a lot considering the wedding. The typical wedding album contains maybe two dozen photographs. Bigger albums tend to bore viewers as people don't have a great attention span. Think back to the days when people groaned about being roped in to view slideshows of somebody's holiday with the inevitable "now just to the left of here was this really nifty..." which begged the question - where was the photo of it?

People take far too many photos today. Not just too many but too many utterly banal images. Just as an example, here's a totally banal image that means nothing to anybody who's viewing it now. It's the bottom of a shower that needs finishing. On its own - totally banal. Of no real interest to anybody bar the people involved in construction.

Is this the depth to which photography has sunk? People take this type of picture every day and publish them online and in their photo albums.

Back in the days when everybody used film, fewer cameras were sold, fewer photographs were taken and photography was of a higher quality. Everybody thought about the picture they were about to take rather than taking it anyway and seeing if it was worth taking, later. People would take 36 photographs on a roll of film. People would take one or maybe two rolls of film when they were on holiday and would come back with 72 really good photographs. These days, people go on holiday and might as well video the entire holiday with Google Glass and edit later. Seriously, 80,000 pictures in 10 years or 8,000 pictures in a year!

I have been taking digital images for about 10 years. Aside from two or three times when people paid me to take pictures in which case I did take several hundred each time, I have not taken more than a very few thousand. The counter on my Canon XT which is now 7 years old stands at about 5,000 images. I normally don't take that many photos. I certainly take more than I did in my film days and acknowledge that sometimes I take several mediocre photos because I'm too lazy to make sure I get one really great photo.

One of the dafter things about digital imaging is that people believe every image can be fixed after exposure. They can't be fixed - they can be cosmetically modified but that is all. A bad photograph will be a bad photograph whatever. There's a lunatic fringe that believes that by cropping a poorly executed photograph will produce a good result. It does not - it produces exactly a cropped, poorly executed photograph. A lot of the people that come out with nonsense like that need to pick up a real camera and to use slide film. Then perhaps they might learn to compose before pressing the button. I do swear that if people could keep the shutter going 24x7 at 20 frames a second, they would and would then choose their images later in a marathon editing session that would last months.

People are not working smarter - they're working harder. Instead of composing and taking the picture, they're photographing everything and then spending days on their computer trying to fix problems caused by lack of photographic skill.

This photograph is uncropped - it was taken with the subject balanced. Notice how the subject fills the frame and the photograph reads from right to left.  There's perspective, contrast and color. Everything is nicely centered with the Landrover nicely on a third.  This photograph needs no cropping because it has been well photographed.

This photograph by contrast is clearly off-center. The lover of cropping would want to crop the right hand side of the image yet this would do nothing to correct the incorrect perspective or the unevenness of the railings.  

Digital has certainly facilitated people's acceptance of poorer quality images. It has also heralded the over-edited image which at some point ceases to be a photograph and becomes digital art. Digital imaging has certainly heralded a downturn in photographic quality.

How much effort is a website worth?

How much money and effort should you put into a website? When do you pull the plug? What's the decision process behind pulling the plug? Why did you put the website up in the first place? There're a lot of questions there and a lot of different answers too.

Nobody can tell you how much money or effort to put into a website since largely websites are vanity items for companies, corporations and individuals. The internet is the world's largest entertainment medium. The biggest websites for visitor numbers are search engines and social networking sites. In the top 25 there are but two shopping sites and one pay-per-view porn site. That tells you that people favor entertainment 8 times more highly than commerce.

The question now becomes more of what entertainment value will your website provide. Entertainment has to be provided along with any possible e-commerce. At one time Kahr Arms had a flash game on their website (which sold small arms) in which you could shoot terrorists as they bobbed up and down from behind a burger bar. It was entertaining but nowhere near as entertaining as the game in which one had to hit John Prescott (The British Home Secretary of a few years back) with an egg, prompted by the famous egging incident. As is often said about newspapers - today's news, tomorrow's chip papers - newsworthy events become stale over time. Thus, any entertainment has to be fresh which means constant updates.

So, a website has to be entertaining and has to capture the imagination and has to be updated frequently. Gosh now that sounds like a lot of design work and a lot of work to keep it updated. This is sounding expensive! Now imagine you're not MegaCorp PLC and don't have a massive budget to throw at a website. Your budget is more modest and won't pay for games and a fancy website. Well, the public isn't going to like it as much. Imagine you're Joe Soap or indeed Zephod Beeblebrox with no budget. That website is going to have to be very niche in order to attract viewers.

Initially this blog was a photography website aimed at selling photography but as there was an insufficient market for photography - particularly in South Carolina - the paid website was dropped and the site was started on a free blogging site. Even that cost too much and the paid domain names were dropped.

The subject of photography was considered for the blog but as so many sites cover the how-to aspects of photography, it was decided to concentrate on the business aspects, the internet aspects and reviews of photography and internet or business books relating to photography. It was also decided not to worry too much about readership. When there are about 500 articles, the blog will probably be big enough that search engines begin to find the articles. Currently there are just under 200.

