Daily Window

Feedburner Help: Redirecting Old Feeds

Lynda — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:32:49 +0000

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

BLOGitse wrote to me asking how to get readers to update their subscription to reflect her new platform’s RSS feed. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about blogging it’s that as loveable as they are, you cannot depend on your readers to take action and update their contact information, bookmarks or RSS feeds. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they’re busy, suddenly you’re no longer updating and they don’t have time to figure out why.

Whenever possible, you need to help out your readers by redirecting the old feed to the new URL automatically. If you’re hosting everything on your own server, you can redirect via .htaccess fairly easily. (Just do a Google search).

If your old blog is set up on Feedburner, it’s even easier. If you’re not using Feedburner for your RSS subscriptions – you should. It’s powerful and there are many benefits. Go sign up and follow directions to install for your blogging platform.

If you’re already set up in Feedburner, you have a couple of options. Just navigate to your feed’s dashboard and take note of the links right below the title.

Edit Feed Details: Under this setting, you can change your old original feed URL to point to your new original feed URL. I do NOT recommend changing Feed URL, ever – unless you’re just setting up your blog. I think this might unsubscribe everyone and make them resubscribe to the new URL. How easy and non-threatening is this method of redirecting your subscribers to your new feed?
Delete Feed: Ohhhh, kinda scary. Or maybe not. It depends on how attached you are to that feed’s stats. If you take this action, Feedburner will automatically redirect your old feed to a new URL for 30 days. The subscribers are still going to have to sign up under your new feed, but you can warn them it’s coming. I like this option because it puts all stats under one account, but you still run the risk of losing subscribers.

Do you have any easy feed tips for moving sites or platforms?

Daily Window is a photo journal on digitalwoe.com maintained by Lynda Giddens. (That's me!) I'm 31 living in Fort Worth, Texas with my husband, two young sons, mother, two dogs and a cat! I'm participating in Project 365 to learn more about photography and to keep a visual record of our life for my children.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and Flickr.

ACR Presets – Sky Set

Lynda — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:45:33 +0000

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

I’ve been tinkering around with the idea of learning how to create ACR presets. (ACR is Adobe Camera Raw, the program I use to tweak my Raw files before pulling them into Photoshop.) I’ve never really used them before and have always manually tweaked my photos in the program. Lately, if I do a tweak that seems to apply an effect, I’ve been saving it as a preset to test on other photos I want to have that effect. So far, it’s rather trial and error as to whether or not something’s going to work on another photograph.

I think I may have lucked out with a set of Sky presets, called that because it seems to work best on photographs of clouds in the sky. I’m offering them for download because I’d love others’ feedback on whether or not it works.

Download the Sky ACR Preset Pack.
To install the presets, all you have to do is copy the .xmp file into your CameraRaw\Settings folder

There are three presets included in this set. They’re all basically designed to up the exposure and pump up the blacks, to help enrich the color of the sky and create contrast in the clouds.

1. Sky

This is the subtlest of the effects. Here’s an example shot straight out of the camera:

With the Sky preset applied, no other edits in Photoshop:

2. Dramatic Skies

This example is one of my favorites for this preset. It took what appeared to be a completely blurry night cloud shot and made the clouds look like they were moving instead of just being blurry. Straight out of the camera:

With only the preset applied:

3. Extra Dramatic Skies

As the name implies, this is the most dramatic of the presets. I will usually try out all three to see which, if any, look good on my sky shots. Here’s an example SOOC:

And again, with just the preset applied:

If you’re interested in using these presets for ACR, please feel free to download it! I would love to see the results, too! If you have a Flickr account and you use one of my presets, please tag your shot: dwc-acr-sky and it will appear in the thumbnail gallery below! I’d also love it if you left a comment letting me know how the results turned out, even if they weren’t very good.

More Sky Set Examples

This post was submitted to the bloghop, Touch Up Tuesday @ The Bonnie 5. Click on the icon to the left to view all the great entries this week!

Friday Finds Feedback: Warm Fuzzies!

Lynda — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:22:51 +0000

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

This afternoon I received such a nice, thoughtful response from one of the photographers whose work was highlighted in yesterday’s Friday Finds: Macros.

Here’s a closer look at his completely amazing photograph followed by his email (published here with his permission):

I’m fixer11 on flickr, and want to say how much I appreciate the time you put into your group “Friday Finds”. I’m a new member, and was pleasantly surprised to see my “pinky frog” picture in the gallery. I know we all need a bit of kind words, and comments to keep our spirits high, and keep clicking, but I’ve always been hard on myself, so I sometimes need more than the “normal” person. Seeing my little frog next to all those other amazing macros gives me warm fuzzy feelings.

