Sunshine Award / Beautiful Blogger Award

My nature blog English Wilderness recently received a double award from Mom To The Power Of Three. The two awards are the Sunshine Award and the Beautiful Blogger Award.

As usual I've tried to trace both awards back to their origin. Unfortunately I reached a dead end on both counts. After following the links for the Sunshine Award I reached a dead end at Counting Coconuts in January 2010. I managed a little further for the Beautiful Blogger Award, finally reaching a post on Rose of Sharon in February 2008.

The Sunshine Award is awarded to bloggers whose positivity & creativity inspires others in the blogworld. The Beautiful Blogger Award is for creativity, originality, and overall contribution to the blogging community. Here are the rules for the awards:

• Post the award on your blog.
• Nominate 12 of your favourite blogs for the award.
• Share 7 interesting things about yourself.

Here are my twelve nominees:

1. My Quality Day
2. The Everyday Adventurer
3. The Virtual Dime Museum
4. Beloved Eleanor
5. The Ancient Digger
6. Dark Novels
7. Poetic Shutterbug
8. Emm in London
9. A Postcard a Day
10. My Journey
11. Dance of Dreams
12. Red Pine Mountain

Now for 7 things about myself:

1. I'm obsessed with collecting things: retro computers, series of books, even photos of bugs! If I can find a list I love to tick everything off.
2. Apart from nature photography I'm interested exploring caves, computer programming, early British history, hiking and text adventure games.
3. I love reading gothic and dystopian novels. A few of my favourites include The Wanting Seed, The Lair of the White Worm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
4. The scariest thing I remember is waking up in a cave one night and seeing something lurking in the shadows.
5. I feel sorry for ugly teddy bears and often end up buying them.
6. I started writing a children's book 19 years ago and I still haven't finished.
7. I'm hopeless at playing musical instruments but that doesn't stop me trying ;-)

Thanks again to Mom to the Power of Three for the award.

A New Photo Blog: 6 Week Review

Six weeks ago I started the Daily Photo Gallery blog to share a few photos of the places I visit. The time has come to take a closer look at the stats. Has Daily Photo Gallery been a success?

For the first week I posted on a regular basis until I reached 5 posts. Then I started to promote using CMF Ads, Twitter and Stumbleupon. I also added a link to the blogroll on English Wilderness and regularly commented on other blogs. Here are the stats so far:

• Pagerank: Unranked
• Alexa: 589670
• Visitors: 1622
• Bounce Rate: 85%
• Posts made: 22
• Comments: 60
• Adsense earnings: £1.58
• CMF Earnings: $0.35
• CMF Spent: $2.15
• Followers: 16
• Listed by Google: 29 Jan

I'm pretty happy with the visitors I've received and how well everyone has responded to the new blog. Lets take a look at where some of the visitors are coming from:

1. 432 - CMF Ads
2. 201 - Stumbleupon
3. 141 - Google
4. 90 - Along for the Ride
5. 18 - Twitter

Here are the most popular posts by number of visitors:

1. Sheep Don't Know the Green Cross Code
2. Two Seasons, One Picture
3. Votive Offering to Mithras
4. Cheddar Man in Gough's Cave
5. The River Witham From Boston Stump

From looking at the stats there are a couple of conclusions I can draw. First, the number of visitors received from CMF and Stumbleupon far outweighs the amount of time invested. Second, photos of the weird and wonderful seem to attract the most traffic.

What tips do you have for a new blog?

My Entrecard Inbox After Removing the Widget!

Here's a screenshot of my Entrecard inbox showing the drops I received after removing the widget 5 days ago. It shouldn't be possible to appear in my inbox. How exactly did you drop on me?

This blog has never been very active in Entrecard. I wonder how many ghost drops an active blog receives?

Are any ghost droppers appearing in your inbox?

Entrecard Experiment - Who's Cheating the System?

Entrecard is a controversial network for bloggers. Members place a widget on their blog and visit other blogs to click the drop box. Dropping leaves a calling card and earns credits to spend on advertising.

The benefits and disadvantages have been discussed elsewhere so I won't repeat them here. For this blog the benefit has been minimal, so I've removed Entrecard to make more space available for CMF Ads.

However I haven't deleted my account. I suspect certain Entrecard users are gaming the system by using a program to click the drop box without visiting blogs! Over the next couple of days I'll make a note of who's still leaving a calling card in my inbox and possibly cheating the system.

Update: After 7 days I've received 27 ghost drops despite removing the widget!