Blog changes

Blogger/Google has been updating the look and tech of blogger so I thought we should too. And since Megan has been blogging so much, I need to too! Here are just a few things that I am going to write about soon:

- My commuter bike project
- Pickles, both canned and soured
- Beer projects. State fair beer, cultured Belgian yeast, and a bad batch

More work on the template too. And you can now share stories on various media by clicking any of the links below each post.

Blog update

Quick update on the Blog. Via our tracking software, we can see that we have become much more popular! After our big spike last April thanks to an odd fluke with with Google images and cars, we settled back to normal by June. But since then we have seen a steady rise in traffic that looks like it will keep going. Where is it coming from? Well, Google images plays a huge part but we also are getting people looking for specific things. If you Google, the benefits of forest fire, post grooming furunculosis or 2002 Subaru Impreza Outback Sport we are on the top one or two pages. We have been linked to by other blogs that give some traffic too. Most of this is for specific links, not for the blog in general.

It is nice to have people reading our stuff, especially the informational things that are showing up on Google. The benefits from our ads is growing too. When we reach $100 Google will mail us a check. When I started with ads I figured we would never see a dime, I just wanted to see what would show up. A few months ago I had projected getting a check in 2011. But now it looks like it might arrive this August. We have written 670 posts and have had between 23,000 and 25,000 unique visitors depending on the counter.

If you keep reading, we will keep writing! Got to use those liberal arts degrees some place right? 

One more thing, Blogger has a new feature that allows you to schedule blog postings for a future date or time. This should allow for more regularity in posting, not three one day and zero the next. 

1 Year Blogoversary!

Happy 1 Year Blogoversary to Winnie Loves Us! Yes on October 19th 2006 I posed this "Obligatory first post" along with this photo of Winnie when we first met her. This is all it said:

"Yes, Megan and I have a blog. And a puppy! Named Winnie. She is so cute that we had to make a blog, just for her."

Since then we have written 525 more posts or about a post and a half a day.

Our trackers show some where between 13,171 - 13,424 hits to our page

However much of that traffic has been driven by google images. At some point in April I posed several images (now removed) of all the exotic cars I had been seeing in LA and we saw over 400 hits a day for a week! Who knows why.

We have a lot of content too! I got to be a journalist with the Ham Lake fire this May. It started with this post and continued for 36 more over the course of the fire including one of my favorite posts, "The benefits of forest fire." If you got to the left hand side of the page and see "Labels" we have tried to label every post with a tag, so you can group them together easily. 

This blog was created when Megan and I were apart, and was in large part just to keep in touch with each other but it has grown far beyond that now! Now it keeps us up to date with lots of people, and is a place people come to find out about Vet School or fire or what ever else we have written about. I has connected us with new people, and lets me talk about Politics. So I think we will keep writing! 

Flat is the new shadow

Back to the design of this page -I took my design cue from the new St. Olaf web page with its nearly complete flatness. It is a marked departure from the web 2.0 curvy/shadowy style as shown by the Blogger homepage, the ebay home page, YouTube and well nearly all of the new web.

I think the next evolution of the web is going to see shadows and curves become less dramatic as people get used to the aesthetic. If you look at the new Apple Store for their design compared to an archive of the old store (loads slowly) it shows the trend away from overt to subtle shading and curves.

I have also updated our adds on the right to include image and videos. If they are not too much of a distraction I will keep them up. So far one has sold me, "Jiglu" - an automated tagging service. Look for it right above "Labels" on the right hand side.

UPDATE: Strike 1 for the adds - having to see the face of wingnut Michelle Malkin on the blog even once. Ug.

WLU 2.0!

Alright I think that does it! Winnie Loves Us 2.0 is online. The underlying structure is really quite different. To the technically minded, it changed from a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to XML (Extensible Markup Language) and I have never worked with XML. It is quite flexible though, once you know where you are. All you have to do is change one element and it changes through out the entire page.

Nerd speak aside, most of the improvements come mostly on our editing side, but you can now see all of our labels now on the left hand side, and the loading speed has much improved.

So what do you think? Is it an improvement? Should I change something? Do you like our new picture?

Blog Update!