Another thing: It’s sometimes impossible to tell how much work went into someone else’s photo. That tiny frog did not want to pose. I got so tired I had to cage the fellow up and try again the next morning. You get the picture. It was a hassle, but totally worth it thanks to individuals like yourself

It is so nice to receive a comment like this! First, it’s wonderful to be able to brighten someone’s day in any way. Second, it’s amazing to receive this kind of feedback and inspire someone!

I wrote a guest post published over on Skinned Knees today about comitting to and getting through Project 365. I think a lot of these points can go for anyone wanting to improve their photography though. One of my suggestions was to interact with other photographers. Comment on their work. Learn from them! It’s really cool and very few photographers don’t appreciate a well-thought out comment.

I started Friday Finds as a way to help myself develop an editorial eye and highlight others’ photographs. I’m so glad I decided to create a Flickr group for it a couple of weeks ago, because the process has blown me away! I still go through and search for Creative Commons photos highlight, but I then invite them to my group instead of just putting the best in my gallery. I find people appreciate the hand-picked quality of the photos and photographers are making connections with one another through the group. At the end of the week, my job of creating an 18 photo gallery is made much easier due to all the astounding pieces to choose from!

Please let this inspire you to not just sit back and expect the world to come to you. Go out there and spread kindness and inspiration and it will be returned to you tenfold!

Friday Finds: Macros

Lynda — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:55:08 +0000

Reading time: 7 – 11 minutes

This week’s Friday Finds is going to be a little different. Since I’ve been so involved in the Problogger 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge, I haven’t done my usual rounds of photography and photo editing blogs. For those on my Photographer’s Blogs feed, I’m truly sorry I haven’t been visiting and commenting on your sites this week. I am so ashamed to admit that I haven’t even opened up my personal feed reader in days!

So instead, I’ll bring you some great posts of fellow participants. To make this relevant to my blog, I’m pulling only from blogs that fit into the photography niche.

This week’s photography theme was Macros! In collecting the photographs for the Flickr Gallery, I noticed that I love bright, vivid colors in macro photography. I never really put that together before. You don’t see an awful lot of black and white macros and I guess there’s a reason for that.

Photo Credit: Lars P.

At the end of the article you can see more submissions from the Flickr pool and find next week’s theme.

Photo Credit: Adam Baker

Photo Credit: photogirl7

Photo Credit: thefixer

Photo Credit: Reilly Butler

7 Non-Insane Tips to Capture Family Memories Melissa over at Adventuroo has a truly awesome site. If you’re a parent and you love photography, get your tail over there right now! In this article she details some very important points to remember for taking photographs of your family.
Zucchini Pistou I love zucchini! Cheese and pasta are as important to me as water and air. so this recipe looks so delicious, I’m sure we’re going to be making it sooner than later! Bree of Baked Bree is a food blogger who photographs the experience. Move over Pioneer Woman Cooks!
12 Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog – Cai of Cai Graham Photography shares some excellent tips on bringing in some quality readers to your site and fostering more discussions!
How the F*&% do Mom’s do it??? – Kimberly Gauthier discusses the stresses of balancing a boyfriend, multiple animals, a full time job, launching a photography business and blogging.
Found on the Sidewalk Fridays. Ann at Ann Again … and again found this absolutely crazy artwork in the middle of a neighborhood while out on a walk. How cool!
Feline Fridays: Week Six: Flowerpot Kitty. Wow! Bubbleboo at Thought Bubble has an amazing website, but I had no idea until today that she also had a blog hop called Feline Fridays! This blog hop is not limited to photography, but I could use it as an opportunity to have purpose in photographing Leah. She is postponing it for the duration of the 31DBBB challenge, which is just as well since most of us are busy out of our minds!
Ten on Tuesday. Steph at A Grande Life lists 10 random things. It’s a great, fun example of a list post with cute photographs sprinkled throughout.
Shout Outs! Adriel at Mommyhood Memos shares some of her favorite links from the 31DBBB participants! The fact that she includes some ultra kind words about me is only a partial reason to why I’m linking it here.
Family Fun on Budget. Joni of Six Cherries on Top guest blogs at 31DBBB participant Christy of Skinned Knees! Please be sure to check out Christy’s site and subscribe to her RSS feed as I have a guest post scheduled for tomorrow called Project 365: More Than Just Photos.

Photo Credit: Thomas Shahan

More Macro Goodness

Wow! I got SO MANY awesome submissions this week! In addition to the ones in this article and in the Flickr Gallery, here are some more great submissions!

Next Page ›

The Next Theme Is: Purple!

Just because I like the color purple and people don’t usually choose it for color themes. Please enter your submissions to the Flickr pool by next Friday morning and tag the photograph with dwc-purple if you’d like the thumbnail to display on this site. You can see current submissions and read through the qualification guidelines on the Friday Finds page

Link Up

If you’d like to help promote the challenge, feel free to grab my button and link to this page!

