First day of winter blahs

Here we are. The snow had some brief flurries while I was running errands yesterday, then started in semi-earnest last night. More of the same today. At the moment it's snowing quite hard, but a few minutes ago it wasn't. There is essentially no accumulation, and probably won't be for a while unless this so-called snow-pocalypse gets into gear.

In the mean time I've been considering photos. Image of the month is going to be brutal. I'm at nearly 10,000 photos for September, and right now I've got 23 with at least 4 stars, and that's without a review of the 3 star shots to see if any need to be bumped up. See below for a sneak preview.

I've been considering if the blog is the best place to display photos, and what my alternatives are. I'm a little worried that Google will shut down Blogger just like they did with Google+. They say not, but who really believes them?

There have been any number of times my readers have contacted me to ask if I had seen a comment they left, or thought they left. Many times that's a surprise to me because Blogger ate it, and I'm disappointed all over again. I love it when my readers comment.

Instagram has never been a favourite of mine, mainly because of the brutal posting process, and how poorly they are displayed. Don't even say Twitter to me.

Facebook. (Yack, he said to himself.) Not a fan of Facebook, though I recognize the reach. One of the problems is that it doesn't really display the photos all that well either, even though I know I have the settings optimized for Facebook. Minus, personally, my rule about Facebook was that I had to have met the person, or had someone I know vouch for them. This doesn't make it easy to expand the numbers of people who see my photos there.

Up till recently I typically only put a link to my blog on Facebook. I've no real idea how many click through to the blog, and of those, how many click on the photo to embiggen it and go through them. It's been suggested to me that I put the photos on Facebook directly, together with whatever commentary I think appropriate, but I'm not sure what I think of that.

As for displaying the photos, I follow a blog put up by Mike Drew on Adobe Spark. His photos look terrific there. He's a great photographer, which is more than half the battle. But unless I'm not understanding something correctly, the photos and text are saved on Adobe's platform and cannot be saved or viewed offline. The idea seems to be that the creator sends a link to the content to platforms of your choice. Which is essentially the same as what I have now, albeit with better photo display. If people won't click on a link to a Blogger site and scroll, they won't click on a link to a Spark site. Minus, there doesn't appear any commenting ability at all.

Maybe a zillion people do click through to Mike's site just because he's a great and famous photographer, and don't click through to mine because I'm not a great and famous photographer. Maybe they've stopped reading my blog because the photos and text I put up no longer interest them, or never really did and now none of their buddies read and comment so there's even less incentive for them. Such is life. Everybody is busy. More news as I noodle on through.

The only photo is a sneak preview of the current 4 star shots. Not all of which have been blogged.

Driftwood of the Day

Lynx of the Day
I'm not sure what this Lynx is thinking. I suspect it's calmly waiting for lunch, but quietly considering the alternatives if lunch doesn't show up soon.