The concept of the gravatar - the ‘globally recognized avatar’ - made sense a few years ago. With the advent of social blogging communities like MyBlogLogs, gravatars seem to be less in use (certainly less by our readers). So I’m switching from gravatars to MyAvatars, a Wordpress plugin that adds MyBlogLog avatars to comments.
This past week we got stumbled. StumbleUpon.com is a website sharing social network, and someone liked my 5 reasons to move to Costa Rica. There was a DRAMATIC effect on our traffic - we went from some 20-ish visits per day to over 8,000 in 2 days. The majority of the visits were less than 1 minute, but a few people took the time to read and some did comment. Our feed subscriptions also increased by more than double, but I was immediately skeptical as to how many new people would actually continue subscribing.
Our traffic seems to be back to normal, though it’s hard to tell now since it’s the weekend, and the feed subscribers have dropped to just 40% more than before instead of 130%. I do think that some of the new subscribers will keep reading, and I feel good about the comment from the person who had never considered Costa Rica before. I suppose the big winner out of this experience was our host, as I didn’t notice any performance issues at all that day inspite of the insane traffic.
We’re in Costa Rica! We’ve been here for over a week now and while we’ve had internet access, we’ve been a little busy having fun and working. We spent most of the past few days on the Caribbean coast, in Cahuita and Puerto Viejo. I think we’re finally settling down enough to start writing again (we’ve rented a house for a week), so keep checking for updates on our Costa Rica experience. So far, we love it and the wildlife we’ve seen so far is absolutely amazing. Here’s a little taste of the perfect, almost empty beach in the National Park at Cahuita. The water was a light green (the picture does not do it justice) and its temperature was perfect. You could dunk yourself in the water without any temperature shock.
Thanks to a cool countdown widget for WordPress (KB Countdown), I just made our Costa Rican Dreamline to the right. I’ve had the date of September 1, 2008 floating in my head for awhile. It’s not oriented towards the academic calendar as a new beginning but towards the end of summer and wanting Winter 2007-2008 to be the last one we spend in cold. Of course, our house isn’t anywhere near on the market or ready for it, but we could keep putting stuff off forever until Things Are Just Right. Funk dat. When the dream is so real that it leaves the back of your mind and becomes an insistent, daily presence it’s time to listen. On September 1, 2008 we will, by hook or by crook, be living in Costa Rica. Earlier than that would be even better. Due to finances we’ve celebrated but one of our seven anniversaries. It would be great to celebrate #8 on a beach in Costa Rica.
Speaking of finances, I’ve been learning more about blogs and their possibilities. We’re not blogging with money in mind (I still can’t believe that’s even possible), but our lifestyle and parenting choices mean that working from home would be ideal. At the least, it’s worth looking into. We’ve tried Google ads and Amazon Associates. I don’t know how many times I’ve edited our Adsense account to remove ads for offending products (like stuff that babies drink when they don’t get boobyjuice, lessons and supplies for poledancing, etc.). If we’re going to have an ad for something on our site, I’d much rather it be companies with products that we heartily approve of. The Amazon stuff we have control over but has been a general bust (that’s another phrase for ‘thirteen cents in 8 months’), so when I saw a mommy blog with a Hearthsong ad, I checked out the source (LinkShare). I found 3 companies that we genuinely like and buy from - Hearthsong, Magic Cabin and Lego.
We’ve been using WordPress 2.0 for a little over a week now, and I feel comfortable enough to give an assessment of our experience thus far. First off, we both enjoy using it because writing a post is easy. With our previous system (Joomla), it involved logging in, clicking a button for content items, clicking a button to make a new entry, being limited to one category and clicking between a couple of other pages to do stuff like upload pictures, edit tags (to circumvent the single category action), and so forth. And the interface wasn’t very conducive to writing.
In comparison, WordPress is a breeze to use, so easy that I think we’re much more inclined to write. We can select and add categories easily and file/image upload is a piece of cake. All the options for writing are one page and we can keep the ones we don’t use that often closed until we need them. Wordpress seems like it was made specifically with the user experience in mind - it just works. No wonder it’s been downloaded 1.4 million times! Let’s look at some of the specific aspects of WordPress 2.0.
