But I didn't know that at the time. In fact I didn't realize it until last week when someone asked me if I'd seen my website recently. Here's how it looked last Sunday:
That's a generic placeholder for expired sites.
Honestly I'd been considering revamping my site for a while. And this new site did offer a certain elegant simplicity. It wasn't quite what I had in mind —a little heavy on the ad/content ratio— but maybe I could work with it. So I spent a little time exploring. My first stop was the irresistible "Jesus You Are" link, which brought up this page:
Gee whiz, low cost car insurance and Bible study, all in one handy location. How convenient is that!
But that was just the start. The site also came complete with all sorts of other stuff. Baby name listings, for example.
And IRA information:
It seemed to have just about anything a person could want on a photo site. It had my name. It had a revenue stream. It had Jesus. And the best thing was it was free. No action was needed on my site to keep this placeholder up.
It was very tempting but I wasn't quite ready to pull the trigger. Not without sleeping on it. I decided to leave the new site up there for a few days and ponder the situation. Maybe I'd get some feedback that would help me with my decision.
From Sunday afternoon to Tuesday evening the new site stayed online while I thought about it. I got a few emails but they were mostly unhelpful. "What the hell's up?" asked one. "Hey, your site's down," said another. Fine feedback but not well researched. I could tell they hadn't explored the new site in any serious way, so I had to discount those comments in my analysis.
One thing was clear. I needed a site. Although my blog is probably the core of my online presence these days, I still depend on my website for certain functions. It's a sort of backlog of past photo projects, not to mention it's my main repository of baby names.
After a few days my decision became clear. I wanted my old site back. I tracked down the company, paid my renewal, and within a few hours my original website was back online, though still needing a revamp. It was almost as if nothing had changed.
In addition to my blog and photo site I have a variety of other online pursuits. Keeping current with all of them can be a constant juggling act. Last week for example I starred in this hardcore gay porn flick (Warning: Do NOT open at work), which was fun to shoot but very hard. I also occasionally moonlight as a stage hypnotist, an employment lawyer and a part time soccer goalie.
With all of these online activities it's hard to pick a highlight, but if forced to choose I think the greatest honor was when my name made the rounds a few weeks ago at Forum.hr, a site most readers should recognize. After all it's one of the top 20 online photo forums in the Balkans. I've transcribed the relevant passage below. I'm not sure if the language is Croatian or Serbian or something else, so my Google translation may be slightly off. But as far as I can tell it went something like this:
Person A: "All are excellent, but only few of them 'play it in your head that people see and unwashed' totally I like to move the humor in them."
Person B: "I will not go into whether the quality, I can only say that I totally neinspirativne, what are the worst when I see photos supposedly good photographer. I do not know, I do not understand what's so great about them."
Person A: "Man who has photos or prejebeno subtle, or completely ridiculous nesuptilno. Now, if you watch them as photos etc then people look wrong. Watch stacking geometry, lights, shadows, lines, shapes and things that resemble each other."
Couldn't have said it better myself. And maybe I did.
Anyhoo, I'm mostly back to normal now. My main photo site is back up. The only snafu is that while it was down I did not receive any email through my site. So if you sent a messages earlier this week, chances are I did NOT receive it. Hopefully it wasn't anything important like a domain renewal.
Weird to read a title in my native tongue. Weirdly enough, now there are many names for the language, it used to be serbo-croatian, but now we get croatian, bosnian, serbian, montenegrin even. And it is the difference comparable to dublin english to galway english, at most. The solution is to call it "naš" (translation: our) language which is what the expats in austria came up with (there is a huge density оf ex-yugos in vienna for example) not to start off conversations with saying the s or c words (serbian, croat). This way, they agree on speaking naš, and don't have to go into all the mindless bullshit that brought upon the separate names for the language in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThanks for clarifying some of the similarities. They may be strains of the same language but Google Translate interprets them differently. In any case I don't think Nesuptilno needs translating. The meaning of that word seems self-evident.
ReplyDeleteit does, because there are different words in them, or rather, different prefered words. but, it was officially the same language for more than a generation and also anyone can understand anyone else a hundred percent. Also, the EU institutions and war tribunals have decided to neglect the money for translating croatian to serbian or bosnian etc. since their experts decided that it was the same language after all.
ReplyDeleteWhat the heck?! I am offline for a few days, and when I am back, my quotes are nesuptilno quoted at my favorite non-standard photo blog by a guy who accidentally changed the way I make photos accidentally! Love it, especially the google translation of my attempt to show the light to the blind, and other unwasheds....:D
ReplyDelete..by the way, you made me decide to do a year long project of "Seeing world through B.A.'s eyes". So far I like the results and everyone else doesn't, which correlates well with my attempts to show them your pictures :D
ReplyDeleteDrago mi je vam se svidio post, Crnigjuro. Ja sam ponosan što sam inspiriran foto projekt. Možda ja mogu vidjeti u nekom trenutku. Postoje li primjeri online? U svakom slučaju, ne brinite što misle neoprane. Oni su uvijek zadnji uhvatiti na.
ReplyDelete