Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Those Austin folks sure know how to show hospitality!
Pam (Digging), MSS (Zanthan Gardens), Diana (Sharing Nature’s Garden) and Bonnie (Kiss of Sun) hosted nearly 40 garden bloggers from 12 states at the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling. They spent months organizing tours of public and private gardens, soliciting prizes and gifts for welcome packages and communicating all the details about the event. They even offered their guest rooms and drove us all around Austin from garden to nursery to restaurant. I can’t imagine how many hours went into planning this event for a bunch of virtual strangers.
Laura (Greenfish Artist and Gardener), Diana (Sharing Nature’s Garden) and Kathy (Cold Climate Gardening)
Pam told me that when they first thought of the idea the big question was, “Do you think anyone would come?” Well, it seems to me that the question for next year’s organizing team should be “How will we deal with all the people who will come?” Because I can guarantee that come hell or high water I’ll be there. And after all the photos that I and the other garen bloggers will be showing you over the next few days, you’ll want to start a garden blog (if you don’t have one) so you can join us.
You know, I almost didn’t go? But when Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening mentioned in an email (yes, bloggers communicate off-blog too) that she was going, I couldn’t pass up the chance to meet her and so many of the other people I feel like I have come to know, just a bit.
Susan (Garden Rant), Suzanne (Verte), Vicki (Playin’ Outside) and Gail (Clay and Limestone)
Still, heading into this event I felt like I was going on a blind date–with 40 people. Would I have to talk about plants in their Latin names the whole time? What if someone asked me a gardening question and I couldn’t answer?
Well, I needn’t have worried. And, really, I did already “virtually” know some of the folks.
Among those folks that I “virtually” knew, I “actually” met Laura, from Greenfish Artist and Gardener. I had purchased three fabulous watercolors from Laura’s Etsy store and learned we share a love of tea.
Diana and Dee (Red Dirt Ramblings)
I also met Dee from Red Dirt Ramblings. I remember when Dee started her blog and have always admired her country home.
There was also Elizabeth and Susan (another Maryland gardener!) from Garden Rant, one of my favorite blogs because of its provocative posts.
And, of course, I met Kathy, who reminded me to go, and also Carol from May Dreams Gardens. I was grateful that Carol didn’t seem to think I am a raving lunatic for leaving a huffy post about the responsibility of owning a dog in response to her comparing getting a tree to getting a puppy. Or maybe she did think I’m a raving lunatic, but she’s just too nice to let it show. (Now that I think about it, she did mention it.)
So what are garden bloggers like? Well, as it turns out, all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all our gardens (and children) are above average.
Thanks again to all my new friends from Spring Fling!
Robin
Colleen V. at In the Garden Online established these awards to recognize excellence in “online gardening.” You can vote for for up to three of your favorite blogs in each category by going here. There are categories in:
-Best writing
-Best photography
-Best design
-Most innovative
-Blogger you’d most like as a neighbor
-Best gardening podcast
-Best North American blog
-Best international blog
-Best new blog
-Post of the year
-Garden blog of the year
-Best forums
-Best gardening site of the year
I already have most of my nominations decided. But it’s not too late for you to woo me with cookies and pies to submit your blog. I can be bought we sweets! I’ll wait until near the deadline to send in my votes so you don’t have to pay for FedEx to get all the treats to me in time.
We all need to get our votes in by April 13. Don’t worry. You’ll still have two days to do your taxes!
And while you’re voting, don’t forget to have your say about blog posts on garden products here on Bumblebee. The poll is in the upper right hand corner of this page.
Now go vote!
Robin
I have to admit that when I first heard about Blotanical, my first thought was “Oh, great. Something else to keep up with.”
With more than 75 blogs in my Google Reader, I already have a difficult time keeping up with the reading. I mean, if I read everything I wanted to read, I wouldn’t have time to write. Or have a job. Or bathe. Or eat.