In honor of our one year blog-o-versary I decided to redo our blog with the new blogger and leave our old CSS friend behind. But our blog-o-versary is still 19 days away and I am ready to change now! So consider this an early present or if you with, the 500th post shabang!

So for the next few minutes (hopefully not hours) the blog might look a little funny as I tool things over.

EDIT: Still working on customizing the new HTML/XML layout. Quite a fancy set up under there! The basic colors are here though...

No Blogging, Blogging!

I have gotten to the point that I have so much to write about, but have not written in so long, that I am just saving up the stories! Blogging constipation if you will. I guess its a good thing when I can say, 'I have been way too busy to blog!' vs. having too much time on my hands. So coming up in more detail are:

• Wedding blogging
• Fire blogging
• Cabin blogging
• Car blogging
• Beer blogging
• Bonsai Blogging
• Old friend Blogging

But for now a quick digest...

So did you know my friend Alex got married and I was in the wedding? It was quite the affair that took all time time from Wednesday to sunday two weeks ago already. My sister took the photos too, so those will go up later.

And on the way to the bachelor party my car died. The problem is electrical, I wont get into details, but it has a new battery now but that did nothing. Time go get greasy again! We also went to the cabin using my moms nice car (mm AC) and made me really start thinking about something a little newer. Personally I am wishing specifically and realistically for a 1999 Subaru Legacy 2.5 GT. All wheel drive goodness that is quick too. Runs around $6,000. I would like to have it before winter time. But first I have to fix mine of course.

Megan and I had a great time up north. The burn area was amazing to see and I have tons of good pictures. In short, the place is beautiful and crazy green. The blowdown was ugly, this is beautiful. I can't wait to watch it grow!

I also tried our lavender homebrew we bottled last week. Its not done yet but is coming along. None of the strong lavender flavor is there but its has defused into light floral flavors. Next up: Belgian Chocolate Stout

Also, two new Bonsai! I just potted them last night and did an initial trim on one. One needs a better pot and one is just in an plain brown one that should be ok for a while. One is a white cedar and one is a paper birch taken from about 1/2 mile from where I harvested my old one. Pictures later!

I also re-connected with my old friend Sam from High School at Fort Snelling on the 4th of July. I have not seen him in over 5 years! He is a captain now, from the 1800s of course. Peace corps for him next, but not till November so hopefully we can get together before he goes.

Ok thats the digest blogging! More to come later and in no particular order.

One of us should blog

Ah yes, one of us should blog! We have been having so much fun moving in that I have hardly sat down at the computer in days. What a good change! Now my RSS blog feed (Really Simple Syndication, updates you on new stories) is in the 100s instead of in the 1's because I checked it so often.

This morning Megan and I had Dave and Zach over for brunch, Zach who is visiting from TX. It was great and I managed not to burn the frittata. Note to self, use blue cheese from now on yum! It was so civilized and normal, I loved it. Dave is cooking dinner tonight, that should be amazing too.

The apartment is coming together really well. Megan and I hit IKEA just to walk around and walked out with a huge load of stuff. Mostly small stuff, like a spatula and some hangers, but we started to buy chairs to replace the ugly ones I brought up from Northfield. The chair in question is to the left here, and it looks much better than its big bulky brethren next to it. Comfortable too.

Winnie is settling in better now, thats good to see. Some things can still set her off to a buffing nervous state, but the AC/vent fan coming on is not bothering her any more. And the general background noise of University is fading for both winnie and me too.

I am not sure how this blog will work now that Megan and I are living together. It was created in large part for us to keep in touch with each other while we spent our year apart. It did a great job at that and has grown far beyond what we originally intended. Its a place to share ideas and keep in touch, so that will all stay the same. But perhaps some of that will be able to be replaced with actual human communication, and I don't think that would be a bad thing!

Traffic down

What google grantih google can takith a wayith. After my first LA post that had all the car talk in it our traffic shot up 600% due to google image hits and we made about $6 in ad revenue. For a moment I thought it might keep up but I think our wave is done. Oh well, thats fine with me! I would rather write for people who care rather than image zombies floating about the internet. (with apologies to any image zombies floating about right now)

Revenue

Check this out, since posting the ad on the left and our strange up tick in google image traffic we have made about $5 in two days. That might not seem like much, but since we started on October 30th until two days ago ... we generated $5. So thanks all!

