Chapter LII: Blograffitti

Image of the Day: Digital Ink Splats (Illustrator, then Photoshop)
In its Help section, Blogger.com describes several excellent ways to increase traffic to your blog.

Most of them are obvious, such as "Write quality content."
Some are more subtle, such as activating the "Email this post" feature.
And a few of them are utterly pathetic. Seriously, bumper stickers with your blog URL? What kind of loser would actually do that? Car bumpers should be reserved for political activism ("KerryEdwards'04") or deep, thought-provoking Star Wars jokes ("That's no moon, that's YO MOMMA'S ASS").

But then I realized that I do some stupid things to promote my blog too. For example, when I set my blog as the homepage on all the browsers in the Library's second-floor computer lab. Fifteen minutes ago.

I am quite literally the only person in the room; I guess no one needs the computer lab on the last day of the quarter. The freedom of being all alone...If I wanted, I could take off all my clothes and dance around naked, then pile up all the keyboards and sacrifice them to the God of the Harvest. I could holler Broadway show-tunes at the top of my lungs (naked), and no one would tell me to shut the fuck up... Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I'll love ya, tomorrow! You're aaalways a day awaaaay!

On the other hand, I could have a freak aneurysm, and no one would be around to call an ambulance.

But I digress. What I was going to say was that I think building site traffic is only half the battle--page hits are one thing, but getting people to stay and read (and heaven forbid, comment) is something else altogether. Every blogger who uses a site tracker service will notice the columns of data indicating hundreds of daily page hits, but an average visit time of less than 5 seconds. People are arriving, but not absorbing.

Thus, the new plan is to put the Image of the Day at the top of each blog entry, thus drawing the prospective reader into the text with an intriguing picture. Hopefully this way, I don't have to write as much "quality content." Or print bumper stickers. Oh yeah, the blog URL will be changing to tryptox.blogspot.com as of next Monday, for ease of remembering. [Reference: the current URL is tryptofantasmic.blogspot.com]

About the Image of the Day...I'm illustrating some of my brother's poems for my Art 181 (Digital Imaging and Design) final project. The relevant passage in this case is "The line between sanity and release is an inkblot tendril." He's been obsessed with inkblots/Rorshach tests for a long time, and I've inherited some of that.