I received an email today from WordPress giving me an end of the year wrap up of my Blog. I like the information it shares but I am skeptical on some of its information. Below is the report:
Today is Blog Action Day 2011! This year’s topic is food! Today I will discuss what we Americans enjoy and probably waste!
My wife’s cousin wrote a kids book in his class and it is so funny. It is titled The Turkey That Tried To Escape Thanksgiving and it will make you laugh. I remember when I was in school how I loved to write stories. I think we need to do that to help us be in touch with our creative side. I loved drawing cartoon pictures like the ones above. I will see if I can get some of my old photos and scan them for you all to read.
Thanks for reading!
Semper Fidelis,
Manuel Perez
I have been thinking of changing the way I do things with the photos on the site and I wanted to get some feedback from you all. I am wanting to make things smoother and easier to see on the website with the photos I post on the blog. I have a bunch of different Presets in Adobe Lightroom that I use but which one do you like the most? I wanted them all to start looking more uniform but I wanted to get your valued opinion. Please let me know what you think.
Thanks for reading!
Semper Fidelis,
Manuel Perez
I recently got approved to use aboutme which is a website that allows users to create a quick page that they can customize with information about themselves.
Today, I join with millions of other bloggers throughout the world and share with you a message about water and how important it is to many people all over. So, I ask you this one question, how has the water crisis affected you and your area? For many the Central Valley seems like just some ordinary valley that produces many crops for parts of west coast but truly the Central Valley is probably the bread basket of the United States if not other countries in the world. It produces many crops throughout the year from cantaloupes to cotton, it has many different ways that it contributes to the world and that doesn’t even mention the jobs that it produces for many of the migrant workers that come to perform seasonal jobs to earn a living doing very hard work that not many other people will do.
The Central Valley has been in a major crisis for some time now ever since the water levels have been cut over and over that is supplied to the farmers to water their crops. Some farmers have been able to improvise and use equipment like you see in the left to allow them to use drip systems to cut back on the water they give their crops. This helps the water crisis and the crops still get enough water to grow. I recall writing an article stressing how important the water is for our farmers which can be read here!
The Water Crisis has been so bad that it is affecting the enrollment in schools due to the lack of people moving and living in the valley. The people don’t move here because there isn’t any jobs for them to work and provide food for their families. There aren’t any jobs because there isn’t any water for the crops. I know that people stress how important it is to save some fish but when do the lives of some fish become more important than our very existence?Â
I only stress to you all that please be cautious on the amount of water you use to water your lawn, wash your car, brush your teeth and even wash yourself. The water is scarce now and soon we will hopefully get another great amount of water this winter but if we don’t get any soon then a lot more farmers are going to have to shutdown their crops and move on somewhere else.
That is all I have for today and this week!
Thanks for reading!
Semper Fidelis,
Manuel Perez
Recently I made some more changes to the webpage. If you didn’t see the post yesterday, I mentioned that I had created a Journal Page where I plan to post at least once a week and the posts would be more personal. I also changed the way the title appears on the page by completely taking the title out and adding my logo to the header. Sunday I was reading the comics and noticed that a lot of them were in pink. Then I read some of the fine prints and saw that they were supporting Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I decided to put a pink ribbon in the header as well to show my support for the cause.
I am planning on removing some categories to help make some ideas for the site work smoother. I just need some ideas on which categories to eliminate and which ones to keep. I would love to hear back some of your ideas.
For the first five people that comment and give me ideas that are legit and working I will give something special to you.
The gift will be a surprise.
That’s all for today and thanks again for reading!
Semper Fidelis,
Manuel Perez
I know that you might notice a few changes to the look of the site and I am going to try and explain all of them today.
I recently stretched out the page to make it a little wider. This allowed me to display all the features of the Upcoming Events Page. Before the change only the days from Sunday through Thursday would display. I had to change the css code to allow me to get more information on the page.
The next page I want to discuss is the Interview Questions Page. This page is something I setup back when the previous blog was working. I wanted to do questions and answers with other photographers in the area and around the world and just ask them some key questions about them and their work.
The Upcoming Events Page is actually a display of my Google Calendar. It allows me to display my events that are scheduled so far. If you would like to schedule an event with me please contact me and we can discuss your plans.