Grab the code: (select all and copy)

This button was made by Christy of Skinned Knees. The photograph used is New “Camera”!, used under the Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Share YOUR favorite reads this week and link up to Friday Favorites at Life Without Pink!

31DBBB – Days 3 & 4

Lynda — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:48:27 +0000

Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes

Y’all, I am so busy with TheSITSGirls 31DBBB Challenge that I cannot even take the time to link you to the challenge. If you haven’t heard of it, look through my archives. As mentioned the other day, I was asked to be a Community Lead over at SITS on BlogFrog for this challenge! It has been so much fun, but very demanding of all my free time. In fact, the past two nights I’ve stayed up until 3:30am and that needs to stop. I wouldn’t say I’m overextending myself yet because I love just about every single second of it, but I think I may be overextending my family a bit.

In addition to reading through all the challenge threads at BlogFrog and responding in most of them and of course visiting challenge participants and commenting on their blogs, I volunteered to put together an RSS Feed of all the participants’ blogs. Inspired by today’s challenge to analyze a top blog in your niche, I also put together a survey to get participants’ feedback about which categories they belong to. (Damnit, I’m going to have to use links after all.) The result is my 31DBBB Niches Page.

It is eating up a lot of my time to maintain it, but I hope everyone will get their links in soon and this won’t be a daily thing. I’m quite proud of it and hope to add another page or set of pages with a blogroll of all participants blogs. That’ll be easy, but the queue has to slow down first. Did I mention that the free version of survey monkey only allows 100 responses? So I can’t let it get too full.

This photo was taken by Mark!

A Challenge on Top of a Challenge

There are over 500 bloggers participating in this challenge! And they’re all being led 5 CLs: Erin (the brainchild of this challenge!), Kathy, Rachael (who by the way, has a 10 week old baby and still manages to comment all over the place!), Jen and myself, along with Francesca of SITS. There is so much going on all over the place and these wonderful ladies are not only making it look easy, but fun! I can’t speak for them, though I have a sneaking suspicion they are, but I am definitely having fun.

But as much fun as it is, I’m not doing this all out of the goodness of my heart.

The Traffic!

First, there’s the traffic. My number one means of traffic has always been return visits from commenting on others’ blogs and forums. I’m not talking about stopping by a blog for 15 seconds and quickly typing in “Your site is great! Please visit mine!” I’m talking about actually reading the blogs and taking a few minutes to respond to their submission to the world. Especially when an article has none or very few comments, I cannot resist leaving feedback. I find it very important! We were talking about this on the SITS BlogFrog forums today and Anna pointed out a very relevant article she wrote on the basics of commenting.

The challenge allows me to do the same as usual, but on a much larger scale where everyone is already pumped and ready to interact, comment and subscribe.

I’m interested to see how well the traffic holds up after the challenge. Part of learning to build a better blog is learning how to drive traffic to your site. That’s what yesterday’s task was all about. For example, many of the ladies in the forums had successes with StumbleUpon. I’m familiar with this tool, but I’ve never truly used it before. The traffic didn’t seem to produce any quality results. But when I dug further, I found an interesting experiment performed on StumbleUpon. I’m going to give them a shot now and have my Google Analytics all set up to show me what’s going on with that traffic source.

I photographed these little guys for a photography ecourse assignment this week on composition. This is one of the photos I rejected because the negative space is too distracting.

Future Opportunities

The very moment I was asked to be a leader I squealed and jumped on it. I find I’m naturally pretty good at it, plus I have several years professional leadership experience. I’m also organized and efficient as sin. I knew I’d be able to offer something valuable. All the leaders for this event are astonishing. I definitely plan to put this experience on my resume and hope they do too, if they have any interest in such a profession.

It’d be my dream come true to one day make money from something I’ve done for the past decade in my spare time while lounging around my house. The SITS and Problogger 31DBBB experience are both allowing me to realize the depth of my skillset and it’s pushing me to my absolute limits. (Remember, I have a day job which is fortunately very flexible with its hours. I took today off, as a matter of fact.)

I can’t wait to see where this challenge takes me and make connections with some of the other super talented bloggers participating!

Having put together the RSS feed, I’ve seen content from or been to the site of nearly every single participant! You know, usually every fifth time I hit up a new blog it’s just mega-stupid (not YOURS, of course!) But while pulling up the 31DBBB SITS participants’ blogs, I was continually blown away. Even brand new blogs which had been created for the challenge were more thought out than most of the blogs I see in my web travels on a daily basis.

Regardless if you’re participating in this challenge, I highly recommend taking a gander over on the Niches page and subscribe if any categories interest you! They’re high quality blogs and I know you’ll be as thrilled with them as I am.

I was supposed to write a photography post today, but I never got around to it. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. It’s not like this is a photography blog or anything…

Four Fabulous Free Action Resources

Lynda — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:37:21 +0000

Reading time: 12 – 19 minutes

In this article, I share with you some of my favorite free actions and where to download more that are just as powerful.

