• Re the "1000 True Fans" experiment, Ctein got enough expressions of interest from people that he has decided to go ahead with the experiment. He's put up a detailed page about it at his site. (He's decided to call it "Collecting Ctein.") I think he did a pretty good job with the page; see what you think.
• Along those lines, very big thanks to those of you who have subscribed to The Online Photographer using the Subscribe button in the right-hand sidebar. You are menschen und, um, womenschen, every ever-lovin' last one a' ya. Danke shoen.
• If anyone has noticed that the site is slow to load recently, I'm afraid I don't know yet what's going on. I'm working on it.
• I do think I blew it the other day. After months of hovering in the 9,000+ range, the number of "readers through feeds" suddently plummeted to less than 4,000 after I revised and republished the "About Us" page (formerly the welcome page). I assume I inadvertently broke a lot of peoples' feeds, for which I apologize. I really don't know from feeds....
Incidentally, for a variety of reasons, the "About Us" page has to keep the same URL and can't be redirected. It now has a Quick Link to the blog at the top of it, however.
• Oh, and speaking of Ctein: the "Ctein" category is now fully populated, in the Categories links.
The feed count is a general Feedburner problem, they are currently working on fixing it: http://feedburnerstatus.blogspot.com/2009/04/reduced-subscribers-reported-by-google.html
Posted by: 1001noisycameras | Monday, 06 April 2009 at 06:42 PM
Many thanks for putting the links back (and even more accessible) on the home page.
Posted by: Cyril | Monday, 06 April 2009 at 10:31 PM
Site loading quickly here in London, RSS feed working fine, Ctein page very welcome and I'm _really_ looking forward to seeing his experiment succeed, even if it takes a little longer than usual. There will be a lot to enjoy and to learn from the artist that PayPal calls "none Ctein" in its contact information.
Posted by: Bahi | Tuesday, 07 April 2009 at 03:53 AM
You problem with the reader count has nothing to do with you - I think. What are you using to handle and count your feeds? Feedburner? I hope/assume you're.
If it is feedburner they recently had a glitch for a few days where they reported >50% fewer subscribers. I went from 1700 to 500 and back again.
Posted by: Mark Levison | Tuesday, 07 April 2009 at 12:43 PM
Dear Bahi,
Yes, Mike seems to think I'm in a category all my own.
I'm going to pretend it's a compliment.
How computer systems deal with single-named people is always of personal interest to me. A few of them are fine with it. The California DMV had no trouble processing a single name for my drivers license (which is not terribly surprising, considering that an awful lot of cultures don't have our "traditional" firstname-lastname combination).
Similarly, Social Security has a special flag word: enter "unknown" into a data field and that tells the computer system that field is to be left blank. (They refer to it as 'the Madonna case.') Which means my name simply appears as "Ctein" on my social security card and my tax form labels and any official correspondence, but somewhere deep within the computer, I am the Unknown Ctein.
Most computer systems I can fake out by simply entering "Mr Ctein" (note the missing period). They don't recognize "Mr" as a title, although any human being would automatically realize it's not a first name.
A few of them are cleverer than that, and then I have to get creative: hence the "none Ctein."
And some are simply intransigent, usually for good reasons. My medical provider, for example, absolutely requires a unique identifier in the first name field. So to them, I am known as "Ctein Ctein."
~ pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com
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Posted by: ctein | Tuesday, 07 April 2009 at 08:27 PM