My site visits results

I was having a hard time deciding what to write about tonight. I had a full paragraph about the craft show I'm going to be in this weekend, but then I decided that was boring. Then was just going to show pictures of the town I'll be in this weekend, which is where my parents live, but.....even more boring. So while I was checking my blog stats, I decided to review with you who is visiting my blog.

Entrecard advertising 10
Entrecard.com 9
(direct) 2
Blogger.com 7
Google 3
Etsy.com 1
Bloglines.com 1
Total Visits 33

I know what all of these are except www.bloglines.com. I guess I should check to see what that is. I'm glad that I got quite a few hits from my Entrecard advertising. None of these hits have turned into sales yet, but since my items are more for gift giving, I'm still being patient.

If you would like to see similiar stats for your own blog and you have a google account, it is very easy to install google analytics into your blog. It will then keep track of how many visitors you have, where they came from, how long they spent on your site, etc. I know that my shop's traffic has increased, but where the traffic has come from I'm not sure. If Etsy admin ever gives us the ability to install tracking on our shop, it will be interesting to compare the two statistics.

Thanks for visiting!!

Satellite Internet Fair Access Policy

So as you may have guessed, we live out in the country in rural Wisconsin. There are advantages and disadvantages to living where we live. One is the amount of wildlife we can see around our house. The lack of neighbors too close to our house. And peace and quiet.

One of the disadvantages is dial-up internet access. So 1 year ago, we decided to make the jump to satellite internet access. It's the slowest speed, but still much faster than dial-up. But we exceeded our fair access policy. Which apparently limits the amount you can upload or download in a rolling 30 day time period. When you go over the threshold, you only get limited access to the internet. That is why I've been unabe to post much this week, or drop entre.com cards, or comment on anyone's blogs. It's been a dreadfully long week.

I have internet access at work, but I've been terribly busy there and I always feel guilty if I do personal stuff while I am working. I'm a great multi-tasker, but there's still there's always that thought that I should be working.

So we've been limited on the internet this week, thinking we should have full access soon. I finally called, and we should get full access on the 11th. We could get full access earlier, but it would involve unplugging our modem for 24 hours. 24 HOURS!! No internet access! The technician was not amused when I asked that question twice. He just did not understand the truly addictive nature of my etsy store, blog, entrecard, treasuries, email, etc. So we can continue with slow access until Monday, and hope that the technician wasn't leading me on about getting full access back then. Maybe I should call again and double check with someone else!?!

Who Knew!?!

This summer has been a series of "Who Knew?" situations.

1. Who knew that German-Short Hair Pointer could get a sunburn? That 3 types of dogs are susceptable to sunburns: German-Short Hair Pointers, Dalmations, and Pit Bulls apparently. We have always had labradors (Black, Chocolate and Yellow) and now that we have a German-Short Hair Pointer, we never even realized that he could get a sunburn. The poor little dog!
2. Who knew that there was such a thing as a limit on the amount of uploads and downloads you can have when using WildBlue Satellite Internet Access.
   
3. Who knew that when letting your 10 year old son go online onto Nick.com, he would decide to stream tv shows? Hmmm, apparently that takes a lot of download power!
   

When I went online tonight, it was as slow as molasses. I checked our router....ok. Then I went into my account and yeap, the download information was in the red. We are allowed 7500 MB on a rolling 30 day period and we're up to 7669MB in the last 30 day period.

No more blog jumping tonight, no more cruising the etsy forums, no more entrecard dropping, no more multiple windows, no more photos on the blog tonight, (hold on, gotta wipe my tears) hmm, I might actually get some more things made for my etsy shop.

So everyone else, have fun on the internet tonight, I'll miss it all. I'm off to make some things!!

I needed a new avatar!

As part of my refocusing on my Etsy shop: www.rockcreekcreations.etsy.com, I've been signing up for a variety of different websites. Most of these sites require placing the scrip on your webpage and then allows others to advertise on your blog. Up until now, I've been using one of my brooches. Not always the same one, just anyone that I choose at the time.

So I've decided that I need to have an avatar that I use on the etsy.com forums, on Indiego, on entrecard and any other place I decide to make my presence. BUT my old computer died so I no longer have photoshop. (I'm not the most organized so I could no longer find the disk and key code. It was a really old version, so I maybe should update someday.)

First I went into picasa, the photo editing software from google.com. I picked out 9 photos of my bookmarks and brooches that I really like. Then I made these into a 3 x 3 collage. If you have never played with the collage option from picasa it is really fun. But I wanted to put my name on the photo.

So what does a person do? I was just about to put up a post on the forums at etsy about a website to edit photos on, but someone beat me to it. That post recommended www.lunapic.com to edit your photos. So I decided to try it. Let me tell you it's no photoshop, but it's not bad for what I needed to do. I could resize my collage to the pixels I needed, and I could pick from a bunch of different fonts to type my name on the photo. I then was able to save the photo to my computer. Not Bad!

So here is the image I decided to use for my avatar and web presence.