John Ratcliff's Weblog

Wow, it is just fascinating reviewing the referrals that come to my website. As I previously noted, the majority of the hits here are coming from keyword searches; most of them from image requests. Here is the number one photograph that causes people to come to my site. The name of the image is 'ball3.jpg'. Were people searching on pornography to find it!? It is a photograph I took of a disco ball suspended from my pontoon boat at sunset while floating peacefully on Lake Saint Louis. I can only imagine that as these people were scanning some image search or another this brilliant image sticks out. Now, all of the links that used to go to my photographs are dead so it will take a while for them to migrate to the new server. Some searches were clearly trolling for porn, with keywords like 'girlfriend blog' and such. However, what induced me to post a message tonight was an interesting search entry. Someone had typed my name 'John Ratcliff' with the word 'Ageia...

I am now beginning the slow process of replacing missing links... My ISP finally took down the server that has been hosting all of my photographs for the past several years. I have moved the bulk of the photographs to a new webserver, but it is going to take me quite some time to manually repair all of the links from previous blog entries. I went to a lot of time and effort to get all those photographs up there and incorporate them into my blog entries so I don't want them to sit dead for all this time. I recently added a new webcounter to my site that shows 'referrers links'. I'm glad I did because it put my mind at ease about all of the visitors that come by this site. Most of them come from either Google searches on various phrases or, more often, from image searches. It seems that today image browsing is now becoming a major way to draw traffic to a site. Some of the Google search phrases can be amusing, but since I ramble on about so many things here none of it is ...

I wrote a very long blog entry, much of which contains book reviews of what I read during my lengthy travels. Before I get into that long boring stuff, I figured I will upload my photographs first since that is all most anybody wants to see anyway. I am going to really test out the blogger photo hosting service by just uploading all of these directly to their site. When they got uploaded they were arranged in reverse chronological order; not that I think it is very important anyway. All of these photographs have higher resolution versions if you click on them. This first picture is the last one I took on Sunday after my visit to Chateau de Vincennes . I tried going to the Pompidu centre and to the Grand Palace, but in both cases the lines were so long to get in that it wasn't practical. Instead I went the end of the metro line to Chateau de Vincennes and walked the grounds. The Church and the Castle are staggering. It would have been incredible to go inside but everything was all c...