After a few emails about it, I finally wandered over, logged on and created my “plot,” the profile of yourself, your gardening experience and link to your blog. I poked around for a bit and that was that.
When I started getting the “You’ve been faved” and “Someone likes you! They really really do!” emails, I thought, what’s going on over there anyway?
So I finally started poking around in the past couple of weeks. At first, I was a little confused about what went where because the menu bars changed depending on where you were. I also kept getting a white screen when I went to the “Picks” page, which confused me further until I stumbled across a message that explained it was also confusing to the developer, Stuart Robinson, an apparently very energetic fellow from Australia.
It took me days and days before I figured out how I could add to the “Picks.” (If you are also confused, there is a submenu under “Picks” where you go to “Current List.” Here you can click on a post and “Pick” if it you like it. Pick mine.)
Users get points and rise to levels, which apparently gives them some sort of privileges–Blotanist, Patron Blotanist, Fellow Blotanist, Master Blotanist and Guru Blotanist. I figured this out when I tried to add to my favorites and hit my limit. “Sorry!” Apparently I have to earn more points to have more favorites.
After scratching my head over this for a while, I have to say I like it. I’m now conflicted between keeping up (a laughable concept, really) with my Google Reader or Blotanical. My Google Reader has more than gardening blogs, which is the conundrum. But if I keep up by reading in Blotanical, I can earn more points and add to my favorites. Plus, I can see a lot more of what is posted in the gardening world than I would see in my reader. I mean, here it is at 5:30 p.m. on a Sunday and already there are more than 75 posts. You can really get carried away with the whole blogging thing, can’t you?
One of the features I like is the map, which allows you to zero in on a geographic area and find other garden bloggers. It takes a bit of manipulation with the zoom keys, but you can see who else on Blotanical is near you. Sadly, there appear to be no other garden bloggers near me in Southern Maryland, although there are several in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
Well, so I suppose I’ll see you on Blotanical. Send me a message and I’ll send you a message so you can send me a message. We’ll be racking up our points.
I wonder if we can trade our points in for prizes? I need a new fountain for my garden. I wonder how many points I could trade for that?
Oh. If someone knows how to get the picture of your blog updated in Blotanical, can you let me know? My new design isn’t showing up. I don’t want to bother busy Stuart if I don’t have to. He must be exhausted.
Robin
Kris at Blithewold recently passed along the E is for Excellent award to Bumblebee…
She said that she particularly appreciated the discussions of public gardens and parks and the encouragement given to go, enjoy, learn.
Thanks, Kris, for the recognition! As you know, blogging is a labor of love, but it’s also sweet to get compliments–and comments from readers too.
Apparently I get to pass along the award now, so I want to recognize the quartet of writers at Gardening Gone Wild. Nan, Fran, Saxon and Steve have been doing an excellent job of writing substantive and thought-provoking posts. I particularly like their design series that encourages reader participation. It’s been some of the most interesting garden blog reading I’ve run across.
Thanks again, Kris. I hope to make it to Blithewold soon! So many gardens…so little time!
BTW, if I could figure out the HTML to get copy to wrap around an image, that big E wouldn’t be so darned big. All the HTML code I’ve tried doesn’t work. Grrrrr. I don’t win any awards on my clever use of HTML code.
Robin
If you’re seeing this post, that means you’re also seeing the new Bumblebee Blog design!
As a beginning blogger I was happy to discover SquareSpace for hosting. Their intuitive interface was just what I needed to make me feel comfortable while I learned the basics. I also liked the fact that SquareSpace offered domain mapping–meaning that I could have my own unique URL rather than one that was part of the blog host’s name. But although I really loved the many designs that SquareSpace offered, they were–after all–just templates. The new design is uniquely mine.
See the woman gardening at the top? That’s me! (Don’t I look great?) The little dogs are, of course, my Papillons, Sophie and Sarah. The kitty cat is Miss P. (Pish, the fish, is still in the house. In his bowl.)
