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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
February Archived
1 March 2015
It was a very busy month here with more product announcements than usual. We've updated the Archive with all of the February stories in Volume 4 Number 2 of Photo Corners. And there were a lot.
We published a record 78 stories in February, including 12 Features, 41 commented news items (about twice the usual number), 23 Editor's Notes (including 88 items of interest in our Around the Horn articles), one review and one Site Note.
On two days we actually published two Around the Horn articles, things were so busy.
The downside of that is review time was more restricted than usual. But we were able to publish one major review: OS X And The RAM Upgrade Issue. And it was our sixth most popular story.
We promise not to dumb down your experience here. We want to make you smarter.
OUR MOST POPULAR STORY, by far, was the Peter Mathis matinee. It was followed by the Mandelbaum matinee and in fifth place was the Bielmann matinee.
Our story about Piccure+ and a Lensbaby optical stack took third place with our Photoshop anniversary story taking fourth place. We should point out that the Multum In Parvo slide show also showcases Piccure+ with an even more absurd optical stack.
The popular Valentine slide show barely beat out the Pirate Cove, both among the leading stories of the month.
Not entirely unsurprising to us was that the least read stories were hardware announcements. Not all of them. For some reason the Fujifilm X mount lineup, Sigma dp0 and Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II stories were hot items while the Nikon AW130, Samsung NX500 and Olympus 14-150mm zoom were not.
READERSHIP remained at the same average daily levels since our foray into social media. There are less days in February, of course, so the totals are slightly down from last month, which had three more days.
That's encouraging news for us.
The metrics remain mysterious because not every unique site represents an individual visitor. In fact, we have the full complement of syndicates visiting us every day to distribute our RSS feed. If you keep track of Photo Corners using the RSS feed, you never actually have to visit the site. That depresses readership numbers but it's such a useful tool for readers (and sponsors, we should add) that we aren't concerned with the downside.
The site, as designed, remains readable -- and familiar -- on a variety of devices from smartphones to tablets to computer monitors. We've been disappointed by the way some sites morph into a list of headlines when read from a smartphone. That trick means we can't find the site features we like. "Responsive" design just dumbs down the user experience in far too many cases.
We promise not to dumb down your experience here. We wnat to make you smarter.
SITE TWEAKS were so minor we're only mentioning them as an example of how small details can escape you in this game. The color of the one-pixel rule we use as a divider was revised to match the teal of the site's highlight color.
It had started out that way with a simple copy and paste of a teal pixel but when we saved it as a GIF, it had been indexed to the closest matching color, a blue. It's so small, you can hardly tell. And, as a slightly darker color, it didn't hurt things either.
But we prefer consistency in this matter, so we saved it as a GIF without indexing it. And now we can sleep at night again.
You too, we hope.