Traffic

Something odd has happened in the past 2 days to our traffic on this blog, as shown by our hit counter on the left here. It seems that since my first LA post mentioned lots of famous cars, and since I linked to some images I found on google images, now this blog is the place to go for some people searching google images for those car pictures that are hosted on another site. Make sense? Me neither because if you do a search for Porsche 911 on google images you do get the picture I used but thats not us.

So what do we do? Well for one we are suddenly making money via our Google Ads on the left. Not much but enough that I though I would sell out and stick an ad box on the top of the page too. Sure I might be whoring us out, but you do need a "Sleep Diary" don't you? (thats what's up now anyway) Clicking on one of those adds is extra valuable because it cranks up our page CTR or Cost Per 1000 impressions that calculates our value.

If things die down again I will remove it, but its worth an experiment I think. Did I mention I saw an Austin Martin DB9 today?

Identities reveled!

Well we have outed ourselves. We are no longer the mysterious "Chris and Megan" of winnielovesus, we are now our real selves Chris Schommer and Megan Watland with our dog Winnie the pooh bear. We had been writing using just first names but things have been going so well in blog land that we decided to try and get our google rankings up there when you search for our names, Chris Schommer or Megan Watland. Don't steal our identities please!

Life as a vet student's blog

So our tracker can show us who referred people to our blog - link, search engine, email, and so on.

So look what happened when some one searched for "Cow's Butt"

Given its on page 2, but I still think thats really funny.

P.S. Why where they searching for "Cow's Butt"???

New Blogger

Our overlords at Google updated Blogger and added some new features. Its nothing revolutionary, just more up to date with the competition and faster for us to use. The template is now much more editable, but I have done so much with the HTML that their upgrade would be a downgrade for WLU because I would lose all of that.

The most notable things for you are post "labels" that we can add to categorize each post. These are then cross-referenced with the rest of the blog so if you click on a label, blogger will display all posts that have to do with this subject. For example, this post has to do with our blog, so I have labeled it "Blog." Click on that!

Mmmm, this has been a meta-data kind of day...

16,000

I copied and pasted the entire blog into word and found out that it is 16,000 words long! Thats quite a bit I think. To celebrate I did another little design change to the template, removing the fade out effect on the sides, making the background darker, and organizing the links. Enjoy the next 16,000 words!

Ads

The ads on the side are funny, for the longest time they were all about vet school and doggie drugs and now it wants to sell me several kinds of sensors (I checked, the Oxygen sensor on the saturn is just fine thank you) and a new camera! I just think its funny what they choose to pull out of our text.

PS. We STILL have only made $.39 on the deal, come on people we have lots off school to pay off! Get clicking!

Cash

Slow bloging day. Winnie is at home snoozing (I hope) and I am at school. I added Google ads down the side bar of the page here in hopes that when the traffic to our blog becomes crushing, it will generate enough revenue for Megan and I to live comfortably on. Its a long term goal but its worth a shot. So far it has earned $.27. Oh yeah!

In other news winnie was playing in our back yard off leash and saw a big fluffy cat. The cat ran up a tree and winnie got a time out after I managed to catch her. Bad dog.

Blogger

I have been mucking around with the code behind our Blogger template and made some changes. The header is now blue and the page is a bit wider. I will keep working on it. Eventually it should look less and less like a "blogger" blog.

David G. was down and we hooked up with Andrew N. for some good times at the tavern. Reminiscing about China/Japan and such. We are excited to see "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" (Yes that is the official movie home page). The movie is going to be a smash hit. Prepare your self for every one doing their own Borat imitations.

Megan will be here this weekend, that makes me happy. We are going to a party on saturday in Owatana that another vet student is having at her farm. That and take another stab at her car. We are going to remove the throttle today! I had thought it was all clean, but a closer (and more educated) look reviled a carbon mess. Perhaps its plugging up some sensor or tube. My car will also get a new thermostat. Finally something simple and easy that I know how to do!

Blogger note

Just a quick note about Blogger for any one who does not know. All the old posts that have fallen off the main page are archived on the right hand side. You can also view the whole month on one page. That is all.