Please notice that when you click each page on the menu signs, the little bee follows you around. How cute is that? And for those of you who have visited before, do you recognize the white picket fence?
Hey! There’s a survey feature in the top right-hand corner! Now, I own a marketing research company and spend a good chunk of my time doing marketing research, so I’ll be the first to admit that this is what I call drive-by-shooting research. It’s not scientific. But it’s fun. And it might, over time, tell me a bit about the people who visit here.
Also, on the right is a random photo from the photo albums. These are photos of my garden as well as my travels to garden or other places. I also have a few family and friends shots. If you click on the photo, it’ll take you to a larger verison of the photo and more information about the shot. Well, to be honest, there’s not much in the way of information right now. But there will be!
My hope is that the new design better reflects who I am and what this blog is all about. Appreciating nature, good food, friends and travel. And I hope you can tell I appreciate fun and laughter!
Thank you to Lucia and Peter at The Blog Studio for plugging away at the design and technical pieces while we got this site launched. They’re the best!
Now, much of the content was imported from SquareSpace. I will be updating non-functional links and tweaking the fonts here and there. If you see any glaring issues or non-functionality, please let me know.Hey, even if you don’t see any glaring issues, let me know what you think!
Robin
Since I started looking at the statistics for Bumblebee Blog and the search terms that bring people here I have learned quite a lot.
For example, I have learned that if you post anything this time of year about Christmas gifts, even if it is about wacky gag gifts to your little brother, people will find you during the holidays with search terms such as “useful Christmas gifts,” “gifts for my bro” and “best Christmas gifts” and even “spiritual Christmas gifts for my mom.” My blog traffic has increased exponentially during this holiday season because of the goofy story about giving my brother gifts such as taxidermy and nose-picking garden trolls. I hope the silly gift exchange with my brother didn’t offend the folks looking for religious gifts!
I have also learned that if all you care about in blogging is the number of people clicking on your URL, make sure you use racy, sexy titles and phrases. You don’t have to use a lot. Just a few here and there will work just fine. After the comment exchange from my original post, People Google the Strangest Things, in which people mentioned some unintentionally provocative post titles such as “Wet and Wild” (about plants) and “Naked Gardening” (about the bareness of the garden), I started getting numerous hits for search terms such as “naked Greek people.”
Hoh! Not here!
Sue at the Balcony Garden attracted a Googler’s attention when they were looking for “Sex in the Beautiful Garden.” It landed that person at a story about the mating habits of the leopard slug!
Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots writes informative and detailed posts about such things as the foundation of his 325-year-old house in Amsterdam and weed burners. Nevertheless, the largest number of hits he has received was from a light hearted post about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
Carol at May Dream Gardens posted a Top Ten list of how people find her blog. It’s mostly plant related, but if you go back to the story she wrote around this time last year about blogging search terms, you’ll find some amusing search terms that landed them at her informative blog.
Thanks to fellow bloggers who posted related stories. Please visit them at:
Balcony Garden
Bifurcated Carrots
May Dream Gardens
On a related note, I was curious that some of the commenters on the original story said that they don’t know how to check their blog statistics or search terms. Although I am by no means an expert in this area, I will say that if your blog hosting service doesn’t provide this information you can probably add it fairly easily.
Two services I have tried are Google Analytics and StatCounter. I prefer StatCounter because it provides much more detailed information, including the geographic location of visitors, their paths through your blog, statistics about length of time visiting and repeated versus first-time visitors. The drawback of StatCounter is that if you get a significant traffic you may have to pay for additional storage.
To track statistics using either of these services takes a minimum of expertise to accomplish. To get started, generally you must sign up with the service, generate some HTML code and paste it into your blog in an HTML editor. I pasted mine into a widget in the menu bar so that it is automatically inserted into each page someone visits. Then you simply log into the service to see how things are going.
Happy blogging!
