Google Analytics is a must if you run a website, since it shows how many people are visiting your site, where from, and how they got there. One of the interesting exercises to do is to check up on how all those link exchanges or forums are doing for driving traffic to your site. For my site, I have listings on Artspan, Top of Blogs, Blog Catalog, Top Pencil Artist, Colored Pencil Central and the CPSA website. I occasionally post to the art forum Scribbletalk, and to Prismacolor’s gallery forum, and also have a link to my website from my Facebook page. So how’s all this stuff doing? Here’s the current breakdown from most referring traffic to least:

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After about a week, I’ve got my website restored to roughly what it was before my “err, didn’t mean to delete that” incident.  I took the opportunity to add a few improvements.  You’ll notice some visual tweaks such as frames around images, and a snazzy tag cloud at the bottom (click a keyword to see all related posts – for instance, all artwork done on blue colourfix paper).  Now that it’s been a week since the latest WordPress upgrade, programmers have also released updates for many of the broken features (“plugins”).  In particular, one plugin allows me to embed Flickr hosted images into any post or page as a Flash gallery.  If you look at my header navigation menu, you’ll see ‘Photography’ and ‘Paper’ links – click one to see an example. A subtle implication of this is that many of my images are now hosted on Flickr – so if I accidently delete a folder in my website, they still exist.

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After some head scratching, my fears were confirmed as I realized my deleting frenzy during my WordPress reinstall resulted in deleting a folder called ‘wp-content’.  As the name might suggest, it contained the content of my site (doh!)…..in particular it happened to contain an ‘uploads’ folder which was home to everything I’ve ever loaded onto my website.  So, in the true spirit of computers, the void which all of my images disappeared into was actually triggered by me unknowingly hitting the delete key.  It reminds me of the old “To err is human.  To really mess up requires a computer.”

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This weekend I felt a tinge of nervousness when I saw that the software I use to publish this art blog (WordPress) offered a version upgrade to 2.5. Nearly every previous version upgrade has resulted in disabling of my website for several days – mostly due to incompatibility with many of the plugins I use (bits of programming that add features to the site). This time the upgrade started a chain reaction of little tweaks to get used to the new version. The last of which, a little plugin that would let me work on the look of the website without taking the many pages offline, quietly crippled the site, even after I disabled and removed the offending plugin. After reinstalling many files from backup, the site is up and running – sort of. You’ll notice many images have disappeared throughout the pages. So, bear with me for a while until I figure out how to get them back, or, worst case, upload them all again.

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