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:

1. Toplisted Pencil Artists
2. The Colored Pencil Society of America
3. Scribbletalk
4. Artspan
5. Facebook

In spots 5-10 are other colored pencil artist's websites who link to mine, mixed in with search engines like Yahoo and Altavista. Coming in at 11 and 12 is Colored Pencil Central and Prismacolor's gallery.  Top of Blogs and Blog Catalog scored a whopping zero.  Something to noodle on if you're looking to drive traffic to your site.

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.

Earlier this year my laptop's hard drive became corrupted and needed to be reformatted. As most of my artwork scans resided on my hard drive, they were lost in the reformatting. In this case, though, I had copies on my website, so I was able to download them back to my hard drive.

The thing I've learned from all of this is, now that artwork has moved from the realm of slides to scans, it's worth noting that it is remarkably easy to destroy or otherwise lose digital files. It's good practice to have at least one backup - either hosted offline on a service like Flickr, or burned to a DVD.  I'm becoming increasing fond of offline backups.  Paired together with my own copies, it should provide a good failsafe for lost files.

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."

My website provider did agree to restore the missing files for me - for a starting price of $150.  Considering I could do most of this for free on my own - it would just take a couple days of uploading a gajillion files - I opted for the DIY option.  Tonight I spent about 3 hours putting all of the colored pencil images back.  Over the next few weeks I'll start replacing the photography, shows and events, and personal photos.  A few things are gone for good - not all images I have backups for - in particular some of the work in progress photos for older drawings like Pensive - but on the most part, bear with me and the photos will slowly rematerialize.

Before the crash, I was kicking around the idea of offline photo systems like Flickr.  They have the advantage of archiving all of your images elsewhere in the event your computer hardrive goes up in a small mushroom cloud, and you get delete happy with your Wordpress directory structure.  Something to consider a bit more.

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. It got me thinking about the increasing technological demands on the artist. Where our domain was previously paper, pencil, and slides, now we've moved to digital images, webpage submissions for juried shows, and online blogs. Webpages can require anything from a little bit of technical savvy, to writing actual code to get what you need. The exposure you get from webpages is terrific - but the requirements are getting increasing technical as well. Just a little rambling as I ponder which digital void to begin searching for my missing images.