Tags!

Since I turned Sodapop.nu into a Wordpress site, I've internally (i.e. for myself only) used post tags ("labels" in Blogger-speak) to see if I liked them, needed them, or wanted to include them for presentational purposes. I figured out pretty early on that I did, but was so lazy that only JUST NOW have I sorted through them and added functionality for them to my current theme. Sooo.... yay? For lateness? Anyone?

I'm also working on a revamp of the current Sodapop.nu theme, using similar colors, fonts, and ideas but making it a little more CSS3 pretty (since right now it's kind of... you know, just there). I'd like to get that done this week, but technically I should probably be doing something "productive" i.e. school-related with my time (although I managed to convince myself that revamping Sodapop.nu constituted schoolwork in that I was trying out new coding things, so this isn't as hopeless as it sounds!).

Happy Thanksgiving! Hooray for sitting around a table with my family but not eating.... duck. WTF.

Today's troubleshooting

.....

WTH internet?

I don't have time to dive into this display mess at the moment, but I WILL.

Indexing issues

Ok.... Here's a problem, or at least what I see as a problem/conundrum/irritation.. whathaveyou, that some people may not agree with. And whether or not they do is something I'm actually highly curious to know.

I just modified my meta tags on the Sodapop.nu Wordpress category and single page templates, to tell search engines NOT to index ANY of my art/photography (whether it's my large-sized images or their lower-res. thumbnail counterparts), and not to index ANY of my single pages about individual works.

But, why?! you may ask. Why would want to reduce the number of visitors you might get?! And the reason why I'm able to give up these so-called visits comes down to a number of things.

When I compose these pages, I'm not doing so to be SEO-savvy. I'm organizing my art in a manner that I feel would be conducive to showing it to people for the first time (because that's what this website is now for... I don't have the luxury of gallery shows - this is what I do instead. This is my medium of publication. And that's how I'm using it. ANYWAY). I decide on a title for my photo series (or artwork) and that title becomes the page header (because it's the title of the series) and the alt tag for each image (again... because it's the title of the series!) out of a concern for consistency. Is this intended to tell a search engine anything? NO. It's intended to communicate something about why a human being should give a crap about these pictures. But it's just not for a search engine.

Might this be an issue on my part? Should I be trying to tell a search engine something instead? Am I just dumb? I don't think so - but give me feedback, if you feel the need. I really do want to know.

Anyway, because I'm not writing these pages with the intention of getting my images on a search engine, if someone found them that way, I'd feel embarassed. And if I was in the visitor's shoes, I might even get pissed. Because this sort of crap happens to me a lot - I'm searching for something with Google and someone's irrelevantly blogged BULLSHIT appears. Or I'm searching for some image and someone's completely UNRELATED image keeps showing up. This is something that annoys the living hell out of me.

Here's an imaginary scenario for which this might happen to a particular accidental, erroneous, search engine-promoted visitor. The content, however, is not imaginary. I have a photo series I published in August called The sun also rises. Does this have anything to do with.... Say... a book cover for the novel called The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway? Or an illustration based on the novel? Or really anything to do with the novel? Not really. It's named after some graffiti featured in one of the photos (and because it suits the message I'm trying to convey by selecting to record and share these images of this graffiti in the first place). So if I'm a hypothetical visitor trying to find something to do with the novel on Google image search and these images pop up because all of the alt tags contain 'The sun also rises' and the page title is 'The sun also rises,' I'm going to be pissed because they have nothing directly to do with that. And so I don't care.

So "should" I actually be structuring my pages differently because of how search engines work? I don't really want to, because this is my publication. How I publish the art for humans to consider matters more to me. The impact it's going to make on a person matters a whole lot more to me. I want people to see what I do... But not on accident when they're looking for something else. If they're not going to care, then they're not going to care, so why waste their time? These single and category pages exist solely to let people view photos or artwork of mine when people WANT to be doing that. They're not named to help people find the photos on a search engine because the photos aren't meant to be informational and indexed like information. And my ideal viewer is one who is searching for fine art photography for the hell of just looking at fine art photography - not because they're trying to see a place, not because they want it for documentation purposes, not because they want to see an illustration of Lady Brett Ashley, but because they want to look at a collection of work by one photographer and for my site that would happen to be me. With my weird titles that are only intended to give meaning to the work... Not to help people find an information-rich source on Google, because there's no relevant information present if they're not looking to sit around and stare at something for an hour.

So... is this too much to ask? Am I just being snooty? Should I break down and share? Should I break down and fix the way I code to cater to a bunch of search engine crawlers? Does this even make sense?

.... Honestly, meta tags just made more sense to me back in the days when the author's provided information was still weighed heavily in the indexing of pages. So the way I lay out my alt tags, headers, links and lists wouldn't matter as much as me saying HEY GOOGLE, THIS IS FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY WITH ODDLY NAMED STUFF, DON'T TRY TO PRESENT IT AS ANYTHING ELSE, BECAUSE THAT ISN'T WHAT IT IS AND IF I WAS TRYING TO FIND THAT, I'D BE PISSED IF I FOUND THIS. K THANKS A BUNCH.

Sigh.

Hooray-a new layout at Sodapop.nu!