1. Pioneer Woman – Photoshop Only

What You Get

Free Actions: 24 actions in two sets of 12.

Download: Pioneer Woman website

More Examples? My Pioneer Woman tag includes entries with at least one photo edited with her actions.

If you’re a blogging photographer and haven’t heard of Ree Drummond, you’ve probably been living under a rock. She’s created two sets of powerful actions which will give you a tremendous amount of versatility in your workload. Doug at Totally Rad Actions helped her create these and it’s evident. Some of her actions effects are indistinguishable from theirs. For example, here’s a photograph with PW’s Heartland action applied to it next to the same photograph using TRA’s Homestead. Taking a look at the layers it creates, they are the same action with different names. I assume TRA gave her permission to do this.

Left: Pioneer Woman’s Heartland. Right: TRA’s Homestead. They are 100% the same.

Workflow Savers

Ree definitely has some actions in her collection which produce cool and funky effects, but the ones I go back to over and over again are the ones that save some time in my workflow:

Quick Edge Burn – This adds a quick vignetting effect. I highly recommend adjusting the opacity and flow on the layer created to get best results.
Warmer – I run this one a lot. It simply adds a layer with a strong warm hue to it. If I find my photograph is a little on the cool side, I can use this and adjust the opacity until I’m happy. I’m no good at color correction, so any way to make it easy is great for me!
Cooler – This does the opposite of Warmer. I don’t run it as much, but I’m guessing that’s because my camera shoots on the cool side. (One day I’ll figure out white balance well enough to set my own.)
Sharpen THIS – Perfect if you want to selectively sharpen a portion of your photograph.

Featured Action: PW’s B&W

This action looks beautiful on almost every portrait I’ve ever applied it to and the layers allow you to customize the results to suit your photo. Here’s the photo above with the PW’s B&W applied:

2. CoffeeShop – Photoshop and Elements

What You Get

Free Actions: Over 70, individually packaged.

Download: CoffeeShop website

More Examples? My CoffeeShop tag includes entries with at least one photo edited with her actions.

If you’re on a tight budget, but love actions, you must check out Rita’s site. She has so much more to offer than actions! Her actions are just as versatile as the pay actions and can do many of the same things. I’ve seen “Make-Over” action sets sometimes as expensive as $100! They correct skin tones, remove color casts, smooth skin, create a glamorous look, brighten and sharpen eyes, whiten teeth and the like. Well, Rita offers five free retouching actions such as Perfect Portrait and Baby PowderRoom. With these free and professional-grade tools, I’m not sure I could ever be convinced to buy a Make-Over action pack.

One of the few downsides to her actions is that you have to download and load them all individually. This can be a huge pain, but it only takes about two hours to download and organize ALL of her actions. I wrote about my experience and method I used to organize her actions in a previous CoffeeShop review. If you download the actions as you need or want them, it’s a lot easier to organize as you go.

Featured Action: Baby PowderRoom

I use this action all the time. I prefer it to Perfect Portrait because out of the box, it doesn’t make any changes to my photo. Perfect Portrait does a color pop and vignetting that I typically don’t care for, though both those layers can be hidden.

Hover over the image above to see the photograph before editing with this action!

Baby PowderRoom includes a layer for Red Skin Repair, Smooth Skin, Lighten Skin, Skin Glow, Eye Define and Bright Eyes (which I also use to whiten teeth if needed). To use, simply paint the effect onto the layer mask using a soft white brush. I use about 70% opacity for the smooth skin and around 20-30% for the rest. I also use the Eye Define layer to paint over lips or other details I want sharpened. The Red Skin Repair layer works a little differently, but removes blemishes and color casts well! For full instructions on how to use this action and to download it, check out Rita’s Baby PowderRoom page.

3. Paint the Moon – Photoshop and Elements

What You Get

Free Actions: 12 actions in three sets, plus 3 helper actions.

Download: Paint the Moon’s First Class Freebies

More Examples? My Paint the Moon tag includes entries with at least one photo edited with her actions.

Annie primarily sells actions, but she has some First Class Freebies available on her site as well. The title is true to its name. Her actions are next on my wish list! One thing I love about good Photoshop actions is having full control over the layers to customize the results. Unlike most other action makers, Annie pays close attention to her layer names and this makes the process of customization even easier!

I have three freebie sets: Refresh, Sweet Treats and Bee’s Knees. Unfortunately Bee’s Knees is off the shelf for the moment, but Annie’s reassured me that she will be rotating through freebies and there will always be at least two sets available.

Featured Action: Sugar Cookies

This is one of my favorites and adds a warm, milky antique look to the photograph. Here, I love how much it brings out the brownness in Elias’ eyes and detail in his hair!

Hover over the image above to see the photograph before editing with this action!

4. My Four Hens – Photoshop and Elements

What You Get

Free Actions: 17 actions in four sets.

