If A Tree Falls In The Woods...

And no one from New York City was there to read it...

When I moved from one place to another there was the feeling that I was about to begin again, start over, endeavor for a fresh start. Nothing wrong with this, in principle, but in practice I could have been more measured. In this case, that measure is in the order of hundreds. Simply put, my newer url isn't ranked.

New York City Garden, the blog address, continues to get hits in the hundreds per day, which is piddly by Internet standards, but something compared to the single digits Mound is receiving. It has not been an issue of content, either. NYCgarden is a blog address with a link history, a search history, let's face it, a Google history, and the history of the web is long. Pages are not forgotten, they are linked to or hit upon as freshly today as the day posted. It became a brand, in a sense, my brand, however ridiculously named by my ignorant logic. I thought, then, that the blog name needed to be attached to the content so that google searches would find it. The name is local, bland and functional. No matter, nycgarden dot blogspot dot com gets traffic, prairiewood dot blogspot dot com does not, and in this way nycgarden has value.

What I intend to do is resurrect the dead, just in time for Easter, by publishing again at nycgarden.blogspot.com. All prairiewood and mealhub posts will be integrated into nycgarden. Nycgarden will take on the MOUND masthead and its updated visual appearance. Sidebars will be integrated in some fashion, although many sidebar links will be dropped because they are NYC-centric and superfluous. It will be searchable, all posts and labels will imported and categorized by date and label, back to 2007. Eventually, I will look for a new dot something url that Blogger can redirect all traffic toward.

When a tree falls in the woods, you'll have a much better chance of hearing it.

If Change Is The Answer

So far, ninety percent of you (if 20 votes is any indication) have stated that I should change the URL for this blog to reflect my new circumstance. Sounds good. Now, does anyone know the guy named Hugh who (hats off to him for being so early to the game) started this blog using the needed URL but never made more than one post eleven years ago? If so, tell him to delete.

Change

Or not? That is today's question.

Does anybody care whether or not this blog maintains a URL which matches its masthead? If I should change it, I will lose all the traffic google, links, and other good-hearted bloggers have sent to me over the years. Most newcomers find their way here via search hits on older posts. Keeping that in mind, things have changed considerably and this blog no longer reflects my gardening or other activities in NYC and further, the masthead might confuse people who think they have gone to NYCGARDEN and what they see is MOUND. Hmm. What to do, what to do.

What are the chances folks who come to NYCGARDEN, and see my final post (which links to a new URL), would actually click through to see where it goes? How about a poll: over there, on the upper right.

_______________________

Change is the constant. Fifteen years in NYC was unusual. I'm a transplanted person, in NYC four separate times, in Oregon, Maine, the Hudson Valley, and New Mexico. We really cannot say how long we will stay in Minnesota. What it comes down to is work, where is it, who will have us? Today I dropped my wife at the airport. She has decided to commute to NYC after no adjunct positions opened up for her here and one of her previous employers got themselves into a little teacher shortage during the first week of the semester. Flying every week will eat up most of the paycheck, but at least there won't be a blank spot on the resume, and I am here, after all, to look after the house.

What we know is that we'll be here until, at the least, June, maybe longer. Both of us are applying for academic positions in other states. That is the reality as things are very uncertain. In the meantime, I will continue to journal my experiences here, for myself, and hopefully for you. And if you have a second, take the poll (on the upper right).

Dept. Of Phooey

Below is a screenshot of a photo I opened in Preview and uploaded to Blogger. To my eyes, the color difference is night and day. Yes, yes, I signed up for the annoyingly necessary Google + and changed my photo settings to "please Google, do nothing to them." Yet still, Blogger is uploading lamer versions of photos. Maybe there is Wordpress in my future...

What The Camera Makes Blogger Takes

Last January I uploaded a picture, the one below, taken with our new Canon G1X. It happened to be the first Photoshop-edited image uploaded to the blog in the new year. The Canon makes pictures of a quality and tonal range I hadn't been accustomed to since my shift to a phone camera three years prior. What appealed to me in this image was the level of detail in the burnt orange leaves clinging to the oaks in contrast to the blue-grey shadows raking across the snow. I was excited to show off the new image, but after viewing the upload I couldn't help but to see a pronounced deadening of the tonal range in the shadows and a summary of detail in the leaves. The image may as well been taken with my IPhone.

In late February I noticed Blogger's inability to render the icy snow in shadow without changing it's blue color toward red (making it lavender). This time the camera was my new Olympus XZ2. These two events were new to my Blogger experience, so it must have been something new. Or were my prior poor source images concealing what Blogger had been doing all along?

Recently I have been applying to several opportunities, many of which require links over the old-fashioned CD portfolio submission. I created a temporary Blogspot address and began uploading large, thousand-pixel wide jpegs. For some older paintings, like the one below, I had only IPhone images because these paintings were finished during my camera-less period. Phone images of large paintings tend to be pixelated, with choppy tonal gradients, and poor color accuracy. This image, below, shows those tendencies, particularly noticeable in the sky (too blue with stepped tonality) and the mountains (too red and blue). Nevertheless, it uploaded to Blogger looking much as it did in Photoshop and considered serviceable.

I used the Canon G1X to make new images a week ago because IPhone images simply will not do when there is a better option available. After taking these I processed them in Photoshop as I normally would, saved as a maximum jpeg and then uploaded to Blogger. The result, below, has somehow been processed by Blogger, pushing heavy on the red and yellow (probably to balance the blue). Now, despite an excellent source image from the new camera, the Blogger variation shows much worse color than the previous IPhone upload! Since this discovery, I've uploaded all my images to a Dropbox folder and am using that as my portfolio link. There, all images show accurate color -see the image. 

So, Blogger, what gives? Google searches show people with variations on this problem. The apparent solution is to make a Google + profile to attach to my Blogger account, at which point I will be given access to a control panel that has a couple of radio boxes that I must uncheck to disable the photo processing Google is doing by default. But I have no interest in Google + or its various demands. Consequently, I will give uploading png files a try, which apparently are not affected by the Blogger processing. On the web, some people said png solved the problem, but others not, either way the png is a larger file and less desirable. Below is the png upload -far better than the two above.

And, since Google also removed the ability to pay for website domains through Blogger, I will probably allow my art site to lapse when the domain goes unpaid tomorrow (I cannot access the account, which is somehow connected to the domain, yadda yadda, before it was easy, now it is hard). I will use the Dropbox folder for image viewing until a real site can be developed. In the meantime, I will get back to painting, where all the work should really be.

Crisis Partially Averted

Wow. How did it happen? The other day I noticed the new static page linking to my art page was no longer above. I investigated, found nothing, and went to reestablish the tab. Somehow in this process, Blogger created a second tab for the Our Weeds page, one of the most popular items on this blog. I left it alone. Until today.

I deleted the one, thinking it just a duplicate of the first, but I did not go about with due diligence. I erased the whole effing thing. The other tab was a dummy tab and linked to nothing. I could not get the information back. Nowhere. In fact, not even a question in Blogger's help forums. No one has ever done this? Seems so easy to do. I was upset -so much work there. I wasn't about to remake it given all else there is to do now. Yet, the weed file is probably the most popular page I have. So I started digging. Caches were no help. Finally,
I went to my posts, because pages is a relatively new aspect of Blogger and my original weed file was a simple post.

Lucky me. An update I did last year on the page I also saved to the original post! Whew. Lost are any additions I made this year, and there were several, but at least those redo's are something I can accomplish. Wow, so where can we save this data if there is no way to retrieve it online?

UPDATE! As I look again, the links above have two OUR WEEDS tabs. This must be a Blogger issue. BLOGGER!