Robin
Occasionally I’ll look back through how people arrived here at Bumblebee Blog.
Apparently, I have inadvertently been luring unwitting Googlers here who were searching for things about bumblebees since a great number of the Google search words are just Bumblebee or Bumble Bee. I have a hard time believing that all these folks heard about Bumblebee Blog from their pals and rushed to Google to find out what all the excitement was about. It makes me think that perhaps I should actually write something about bumblebees sometime soon so they aren’t all disappointed when they land here.
A while back, I had dozens and dozens of people arriving here via a website that linked directly to the story about my visit to Graceland. When I tracked it down, it was some fellow’s website in Greek! I couldn’t find the reference to me or to Graceland and am still baffled why a bunch of Greek-reading Googlers would want to read about my visit to the home of The King. Perhaps it was my fake photo gazing adoringly at Elvis. I like to think that perhaps I have an uncanny resemblance to some Greek movie star or supermodel and that all these folks were checking me out. In reality, I probably look like someone’s cousin or something.
Some of the Google searches and the stories they find actually make sense, such as my blog post on the miracle plant food challenge where I compared SuperThrive and Miracle Gro plant foods.
A huge number of people arrived here looking for a recipe for Italian Cream Cake, although a lot also arrived at the very same story by searching “bird birthday cake” or “happy birthday Italian.” Happy birthday Italian? What’s that supposed to mean?
Quite a lot of people find my story about the ugly parts of my garden by searching on images for sky pencil holly. There are so many those hits that one time I did the same search. It’s no wonder they link here. My sky pencil holly arrangement really does showcase the plant better than the other photos on the Google search. Nanna nanna booboo.
Some of the Google search strings are just plain funny, such as the person searching for “November 2007 Weird Events” that took them to my guest blogger Sophie’s story about my inadvertently picking up a hitchhiker. I wonder what kind of weird events that person was searching for? UFOs? Darwin Award material?
By the way, that story also contained a rather lengthy list of things for me to do that weekend. Someone else found that story the same way by searching “Mom ToDo List.” WHAT? They don’t have enough things on their own list, they need to search for someone else’s?
In an ironic twist, I seem to be attracting bunches and bunches of knitters who Google such phrases as “how to monogram knitting,” “Italian knitting needles” and “$100 knitting needles” and—get this—“knitting mushrooms.” These folks landed on the story about my misadventures trying to learn to knit—and how I re-purposed my knitting needles to prop up the humidity tent on my new mushroom patch. Imaging getting all these eager knitters when I am a knitting moron. Hehe.
One of the most popular search strings is “mung bean sprouts,” which takes people to a short post on the benefits of sprouting mung beans. Who knew there was such a dearth of information on the World Wide Web about sprouting mung beans—and such a demand?!?
Two people, one searching “Christmas hair highlights,” and another searching “blond man hair” found the story about my otherwise uber-masculine brother-in-law’s preoccupation with his hair style. I am QUITE sure that Captain and his “man bag” is not what they had in mind.
Then one guy Googled “little girl tongue.” I don’t even want to THINK about what he was looking for. What he found was a photo of my little dog Sophie after a bath with her tongue sticking out. (It doesn’t fit all the way in her mouth.) Probably not what he had in mind. Serves him right. The creep.
Finally, I’m intrigued that so many people visit my photo album and linger over photos of my family. I posted them as a convenient place to share with my far-away relatives as well as to keep some of my favorites organized in one place. But people are apparently pretty interested in photos of us in Greece, sailing or hanging out in the yard. I read once that when burglars break into homes it is not uncommon for them to take time to peruse the photo albums that might be laying about. Perhaps it’s all part of the same curiosity about other people’s lives?
Now I’m wondering, what Google search strings have taken people to your blog? If you write a blog entry on the topic, let me know by, say, December 5, I’ll do a roundup with all the links. Should be good for a laugh or two, eh?
Robin