Download: My Four Hens Freebies Page 1 | Page 2

More Examples? My M4H tag includes entries with at least one photo edited with her actions.

I just found Sarah’s site recently through Clickin Moms. Like Annie, she’s a photographer who sells actions on her site. I am amazed at the amount of high quality Freebies she has to offer! A lot of her actions produce a creamy, antique or vintage hazy look and are perfect to apply to your precious memories. I tried out all of her actions on one of my flower photos and they all looked great! Here are a few examples:

Sarah’s written a wonderful inspirational guide to using her actions. They’re incredibly powerful! In addition to suggesting that you tweak the layers, she also gives an awesome tip and example of using color balance adjustment layers to make the most out of her actions! The article is a must read even if you don’t have any of her stuff since the principles can be applied to any action.

Featured Action: Pretty Hazy

Many of my very favorite actions are ones where you press the button, all this stuff happens and when it’s done, your photograph looks exactly the same. That may sound nutty, but usually there’s a plethora of layers for me to activate and play with as I please. That’s the case for CoffeeShop’s Baby PowderRoom and it’s also the same for M4H’s Pretty Hazy. This action gives you the power to apply a hazy vintage look to polish your finished photograph. It creates a group of over 10 different layers which are not active by default. You can enable any that you want, in any combination, set to any opacity level to customize the results exactly to your liking!

Yes, this action is new to me, but we’re going to get along just fine!

Here are the layers and opacities I used for the example below: Fresh Haze: 86%; Grey Haze: 85%; Pumpkin Haze: 55%; Dew Drop Haze: 100%.

Hover over the image above to see the photograph before editing with this action!

5. Bonus Resource! MCP Actions – Photoshop and Elements

Okay, so I felt bad leaving you with only four free resources. I’ve purchased several actions at MCP Actions, however some of Jodi’s most useful stuff is free! I didn’t want to truly highlight her as a free resource because her free offerings aren’t as plentiful or versatile as Paint the Moon or My Four Hens. For free though, these actions can’t be beat!

Texture Applicator – As you know, I love textures. They’re easy enough to apply manually but I love this action because it names the layer with the texture’s file name. This walks you through changing the layer’s blending mode, but I found that very annoying. I edited the action so it would apply the texture file and stop after setting the blending mode to Overlay at 45%. From there I tweak manually.
High Definition Sharpening – This also includes a web resizing/sharpening action which is great. I use one or the other for almost all my photos even though I have about a million other MCP actions to sharpen that I paid for.
Touch of Light / Touch of Darkness – A great tool to lighten or darken certain areas of your photograph (also known as dodging and burning) without altering the background layer (the actual photograph itself).
Burnt Edges Vignetting – I haven’t tried this one myself, but it looks like it’s a good alternative for Pioneer Woman’s Quick Edge Burn.

The Take-Away and a Challenge!

I love playing in Photoshop and I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve spent up to an hour editing one photograph by applying different actions to it and tweaking them to see what would happen. It is so easy to get carried away or overdo the effect. When editing with actions, it’s good to keep two things in mind:

Less is more. Is your image too saturated? Too much vignetting? Too bright? Try using less of an effect to deliver more of a punch.
Is the photograph better off with the action applied? I can’t tell you how much I sit there toggling the eyeball, turning the layer off and on to see if the adjustments made truly enhance the photograph. Turning layers on and off (or turning them up to 100% and off) is also a great way to help you figure out exactly what that layer is doing.

Now, I want to see what you can do with free actions! What are your favorite free resources or actions? Please write or link to a blog post where you’re discussing your favorites including before and afters and add your link below!

Day #1: Step Aboard My Elevator.

Lynda — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:17:04 +0000

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

For weeks I’ve been searching for an elevator to photograph specifically for this entry!

On Day #1 of 31 Days to a Better Blog, Darren of ProBlogger.net asks us to write an elevator pitch: a short introduction that explains who you are and your goal in blogging. I’ve done this in my professional life as it was needed to explain a job title that was exclusive to our company. It would have been a short and awkward conversation when someone asked me what I did for a living if I answered only giving my title.

The title of your blog can be seen the same way. Some blog titles are very descriptive and you can tell what they’re about without follow-up. Most of the time our blog titles are personal to us and are not enough alone to make people interested in visiting your site.

A tagline is a very short elevator pitch. This should be succinct, general and interesting. Currently, my tagline is, “A photographic record of my ordinary life.” I think it’s fine. It kind of describes what I’m doing here, but it practically screams, “I’m boring!” It doesn’t offer anything to the reader whatsoever except the promise of mundane pictures. And I kind of hope I offer just a tad bit more than that.

After reading through today’s task, I’ve decided that starting tomorrow I will implement a new tagline: “The chronicles of a not-so-secret love affair between a girl and her camera.”