The purpose of this blog or rather web presence has changed over the years. Originally it was "here's my work. I'm a photographer. Hire me". That didn't work. There is very little opportunity to sell photography in a state noted for being the poorest in the union and a state where 50% of the population is on some form of welfare and the rest are stuck working in some miserable McJob.

The decision behind pulling the plug on a website is based on visitor numbers and or income. This blog gets an unknown number of visitors for example. As it doesn't cost money, it's not something that needs to be pulled. In a purely commercial world, something that hasn't a concrete visitor count and or concrete income after a year needs to be dumped. It's very easy in the technology world to say "now if I do this" or "if I spend a few dollars here" which before long turns out to be vast sums and vast time expenditure to no effect.

Before starting a website, it's best to have a clear plan of what needs to be achieved and a clear date by which time, if the achievements have not been met to axe the site. If it's not going to work, it's not going to work no matter how much time or money is thrown away on it. There are hoards of purse-lighteners out there willing to take money with false promises of fame, fortune and popularity. It's all codswallop. Stick to first principles like this site did. It made no money so the bits that cost money were curtailed.

Who's going to find your website?

It doesn't matter whether you have a photography website or a blog though with a blog there's more chance of people finding it since each entry can have its own meta tags. The question is though - who is going to find your blog or website? How are they going to find it?

Meta tags were mentioned just now. They are one of the keys that used to be heavily used by Google in order to locate websites. According to Google:

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

Now that's about as clear as mud. If you want to become even more confused then this is the page to read: How Google Search Works. My understanding is that meta tags help but aren't the whole answer. Throughout this blog, key search terms have been used. These are called "labels" by Google's blogspot. Two techniques have been used for the labels. Initially keyword mirroring was used where keywords and key phrases in the text were mirrored as labels for the blog entries. Subsequently, labels were used that would describe the blog entry or the sections of the blog entry - more as possible search terms.

Somewhere, it was written that people would search for "wedding photographer maui" rather than "Joe Bloggs Photography". This approach to blog labels is currently underway. This didn't really seem to produce any positive results. Indeed, when a search was just undertaken for "zombiestat" this link came up on top: http://spamspoiler.blogspot.com/2012/12/adsense-watchdog-zombiestat-vampirestat.html when in fact there is just such a blog entry on this blog - here: http://tehisp.blogspot.com/2013/12/vampirestat-zomiestat-adsensewatchdog.html. Using one of the page rank checkers, the site couldn't be found in the first 10 pages of the Google search using "Zombiestat" or "adsensewatchdog" as search terms.

Looking at the searches that have found my website, they are the following:

Entry	Pageviews
mystyle,myvision,myway	74
www.britphoto.us	30
http://britishphotography.us/	27
pornhub	17
www.britishphotography.us	11
britishphotography.us	5
bit.ly	4
http://www.britphoto.us	4
calumet closing	3
led light panel	3

Now the question having seen this is what difference does having a search term make? Very little, judging from those search terms. People are definitely viewing the blog judging from the viewing figures but absolutely not from any of the search terms that have been entered.

Of the 10 listed search terms that have been used since inception of this blog on July 12th, 2013 (the blog is a year old - yay), 5 have been people typing the web address into a search box instead of into the address box. One has been the result of my Twitter bot - 4 visits from Twitter in a year means that Twitter is worth exactly the money invested in opening a Twitter account. "Pornhub" is a term that has ever been used in this blog until now. Baidu - the Chinese search engine always does lookups under the blog title. This leaves just two entries as genuine searches. That's not promising.

In terms of visitors, the blog is much healthier though how many are human as opposed to robot remains to be seen.

The above is the last 30 days of web traffic. Heaven alone knows why there was such a spike on June 25th. The post on June 25th received just 32 visitors to date.

So, various tactics have been used, including discussing popular current events such as Calumet closing, which received 167 visitors to date. Nothing that has been used in active blog promotion seems to have worked at all. That's incredibly interesting. My other blog doesn't get any advertising at all yet manages to get a background rumble of web traffic that works out at about 50% of the traffic this blog gets. The search terms are marginally more nonsensical with made-up search terms that don't occur anywhere in the blog.

Now let's look at Google's other set of figures - Google Analytics - which matches quite nicely with what one of the independent counters used to say and disagrees strongly with Blogger's figures. Today Blogger says the site (thus far has had 231 page views). Google Analytics says there have been 28. There's quite a discrepancy there. Over an all time range, Google Analytics says there have been 21,462 page views and Google Blogger says there have been 39,527.

Given the fact that none of the perceived wisdom on how to index a website successfully seems to work and given that two sets of figures by the same organization can differ so wildly, is there anything that can be relied upon? Really, who is going to find your website aside from the spam bots and will you even know whether your site has been viewed by a real person or a bot? Are any of the figures really accurate? Is there perhaps just me and a tin of baked beans viewing my blog?