I managed to finally create one that I liked (using my orange, aqua, and off-neutral colors that I've now been using for the past year), plan it, code it, theme-it for Wordpress, and get it fixed up and running this weekend.

I'm thinking it's a lot more user friendly, so my next goal is.... DUN DUN DUN... sharing this site with people I know. I've had some sort of xenophobia/people-I-know-knowing-this-is-mine fear since I've owned this domain, I think it orginally stemmed from the fact that I never wanted to discuss with people that wouldn't get it that I used to make websites for characters that I liked. I figure since that's not even my main focus anymore, I should kind of... uhh.... get over it. So when I'm sitting in my HTML class and I get asked to share some of my sites that I say I make, I don't have to sit there and look dumb and shrug anymore. YAY.

I've been posting photographs like a madwoman

One thing I'm trying to be very particular about right now is titles. This set of photos, for instance, is basically all in the title. (Sort of.)

I'm wondering if it's too much to ask that in the span of a few days I've deliberately referenced Greek mythology as well as obscure Playstation mythos that borrows from Greek mythology - but isn't. ;) Probably.

I'm in the process of rewriting some of the generalized content around Sodapop.nu. I think I'm also about to shift around everything in some new way because right now I dislike how not everything matches (all the category pages are different, static pages themselves look different... annoying!).

And I found out the other day that my nifty little navigation bar on the index page doesn't work so great in resolutions lower than a certain number of pixels (like on my vertically-turned iPhone T_T) because that area is fixed-positioned in the browser window and won't scroll if it all won't fit. It just cuts it off and the links disappear! Poo. Maybe I can give it a fixed width and see if it works? ... Anyway, I might have to rethink it anyway if I'm changing other stuff around.

So part of this is just me trying to make the site more friendly, and part of it is also that there's always been this divide between the people who I can and "can't" share this site with. I'm really tired of that. My number one goal is to get this site posted on my personal Facebook. (Unless I come up with some horrifying reason why I shouldn't do that, which always seems to happen.)(Fingers crossed!)

This is really for you if you're a software developer

I don't know what it is about my mom and my boyfriend, but somehow whenever I try using their computers it always seems some new program has installed itself on their machines, changed their default search pages, and caused other unwanted chaos with their web browsers. What do you two do? It's a hostile world. Be careful what you look at and click on!

Anyway, the real point of this post was that I wanted to complain about the way Firefox has it's 'change your home page' action set up. I just tried to recover my boyfriend's computer from the clutches of some auto-installing program and toolbar ad-on that hijacked his default homepage, and had to look up on Google how to manually change the homepage because I couldn't figure it out and got annoyed. And I consider myself a fast learner and can usually intuitively figure things like this out. I also basically breathe this "web stuff" because I'm a student and will eventually be a professional web designer/developer. So,

DEAR MOZILLA: DRAGGING SOME ICON NEXT TO A WEB ADDRESS IN THE FIREFOX URL BAR TO ANOTHER BUTTON IN THE BROWSER WINDOW IS THE OPPOSITE OF INTUITIVE. How the heck should I know that I can click and then drag one button, and then place it on something else? At least on a desktop computer and not a mobile device, where input is finger based and dragging is a little more expected. You should be kicked for this. At least in lieu of another method to reset the homepage at will. Like, you know, that involves right clicking. Or the browser's menu. Or, even better, ALL THREE.

And while I'm at it, dear generalized developers:
Whenever things, interfaces specifically, get simplified too much...  Make sure that "advanced" users can still access "advanced" features in a more "non-simplified" way. We're still out here. And we get pissy. Especially when "simplification" doesn't work as intended. Thank you.

In case you didn't notice on the way in, I updated the Sodapop.nu index page to be a little less esoteric. Although when I first made it I liked the idea that it was mysterious and not immediately obvious what was going on, I'm tired of my boyfriend visiting the site and asking, How do I look at your photos again? Major usability issue if I have to be there to tell someone how to use my website. I want it to be mysterious but not to the point that people just leave... I may update the subpages as well to have the same dark grey navigation bar, I haven't decided.

Anyway, I've also been posting photographs like crazy this past week, so check 'em out if you have the time. I ALMOST feel like I'm overusing my Hipstamatic app, but it keeps inspiring me to shoot with its convenience so I guess it's not the time for my photo snobbery. :P

More Oopsies

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-3.3.1-no-content.zip…

Download failed.: Failed writing body (45 != 1448)

This is why, if you ever use your own personal hosting account to store a bajeezus worth of huge Photoshop files for scholastic purposes (read: design homework), you should always DELETE them afterwards to avoid inadvertently going over your allotted server space.

I went to Wordpress and freaked out because I couldn't post, then deduced it was only from using my domain as a storage dump. Deleting my excess files solved the posting problem.

Yes. I oppose PIPA and SOPA.

Please inform yourself and act accordingly.

http://sopastrike.com/

Sodapop.nu will be down on the 18th.

Post-Holiday Blues

It was going great for a bit with art and photograph posts, now I've fallen behind a little bit - which I am blaming entirely on the holidays, of course.

Hopefully this little slump is something I can overcome soon, but not today, unfortunately.

The site's index page is now starting to be annoying to me, so I plan on changing that soon (as well as adding as some sort of indicator of where new posts are located, for visitor convenience).