The camera is my mistress, it’s totally true. Aside from my husband and children, I spend most of time with my camera, editing photographs and writing about it all. Sometimes I think I spend too much time on these things and I feel guilty.

I’m getting ahead of myself though since my task today is to create an elevator pitch, not just a tag-line. This is the elevator pitch I’ve been using everywhere, including my own site:

OLD:
Lynda Giddens is a 31 year old work-at-home wife and mother of two young boys. She recently moved to her husband’s home state of Texas. In 2010, she is participating in Project 365 where her goal is to take and post a photograph daily.

This website chronicles her life and her journey in learning more about photography and photo editing.

I like the first sentence and the fact that it calls out I’m participating in Project 365. The rest of it? Not so much after reading today’s task. I want my elevator pitch to introduce me for sure, but it should also indicate what my blog is offering. What is it offering? I hope it offers tips and advice, both on phtoography and photoshop. As I learn how to create them and figure out what works, I would love to offer textures and overlays to be used in photo editing.

Darren gives a lot of tips in the workbook about composing a great elevator pitch. I tried to incorporate most of his advice into my new tag line and pitch, but it’s hard to pack so much into such a little introduction! Here’s my newly constructed about blurb:

NEW:
Lynda Giddens is an amateur writer and photographer living in Fort Worth, TX with her husband and two young sons. In 2010 she is participating in Project 365 while chronicling her adventures learning photography and photo-editing.

Her website is a personal photographic scrapbook which also features a variety of photography tips along with easy to follow editing tutorials.

Learn along with her and be inspired to start or continue your own creative path.

Likewise, tomorrow I will be implementing the new blurb on my index page and change it over on any social media sites it might be added to.

Even though I already had a tagline and elevator pitch for my blog, the first of 31 Days to Build a Better blog definitely helped me make improvements and get even more excited for the next few weeks to come.

One of the most exciting aspects of going through Darren’s workbook is doing it in this group setting. You can still purchase the workbook OR just follow along with all the SITS Problogger Challenge participants and be inspired to improve your blog. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun! I plan to visit as many participants as possible and comment. Please leave me a note if you want to nudge me to get to you first.

Problogger’s 7 Link Challenge

Problogger Site Tracking Introduction

Lynda — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:16:20 +0000

Reading time: 7 – 11 minutes

For the SITSGirls Problogger 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Summer Challenge, prompted by Jennifer of She’s a Fat Chick who provided a wonderful and simple tool in the Stat Tracker Spreadsheet, I’m going to be keeping my site stats and I will update them here weekly so you can follow along. I’ve started a discussion on SITS also, so if you want to come and share, please visit the Site Tracking to Date thread! For those who are new to site statistics, I am also including a brief explanation of what each line on my spreadsheet is tracking exactly!

I’m using Google Documents instead of Excel to keep track of my stats, so I can access them anywhere and anytime!

I’m actually quite pleased with my stats for this blog being actively worked on for less than a full quarter!

Google Analytics Stats

First, you will want to track your weekly stats, not your total stats. To calculate the stats just for that week, there is a date range in the upper right hand corner of the Dashboard (the first page you’re taken to when viewing the report for your site). Just select the start and ending date. I used 07/09 – 07/16.

The very first sub-section is Site Usage and it will give you most of the information you need for this tracking. Some of the explanations used in this article are taken from Google’s help documents. For a comprehensive explanation of all major Google stats, check out their Metrics Definitions

Visits is the number of times someone accessed your site that week.
Absolute Unique Visits is not in this graph, however if you click on Visitors on the lefthand menu, you’re presented a graph which shows you this statistic. Unique Visits represents the number of unduplicated (counted only once) visitors to your website over the course of a specified time period. A Unique Visitor is determined using cookies.
Pageviews are instances of a page being loaded by a browser. Google Analytics logs a pageview each time the tracking code is executed.
Average Pageviews is the number of page clicks by an average visitor to your site. The higher the number, the better!
Time on Site is also calculated using cookies and tracks exactly that. The total amount of time an average visitor spends on your site before leaving.
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors and your average pageviews will be lower.
New Visits is the number of new visits by people who have never been to the site before. This doesn’t really take into account the same person using multiple machines or devices to access your site, but it’s fairly accurate.

Site Tools Stats

This article covers how to track your RSS feeds for Feedburner subscribers. If you don’t have an account, I highly recommend one since they provide so many feed tools for free! To get to your Feed Stats, click on Subscribers in the Feed Stats menu on the left.

Note: There are other sites like feedburner too, but if you don’t want to use them and your provider doesn’t supply statistics to you, here’s a great tutorial on Using Google Analytics to Track Feed Subscribers. If you have any other resources for tracking RSS feeds, please let me know and I’ll add them here and credit you!

