In a mind boggling month (August), my individual daily visitor count leapt from a nice, manageable, comfortable average site-wide figure of around 4 - 500 people with an average bandwidth usage of around 5 or 6 KB's, to a fairly surprising figure of between 650 and 1000 a day and 14 GB's of bandwidth.

Why?

In July, Google Images sent 1262 visitors to the site. In August: 4846. Somehow I've been bumped up in the google image search ranking system. The results have been quite astonishing and I almost feel a little violated. Like there are lots of grubby little hands pulling at my jpegs. I have always wanted to share my images but I have only received maybe 3 or 4 emails this past month from people who have actually bothered to ask about using images for their projects (and I thank you all very much). I know that by putting them here they do become - almost - public property, and that no-one is really going to pay any attention to the Creative Commons license that all my work is registered under. But I really wish people would exercise some grace and drop a line so I can at least see how my work is being used. And if you are one of those naughty people I am speaking directly and I am making you feel guilty then why don't you at least go and vote for me at Photoblogs.org! But drop an email too, please. It really doesn't take much...

Anyway, I've been emailing my hosts to discuss this overnight issue of bandwidth and I have looked at a few options. The best way to pay for it may be by including google ad's on my blog and gallery pages. These are advertiser links specific to the content on your page, and everytime someone clicks, I get a little advertising revenue. My hosts tell me it can be quite lucrative, with one of the big sites they host receiving $250 USD a month from Google. I am also going to look into that terribly tacky "paypal donation" option. I have always thought it quite cheeky to ask people to make donations but now that all this traffic is actually going to bump my own expenses up quite a lot, I am not ashamed to give it try.

So, when I get a chance you'll be seeing some small changes around here. Actually, I have also had a chance to check out the site on some different computers this week and oh god! my CSS is so clunky - in some non-firefox browsers everything gets all screwy, like the links being some tiny bold font, and the sidebars not sitting where they're supposed to. So please, all of you! If you haven't already been converted, give Mozilla Firefox a try. It's a beautiful browser and I know it renders my site properly.

Finally, I have started on the Shimoda report but I haven't finished it yet and I really must get to bed so I can drag my sorry-arse out of bed at 6.45 am tomorrow goddamn morning. In the meantime, I did get around to uploading the Shimoda / Ohama / Soto Uraguchi beach pics here so please check them out and come back and read the story to go with it in a few days.... (i hope....)

Finally, a special mention for my dear friend Narissa, who emailed me last week with some special news. She has just become the official entertainment booker at Sydneys Metro, after managing and booking The Zoo (my old job) for the past 2 years. Congratulations, baby. You go, you good thing! Just remember to breathe.