No Mod Required

As some of you may be aware, I know a thing or two about collectible comic books. Because of that knowledge, last month I was asked to write a large piece about collectible comics for a magazine from the UK called Rare Book Review. Well, apparently it’s out now and to my surprise my little article is the cover story:

I’ll have the article itself up on my comics site soon and I’ll be sure to link to it when it goes live.

For those of you that don’t use the site, they have this “People you may know” feature on LinkedIn, which basically suggests people who you might know and, presumably, want to connect with. It’s occasionally spot on and I’ve connected with a couple of people by scanning their list of suggestions. Thing is, there’s this one guy that keeps showing up on the list that I absolutely hate (one of the two people I’ve ever worked with in the field that I actually hate) and none of the “no, I don’t want to connect with this guy” options are strong enough for my liking. I’m tempted to use firebug to edit the HTML add my own and see what happens:

Names blocked out to protect the innocent

Okay, ignoring my day job and an ongoing freelance project, the following things are happening to me this month:

• I’ve got an article coming out about collectible comics in a magazine called Rare Book Review. Something like 2000 words, which is the longest piece I’ve had published in a long, long time (this place doesn’t count )
• I’m going to be interviewed this Thursday by Big RED & Shiny: An Art Journal. It’s a graffiti thing. I’m not sure of the details at this point. More info as I get it.
• I’m going to be a panelist April 15 @ Social Apps and Widgets: Building a Social Application for a Top Platform
• I’ll be showing paintings at the Future Arts 2008 Art Exhibition April 19th
• The very next week, on the 26th, I’ll be showing paintings at the Legends of Style, Boston event. For those of you keeping track I’ll have three new mythology paintings done in a large (for me) scale.

Busy month!

From the Shamless Self Promotion Department:

Top Street Style Event Returns to Boston

Legends of Style announces April 26th date
Boston MA, March 27, 2008: Legends of Style, an event based brand showcasing urban art, dance, music and fashion, has partnered with Scion to launch its 2008 series of nation-wide events in Boston. “Our 2008 Boston show will raise the bar “, said
Legends of Style executive producer Kyle Moran. “From the start we have been all about exposing the hottest new artists and our show this year will be no different.” Attracting almost 1,000 attendees per event, Legends of Style is a four-year old
event featuring urban inspired artists, top deejays, dance performances and hot new fashion.

“Scion’s generous support allows us to enhance the event with an entire night dedicated solely to artist appreciation as well as a community focused daytime showcase on Saturday afternoon.” stated Moran. The complimentary Saturday showcase will feature
interactive painting with select artists, a Scion painting exhibition and a b-boy workshop with members of the renowned Floorlords Urban Dance Theater. With top local, national and international artists already confirmed Legends of Style 2007
promises to be a highlight of Boston’s art and culture event calendar.

Legends of Style 2008 - Boston
April 26th at the Boston Center for the Arts
Afternoon Showcase 12:00 - 4:00
Main Event - Doors Open at 7pm
Tickets available at www.LegendsOfStyle.net

I’ve got three new mythology paintings in progress for this show. Large (for me) scale, they’ll hopefully stand out in the space

This won’t be fully comprehensive as, well, I’m tired. But, I’m sitting here, drinking some tea and feel the need to drops a few comments about the day.

I started my night with a drink (Hendrick’s gin and tonic) at Rocca. I like that place. The service is good, even for what feels like an “after work” place, and Hendrick’s is always good.

After that we went to meet Tak at the Weekly Dig office, which, it being “last Friday,” was doubling as Space 242. As promised the opening was a fun, fun time. Some interesting art was up and there were plenty of people. Here’s a camera phone photo:

It was nice seeing the full crew. There are still plenty of people involved from way back when so it’s always nice to catch up.

Following that fun little interlude, we headed over to O Ya, the main event for the evening. I’ll have to save the full review for later, but I’ll just say it was everything it was cracked up to be. I had the omakase and it was incredible. One of the best meals I’ve had in the city. Ranging from very good to absolutely sublime, the 15 separate plates kept my chop sticks busy and my palate entertained for nearly two and a half hours.

Wow, I really am tired.

That’ll have to do for now.

More tomorrow?

Maybe. I’ve got the whole menu to go through so that might take a little time to put together properly. 15 dishes is a lot of flavors to sort through

I cleaned out my inbox at work.

Now if I could just purge my mind of some of the times behind some of the messages I deleted I’d be a happier person (and I’m pretty happy to start with )

Just in case you were wondering why things have been slower around here than usual, I’ve been incredibly busy over the past week. I’ve had plenty of day job to go around, plus two freelance web jobs (hi Devin) and one freelance writing gig all come to pass within the past seven days.

More on all of the above as time permits.

The good news is I’ve got just the one freelance gig to go (hi Tom) and then it’s back to business as usual- at least blog wise. I’ve got another Wordpress theme to go through in short order. At least that won’t be stacked on top of three other things.

I know this may not be of interest to anyone but me. Thing is, it’s so interesting to me I’m pretty much forced to share it.
First of all, here’s what two large traffic events do to the charts in Google Analytics:

See any trends there? Me neither. With huge spikes like the ones I received this week and back in August, the day to day and month-to-month trends are flattened out to the point where the charts are useless. Here’s the space in between those two dates:

Look! Trends!

Referrers

Taking the same 3 day period from last year, I received 551 visits via 78 referring (not direct/not search engine) sources. From March 5 through March 7th this year I received 24,270 visits via 228 sources.

To illustrate the concentrated power of the Slashdot link, here I’ve presented the top twenty referrers from the past twelve months. The bold domains are all NEW to the past week:

For what it’s worth, Google.com there at #20 is for the Google homepage and not Google search. Google search, in that same period, generated 136,591 visitors. Google owns my traffic.

Some data transfer numbers

I serve just text (Javascript, CSS and HTML) off of my main web server, I do my best to scale things down code wise and I Gzip most of that content- even still I served 1.18GB of data on Thursday alone. From Wednesday through Friday (the span of the the entire “event”) I served 3.14 GB of text.

Thankfully, I moved all my image hosting over to Amazon S3 a few months ago, because in the three days of the event I served a total of 10.35GB of images*. That’s a little under 1/2 of my normal monthly total.

Third Parties

Compete, sadly, misses the bump in their daily attention graph:

Alexa, however, recognizes the bump, moving me up from around 243,000 last month to 71,014 on Wednesday and finally #32,527 on Thursday.

Multiples

Comparing, arbitrarily, March 6, 2008 to March 6, 2007 we get the following multiples

All the metrics aren’t good, of course. The paltry 1.49 Pages per Visit I got this week kills me, especially when compared to the robust 7.36 I got the same day last year (a drop-off of -79.78% ouch.)

Still, would I take that kind of traffic bump again? Of course, especially if I could get those 13,000 people to all visit 7 pages

*I love S3. That traffic spike cost me all of two bucks. Before, since I was always bursting at the seams with data transfer all of that would have gone into overages and would have cost me some outrageous sum.

I should have these some time before April (sticker guy isn’t super precise on the delivery dates)

Let me know if you want one. Just hit that email link over on the right side and we’ll make it happen. If you’re in the USA, the stamp’s on me

Hit the Deck- SXSW, 2008.3.13 @ Light Bar in Austin, TX

Hit the Deck- Winter Music Conference, 2008.3.28 @ The Catalina Hotel in Miami, FL

FutureArts 2008 April 18 and 19, 2008 @ The Boston Center For The Arts

Two more shows + more info as it comes to me.