RSS Subscribers is the number of people pulling in your RSS feed to their feed reader of choice.
Email Subscribers can be found toward the middle of this page. This might not be relevant if you haven’t set up email subscription capabilities. To set up email subscription you can click on the Publicize tab and there is an option on the left hand side for Email Subscriptions. There will be code there you can use on your site as well. I like offering people choices, so why not?
Website Grade can be found by going to the Website Grader site and putting in your URL. I highly recommend taking the time to read through the report provided. It fully explains how each statistic is calculated and what your score means. It’s a great tool to figure out what you can do to improve your blog! For an example report, you can see mine. The number represents the percentage of sites not as good as yours according to their own algorithm.
Blog Grade is another metric derived from the website grader site. It is based on a measurement of the traffic levels to your blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.
Alexa Rank is your traffic rank from Alexa.com. Simply plug in your URL and you’re presented with your profile. Here’s mine as an example. The number represents how many sites are better than yours.

Social Media Stats

These are mostly self-explanatory, but for some I’ll go into why I’m keeping track of them. You probably won’t want to keep track of all these yourself!

Twitter Followers are the number of people who follow you Twitter feed.
Twitter Grade is derived from the Twitter Grader. It uses a unique algorithm to determine how powerful your profile is. Just plug in your twitter username and it spits out its statistics. Here’s a detailed explanation of how it works, but the short of it is that it’s based on your twitter followers, their twitter grades, how often you update, your follower to following ratio (I try to keep less following than followers), and the number of times people are responding and RTing you among other things.
Facebook Fans is the number of fans for your Facebook page. It’s super easy to set one up if you don’t have one. From any page on Facebook (try mine after “Liking” it!), just scroll down the left hand side until you see “Create a Page for My Business”. Don’t worry if you’re not a business! You’ll be guided through the setup process. When it comes to the type of business, select website.
Flickr Contacts – Since I’m a photography blogger and I have a lot of weekly interaction on Flickr due to my Friday Finds Weekly Challenge I want to see how my contacts increase throughout this challenge.
Friday Finds Group is for my group on Flickr. I recently opened submission for Friday Finds photographs to all, so I want to see how the membership of this group grows in the next month.

This has nothing to do with this entry, but I’m a photography blog, remember?

How About You?

Are you keeping track of your stats for this challenge? What unique stats are you tracking and what do you hope they’ll reveal for you by the end of the challenge? Do you have any goals for where you’d like to see your numbers by the end of the 31 days?

Please feel free to respond if you have any questions!

Problogger’s 7 Link Challenge

Lynda — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 22:27:02 +0000

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

To prepare for the SITS Problogger 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge, I’ve decided to take Darren’s 7 Link Challenge which points you through various posts in my archives. This is a fun exercise I recommend everyone take a shot at! If you complete it, make sure to link up to the thread on SITS at BlogFrog!

Without further adieu, here’s my list of seven!

Your first post: That’s kind of hard to answer since I use this site to chronicle my experience with Project 365, yet I didn’t launch it on January 1. My first entry on this site is, Elias With a Toothpick, which is my first Project 365 entry for 2010! I wasn’t happy with the shot when I posted it, but I’ve come to love it.
A post you enjoyed writing the most: That’s hard to answer since I truly love writing most of my posts! I really enjoyed writing, History Palette Helps With Workflow because it was my first tutorial and I love that shot of Thomas the Train.
A post which had a great discussion: Sadly, I haven’t had a lot of discussions on my site yet, but I hope to! On Water Table, Settings Snafu and Spot Metering there was a nice little conversation about matrix and spot metering.
A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written: So this isn’t a photography related blog or post, but I love Copyblogger’s Improve Your Writing Overnight With The Rule of 24: Guaranteed. Waiting 24 hours or more and doing multiple edits has always been one of my techniques. Many times I do get excited and post immediately after completing an article, but believe it or not, I actually plan a lot of what I write! I love the style of this article and how easy it is to read and apply the advice. I want my posts to be exactly that.
Your most helpful post: I’m surprised I got so much positive feedback from my cropping advice in the Touch-Up Tuesday: Crop’s Up post! It’s nice to know I’m not alone in cropping willy-nilly though!
A post with a title that you are proud of Maybe the post is just too personal, but I like the title, My Broken Heart Can’t Shoot, which details how hard it was for me to pick up a camera when Mark was away for three weeks.
A post that you wish more people had read: I was expecting my Toy Story 3 Review to get more of a response! I guess I wasn’t timely enough.

I’ve been blogging for over a decade, but this blog is still in its infancy. I can’t wait to revisit this exercise in a half a year or more.

Y’all, I am SO excited about the Problogger challenge coming up. There is still time to join in! You don’t need the book to do the challenge, even Darren says that. (It’s pretty much all on the Problogger site.) If you don’t have a copy of the book and want one to participate, Pepper of Pepper Scraps is holding a contest right now to give away one copy of the book!