The Gallery Page is simply that. It is a gallery of only a couple of my photos that I have for sale. I plan on adding more but it is all done in time. All checkout is done through PayPal. PayPal is legit and allows you to pay with trusted security in a quick and timely manner. If you don’t have a PayPal account you can visit their site and signup for one.
The Subscribe Page is a page that allows you to enter your email address and FeedBurner will automatically send you an email of any new posts that I add. You can also use the Subscribe to get updates button located at the right of the page just under the search box.
On the right you have the You Shopping Cart Widget. This will display the total number of items you have in your cart or will display that it is empty. If you use the Gallery Page and add something to your cart you will see that your cart has items.
The FeedBurner RSS Widget displays the total number of readers that are currently subscribing to my posts. This will automatically change and the amount of readers increases and decreases. So if you want to increase the numbers please subscribe via FeedBurner.
The Ask Me Anything Widget simply allows viewers to interact with me. After signing up through formspring you can ask me any questions and I can answer them and display the answers and questions here on the page.
The Google Members Widget allows other Google Members to follow the site and display their profile picture so other viewers can see who else is following the site.
The next features I want to discuss are the ones located within a post. These features are usually located at the bottom of the post. These features usually allow you to interact socially with other social networks such as facebook, myspace, twitter, etc.. I am no longer using facebook and twitter as I made it a point in myself to publicize my page without the use of these networks or any other social network. I am counting on all of you to spread the popularity of my page and share your experiences with others.
The Share/Save button allows you to share the post with others via the tons of social networks that are out there. Please feel free to share my content with others.
The Related posts: feature allows you to look at a post and see what other posts on my blog are similar to the one you just read. It is all based on Categories, Tags and keywords. The Categories are just below that that always contain All and other categories. To the right of that is the Tags. Click on either a Category or Tag that you want to see all posts that are related.
The next feature is the Comment section. This is where readers can leave a comment and I do usually get a lot of spam in the comments that I have to go through but I promise if your comment is legit I will approve it as soon as I can. I will also try to respond to every comment I get in a timely manner.
Just below the comment box is a Subscribe to comments feed button. This allows you to use RSS or Really Simple Syndication or that feature in Internet Explorer to keep track of what changes are made to the comments. If you haven’t heard of RSS, trust me you need to find out as much as possible about it. A lot of cool things happen with RSS and if you haven’t signed up for Google Reader you need to so that you can get all your feeds in one area and read them.
Those are all the features as of today and I do plan to update you regularly on any changes that do come up.
Thanks for reading!
Semper Fidelis,
Manuel Perez
I came across an interesting article today that is from I Love Photo Blogs. The article titled 46 Things I Have Learned About Photo Blogs contains some very interesting information for Photography Bloggers either just getting started or have been around for a long time. I considered the information very helpful because it gives a lot of great tips on what you should and shouldn’t be doing with your Photography Blog.
One that I found interesting was number 3 which says, “Photographers that don’t list a biography are missing great opportunity to connect with their viewers.†I thought this was a great point because I looked at my About Page and realized there isn’t anything really about me in there and I haven’t updated it since I started the page after I encountered some errors on the previous one.
I decided I am going to come up with a great introduction or Biography for you readers to check out on my About Page. I apologize for not doing this sooner but as most of you don’t know, I work as a full-time Network Engineer in a school district, so my free time is usually spending it with family and just trying to enjoy life.
I will keep you all posted on how things are going!
Thanks for reading!
Semper Fidelis,
Manuel Perez
Recently, I made some changes to my feedburner setup. This causes the issue of only being able to see a small amount of content from each post. If the reader is interested then they should be able to click on the link to view the entire post by viewing the site. I can switch it back and display all of the content to the subscribers but it would cut down on the hits to the site.
I want to get some feedback from you and see which one you would prefer. I know that my occasional visitors to the actual site this means nothing to you and I am pointing this question towards the subscribers that are reading my content. I want to hear back from you and see which you would prefer.
I think it all is important if you can respond and give me your honest feedback.
Thanks for reading!
Semper Fidelis,
Manuel Perez
