Thursday, January 27, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Blue-winged Teal Female, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 24, 2011
My site redesign is coming along
Light may appear at the end of the tunnel any day now. I surely hope so. Remember a couple weeks ago I said I was going to redo the bones of this website to make it easier to maintain and update? What a ride that project has turned out to be.
I guess I knew going in it would be a big deal. I recognized years ago the need to come up with a scheme to navigate this mess of largely unrelated pages and abandoned every attempt I made to tame the beast. Now I feel I'm making some progress at long last.
I keep getting distracted from the navigation work by design improvements I want to make and immediately run up against my lack of a sufficient working knowledge of HTML and CSS do what I want to do. It's frustrating sometimes to have to stop and learn when all I want to do is make some simple little design change.
I've learned the latest features of the HTML5 and CSS3 markup languages are now supported by most web browsers (knock knock, Microsoft, wake up!) and since less than half of the visitors to my site still use Internet Explorer I decided to abandon the idea of having the site look the same in all web browsers and to start using cool new (to me) CSS3 based features like drop shadows and rounded box corners in my design and let the declining number of people still using IE muddle along with a less interesting experience.
Oh, what's a guy to do?
One impetus, aside from the fun of all this redesign stuff, for all the effort I'm putting in here is to see if I can bump up my Google Adsense revenue from the dollar-a-day it's been stuck at ever since I put ads on the site years ago. There's more to getting more visitors than navigation and design, of course, but I need that foundation to build content on.
Today I was looking at the stats on what search terms are bringing visitors to the site, what browsers they are using, etc., and then I looked at what browsers the people who actually click on ads are using. Big surprise - 85% of my revenue is generated by those of you using Internet Explorer. So, less than half of my visitors use IE but those that do generate 85% of my revenue.
I'm shocked, shocked I say!
Night camp
Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
The Heliograph in the Apache Wars
"The mountains and the sun...were made his allies, the eyes of his command, and the carriers of swift messages. By a system of heliograph signals, communications were sent with almost incredible swiftness; in one instance a message traveled seven hundred miles in four hours. The messages, flashed by mirrors from peak to peak of the mountains, disheartened the Indians as they crept stealthily or rode swiftly through the valleys, assuring them that all their arts and craft had not availed to conceal their trails, that troops were pursuing them and others awaiting them. The telescopes of the Signal Corps, who garrisoned the rudely built but impregnable works on the mountains, permitted no movement by day, no cloud of dust even in the valleys below to escape attention. Little wonder that the Indians thought that the powers of the unseen world were confederated against them."