This is going to be great fun, so if you’ve been meaning to improve your blog, stop making excuses and come along for the ride!

Friday Finds: Camera Phone Shots

Lynda — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:28:25 +0000

Reading time: 8 – 14 minutes

Welcome to another week of Friday Finds! I am glad that I opened up this challenge to participants because I had so much fun looking through your submissions! If I didn’t pick your photograph this week, it might be because of your creative commons license or you might not allow others to share your work. Check the rules for more information.

This week’s theme was: Camera Phone Shots, proving that it’s not your equipment, it’s YOU who takes the photograph. Check Flickr for the entire gallery of camera phone shot picks this week!

Photo Credit: Michael.Sutton

At the end of the article you can see more submissions from the Flickr pool and find next week’s theme.

Photo Credit: Jesse757

Photo Credit: tsurujun

Photo Credit: craigemorsels

Photo Credit: *Jeffrey*

Photo Credit: swanksalot

Photo Credit: mamaloco

Photography

The Importance of a Lens Hood – I’ve been thinking that my next accessory purchase should be a lens hood and this article put a nail in the coffin!
How to Take a Kick-Butt Silhouette – Some great tips and beautiful pictures to go along with them!
Teaching Photography to Beginners – This is a great article if you like helping others.
The Best of the Worst: Internet Photography – This article pissed me off a bit. Maybe it’s because so many of my own shots are completely cliche or maybe it’s because I posted my own blurry firework shot just because that’s all we got and I wanted to remember the night. Can’t people have fun and do what they want with their own photography? Some photographers have an air of smugness about them. It’s one thing to post a photo and then what could have been better about it, but he’s using someone’s work in an article and directly scolding them for ever publishing it to the internet in the first place. Then at the end, he’s all, “have fun!” Yeah, so people like you can rip us apart.
Update 7/22/10 – My Broken Link detector tells me Fuel Your Photography pulled this article. I searched and couldn’t find it. Interesting.
5 Foolproof Tips for Photographing Kids – I already practice all of these except the first since I only ever shoot my own kids and I don’t need to win them over. I especially like the tip of forgetting the look-straight-at-the-camera-and-smile poses. Capturing a kid’s true expression is priceless!
How to Shoot Light Trails – This is a really cool technique to show movement at night. Tips for setting up the shots and of course, gorgeous examples!
Texture Photography Essentials and Tips – This articles goes over three types of texture in photography used to enhance details, drama or information.

Professional Photography

12 Excuses for Shooting Photos for Free — and Why They’re Bogus – I’m not a professional photographer of course, but the business does interest me in general. I think this is a great article to help you NOT offer your services for free. Sometimes it’s expected and sometimes it’s you giving away the farm, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Help for Photographers to Stand Out – What will separate you from your competition?

Photo Editing

Getting the Most out of Your M4H Actions – This article was written specifically to highlight My 4 Hens wonderful actions, however the concept is easily applied to all actions and ties in nicely with my recommendation yesterday not to accept out of the box results.
Photoshop: Smooth Skin Tutorial – Quick video to show you how to easily smooth out skin in photoshop!
Non-Destructive Dodging and Burning – For the love of all that is holy, don’t dodge and burn directly on your background layer!
Contest: Win Photoshop CS5 and MCP Photoshop Actions – There are still a couple of days to enter Jodi’s contest to win Photoshop CS5 or MCP Gift Cards!
How to Prevent and Edit Out Reflections on Glasses – Some quick tips for photographing subjects wearing glasses and a quick Photoshop tutorial on using the healing brush tool!

Just Fun

Flickr’s New Photo Page: 5 Great Things You’d Notice & Love – I love Flickr and have been using the new photo page for several weeks now. I still don’t like how “Older” and “Newer” directions are switched around and I don’t really care to see the map of where the photo was taken, but other than that I like it!

Photo Credit: Roman Keller

Video of the Week

There are tons of great videos on YouTube which teach photography and photo editing. I’m going to start featuring one video here each week!

This tutorial discusses the importance of light and three different kinds of light that will effect your photography: direct, diffused and reflected.

More Camera Phone Goodness

Thanks again to everyone who submitted a photograph to the Flickr pool this week! Here are some more great submissions:

Next Page ›

The Next Theme Is: Macros!

In honor of me getting my cool new close-up filters I want to see what you can do with macro photography! Please enter your submissions to the Flickr pool by next Friday morning and tag the photograph with dwc-macro if you’d like the thumbnail to display on this site. You can see current submissions and read through the qualification guidelines on the Friday Finds page

Link Up

If you’d like to help promote the challenge, feel free to grab my button and link to this page!

Grab the code: (select all and copy)

This button was made by Christy of Skinned Knees. The photograph used is New “Camera”!, used under the Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Share YOUR favorite reads this week and link up to Friday Favorites at Life Without Pink!