Google Analytics ROCKS

I am not a computer whiz, by any stretch of the imagination.  Just managing to cope with the little bit of HTML work I have to do to maintain the design of this blog is a huge challenge for me.  So when I discover the power of technology, sometimes it impresses the socks off me.  I just discovered the joys of Google Analytics.

How it started: a little while ago, I started taking photos at our friend M's baseball league games, just for the fun of it.  Once I'd taken a game's worth of photos, it dawned on me that I would like to be able to share them with M and his team, so I started hunting around for a good on-line photo sharing program.  I'm a big fan of Google, which is why I use Google's Blogspot as the host for this blog, and I also use it for gmail.  Thus, I decided to try the free Google photo sharing and editing program, Picasa. 

It was a big ol' hit.  Easy to use and free.  What more could I ask for?  By the way, if your blog is hosted on blogspot, you may already have a Picasa account and not realize it.  That's where my blog photos were getting stored.  Who knew?

So, because I'm me, I started poking around with all the settings on Picasa and stumbled upon something called Google Analytics.  It's a program that allows you to track hits to your web site.  I'd already installed a basic program for that for this blog, but found it remarkably unuseful.  Could Analytics do more?

Ooooh yeah, baby.  It does a whole lot more.

I figured out how to install it for my Picasa photo albums, and have been using it there for weeks.  But the viewers of my photo albums are just friends and family, so it wasn't telling me anything exciting.  It took me several more weeks to figure out how to install the HTML code on this blog's template - not through any fault of Google's instructions, but through my own sheer ineptitude. 

But I figured it out.  And on my first day of gathering information about visitors to this blog, I learned I had 47 visitors, who hailed from:

Canada
Italy (although that one sort of doesn't count since it's my mother)
Latvia (this is my favorite)
California
Texas
Louisiana
Illinois
Indiana
Pennylvania
New Jersey
Connecticut
Maine
And lots of different places in New York.

I am certain I haven't yet understood the full power of Analytics.  My favorite feature, though, is the one that shows you maps of where all your visitors visited from.  Take this example of those maps, showing my visitors from within New York State:

Pretty wicked, huh?  If you move the mouse over those dots, it tells you what the town is.  (For my regular NY readers, can you find yourself on there?)  It also allows me to track how visitors find my site, how long they're on my site, and a whole lot more.

I'm guessing some of my readers long ago discovered the fun of Analytics, but for those of you who haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend it.  What a fun way to see who's reading what you post!!!

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LED Frisbee

I mentioned that I played frisbee at night at last weekend's barbecue, with a frisbee that has 4 LED lights spaced around its perimeter.  It never occurred to me to try to photograph such a thing, but my friend M (a fellow photographer mentioned in various previous posts) had the inspiration to try.  I thought these turned out supremely cool, although M expressed dissatisfaction with them.  He acknowledged that "artists are always their own worst critics", which I grant him certainly holds true for me.  Regardless, he generously gave me permission to post them.

That faint gray blob on the right hand side is me, probably trying to decide if I want to dive for it or let it hit me in the shins:

I think this one looks like a UFO.  Who knew that's how a frisbee moves through the air?

I believe this is me trying to snag it on my finger tips, just before I dropped it over the fence behind me:

This one must be a shot of someone else's toss - that pattern is far too neat for any of my throws:

And here I am, tossing it:

These served as a reminder to me to keep thinking of unexpected things to photograph.  You just never know what will turn out to be an interesting photo.

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Industry Meets Nature

In my final series of photos from our Adirondack photography trip, industrial images sort of meld with nature. Kind a perfect summary of my day, I guess.  We drove down a dead end road that terminated with this bridge, which is now closed to vehicular traffic.  It turned out to be a great vantage point for seeing the intense fall foliage underneath the lowering gray skies.  It also turned out to be a favorite hangout for a lot of gnarly, industrious spiders.

This wheel barrow was found somewhere along the dead end road, right near the lovely red ivy.  I thought they were painfully picturesque.

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Pipeline Shapes

This is a continuation of my Adirondack Industrial photos.  While looking for some waterfalls (which we never did find, come to think of it), we turned down a side road and ran into this enormous pipeline.  D thought it was transporting water from a reservoir for power generation, and although he told me the reservoir, I can't remember the name.  I just thought it was incredibly cool... and incredibly enormous.  Here are my favorite shots of it.

First, for scale, here's a picture my husband took of me on top of it.  I'm relatively certain I shouldn't have been up there, but it was all for the sake of art...  When on top of it like that, I could feel the vibrations of the water rushing through the line.

Here it is, stretching into the trees.  It reminds me of a giant blue caterpillar:

I love all the details of the rivets and rust.

One lowly bee, perhaps trying to warm herself in the weak sun?

It looked to us like this old wooden water tower was at the end of the line, but how it's used is a bit of a mystery.  I could make several guesses, but have no real information to go off.  Anyone know the history of this pipeline?  This is my husband's shot of the tower, as it came out better than any I took of it.  I can't imagine there are too many wooden water towers still in use.

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