one digital life

We’re going to Hawaii!

We are gone on vacation… in Maui! In fact, at the moment this gets posted we’ll be on a plane. How did I post this from the plane, you may ask. Well, I didn’t. I actually wrote it last night, and date-stamped it not to show up until 8:40am Saturday.

WooHoo! I’m so excited to go to Hawaii! Neither of us have ever been. We’ll have a whole week there. We’ll be staying on the west (beach) side for 5 nights, and the east (rain forest) side for 2 nights. We are meeting some friends there, and have all kinds of fun things planned.

Luckily, this was all booked and paid for back in January, before I had my tax trouble in April. Otherwise, we would probably be spending this week here at home.

We’ll have internet access for at least the first 5 days, so I’ll probably be logging in from time to time, but if no new posts appear… that means I’m having a beer or three at the beach, and I can’t make it back to my computer.

Now you know why I’ve been looking at new earphones and waterproof iPod cases ;)

Happy Birthday to Me…

It’s my birthday! Yay! I wish I could say I was taking the day off, but I have too much work to do. Oh, well.

There was another birthday recently that I totally missed. On May 1st, this blog turned 2. I started it on May 1st, 2004. Check out my first post. I had no idea what this site would become, or if it would last long. I was just curious about blogging.

On a related note, I had an alternate image for this post, but it seemed a little cheesy, or spooky, or somethin…

UPDATE: Oh my god, I was totally wrong. I didn’t start this blog on May 1st, I started it on May 28th. I guess I’m early for once.

Do what you love… Don’t settle

“…Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle…”

That was an excerpt from Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford, June, 2005. I’ve been thinking a lot about those words lately. The entire speech is available through iTunes (FREE).

Link (Steve Job’s Commencement Address - iTunes): Audio | Video

Found via Daring Fireball

One Digital Life needs your help

So, if you were here earlier, or you subscribe to my feed, you saw a very different post here this afternoon. I’ve taken that post down. I never should have written it in the first place. I’m actually very ashamed of myself, and a bit humiliated by the whole thing. Please forgive me.

Let me explain what happened. I met with my tax guy this morning. That meeting was a bit overwhelming, and I had a minor freak-out. I came home, and in a knee-jerk reaction I turned to my blog for comfort. I gave all of you a sob story about it, and asked if you like the site, please lend me a hand.

As time went on today after I posted the story, I began to feel very self-concious, and ashamed of what I had done. It was just wrong of me to lay that all on you guys.

My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who laid down their hard-earned cash to lend me a hand. I really appreciate the thought. But, I’ve refunded all the money that came in.

Seeing a “donate” button on blogs is by no means uncommon, and I don’t normally think it’s wrong to do. But, the way I did it was wrong. Again, please forgive me.

Walk across the Golden Gate

It’s been raining here for about six weeks, and it’s getting really old. Fortunately, we had a few hours of nice weather on Saturday. I was working on-site for a project, but luckily I was able to sneak away for a bit and get outside… I needed it.

Anne Marie and I decided to do something we’ve never done… walk across the Golden Gate bridge. I’ve been here for 2 years, and she’s been here for 12 years, but for some reason we’ve just never gotten around to doing this. It was great! It was so nice to actually be outside in the sun. Now, if we could just get some more days like that.

Busy, busy, busy…

My posts have been a little sparse lately because I’m in the middle of a huge project, under a tight deadline. If you’ve emailed me lately and I haven’t responded, or you’ve been wondering where the posts are… that’s why. Bare with me… everything should be back to normal within a few days.

UPDATE (3.27.06): I will be wrapping up my project today. I’ll be answering emails and posting new content this afternoon. Yay!

UPDATE #2: The Project is done! But, I’m afraid I lied about the new posts and getting to email. I’m beat! I’m showering, eating dinner, and going to bed. More tomorrow…

You Digg Me… The FollowUp

I thought I would do one followup on yesterdays story about my digg / del.iciou.us experiment. The final visitor count for yesterday was 17,891, up from an average of 3,500/day. The RSS feed subscription is at 1,205, up from 286. Although the frenzy at digg.com has died down, elevated traffic continues to spill over into today.

I’m not mentioning this to toot my own horn… I’m just stunned that one tutorial could have such an impact. I have several long standing pages that get quite a bit of search engine traffic, but the iTunes tutorial has jumped from relative obscurity, to the third most popular page on this site… in just one day. Just incase you’re curious, the top two are Bloodrayne Topless, and the downloads page. I think it’s obvious why those two pages get so many visitors from Google Image searches.

I’d also like to take a moment to talk about stats, in general. Most stats packages give 2 numbers for visitors… Total - the total number of visitors in a given time period, and Unique - visitors that have never been here before. Bloggers, myself included, tend to get hung up on Unique… but is that the number we should care about? Advertisers care about unique visitors, because it means their ad is reaching a wider audience, but shouldn’t bloggers be more concerned with total, or more precisely… the difference between total and unique? The difference between those two numbers represent your regular readers. You may have a lot of unique visitors, but if your unique and total numbers are almost the same, then not very many people are coming back to your site. I don’t want that, would you? I care about my regular readers. Although I keep this blog for my own enjoyment, I would hate to think that no one else sees enough value in it to come back… and it’s just a random Google-stop for a topless image of Bloodrayne, or an Apple desktop picture.

You Digg Me… You Really Digg Me

A little over a week ago I announced that I had changed my RSS feed over to FeedBurner, so I would have the ability to keep track of how many people subscribe. An added benefit to FeedBurner, was a feature they call FeedFlare. FeedFlare basically gives you some pre-built items to add into you feed, and your blog posts. That’s what generates those links at the bottom of each post, for emailing the story, digging the story (digg.com), adding to Del.iciou.us, etc… I wanted to make it easy for people to share my stories, so I decided to take advantage of that feature.

Now, I had never actually used digg.com or Del.iciou.us, so I really didn’t know what those buttons did, exactly. So, I decided to do a little experiment. The expirement was meant to show me what the buttons did, and determine if someone could boost traffic to their site by using those other sites. The only thing I can say now is… Oh… My… God!

Here’s what happened… Yesterday I opened accounts over at digg.com and Del.iciou.us (both free). I then gathered up a handful of my past stories that I thought people would be interested in, and bookmarked them in Del.iciou.us, and dugg them (digg.com). Most of the stories had a mediocre response, less than 10 diggs each. But, there was one story that got a little more attention. It was a tutorial I wrote last year, on how to back up you music library using iTunes, and automatically track future incremental backups.

As of 8:00pm tonight (PST) the story has received over 1,500 diggs. My site, which usually gets around 3,500 visits per day, has received over 16,000 visits today. The traffic hit its peak at 11:00am, receiving almost a days worth of visits in one hour. Yesterday, there were 286 people subscribing to my RSS feed, as of right now, there are over 1,000 subscribers. My referrer log has been overflowing with links from digg, Del.iciou.us, Yahoo News?, PopURLs, and a bazillion other online news readers, RSS aggregators, and blogs that picked up the post.

Now you see why I said… Oh… My… God! It was an amazing day. I’ve read about this happening to people, but it’s the first time I’ve gone through it. It was a bit freaky to see the numbers change as fast as they were today.

I’m going to say that this experiment was a success. I learned what the buttons did, and determined that, yes… you can increase your traffic by using sites like digg.com, and Del.iciou.us.

I’ve also read that after an event like this, you typically don’t retain all those readers. A lot of them will drop off… and that’s OK. But, I wanted to extend a welcome to any new readers out there. I hope you enjoy the site, and stick around for a while. Thanks for an exhilarating day!