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Other Rambles are listed on the Ramble Index

But it can't be a Midnight Ramble; it's only 11 ayem!

 
But here I am, rambling.

July 5

Watching TV in Angel Fire, New Mexico last week ( even online art rag editors get to vacate sometimes ), I noted with odd fascination that Teddy Roosevelt ( the fourth, inexplicable, face at Mount Rushmore (( that wasn't targeted, after all, in the Independence Day terrorism massacre yesterday — I thought, Hmmm. Why not just blow off his mustache... )) [ sometimes even I get lost in the parentheticals of these long, JR sentences ] used to go on what he called Midnight Rambles.

Anyway, Teddy, when he was chief high mucky-muck at the New York Police before the turn of the 20th Century, used to walk around New York City making sure everything was going alright with the people and the police in the middle of the night. I don't know if I unconsciously copied the term from history or just snatched it out of thin air...
 

Welcome to new members

• multimedia artist Anila Q. Agha, whose images are up but whose text is still awaiting changes
   
• digital artist Paul Rogers Harris, whose copy of Photoshop software is keeping him from sending us his latest works.
   
• The White Rock Lake Artists' Studio Tour, whose page is up but will be expanded and updated before the October event and
   
• sculptor David B. Hickman, whose work will be appearing soon — we hope.
   
• Oh, and my page is now up, too.
   
   

This is the top ten most popular DARts pages for last week. The only surprise is the second page of the NetFlix review in the Movies pages. NetFlix is an online DVD rental that I have subscribed to twice.

I wrote the review at least six months ago. It's not new. It's sort of like the most popular page on JR's Collection was, for many months, the one with a scan of a postcard of my favorite Toulouse-Lautrec painting, "A Montrouge" - Rosa La Rouge," 1886-87. It's got nothing to do with Dallas, and the NetFlix review has hardly anything to do with art. Yes, I know movies were the art form of the last century and all. But...

The other entries in the top ten pages are no surprise. Click on any of the ten in the above graphic to see what those pages are.

  

I keep discovering new ways to learn new information from Earthlink's website feedback data page. Yesterday, I discovered, for the first time realizing ...

... an actual ranking list of hits to member pages.

The above list is for one week. The most recent week I could get stats for. Dates noted at the top right of the graphic. These ranking change often. This is merely a one-time snapshot for a ranking I can, at least partially, explain. Sort of.

I and other Dallasites had been promoting Joe Stanco's page, primarily because he died last month. That explains his page's largish popularity this week, although it's been a popular page ever since I detached that information from the cover.

Richard Ray has a show listed on the calendar, and for a couple days, I had another pic of his sending additional hits to his member page from somewhere I now forget.

Ken Shaddock's outrageous work continues its immense popularity for fairly obvious reasons, although it is only linked ( from this site, anyway ) in one place. I should note that Ken recently sold $1,200 worth of his work to a collector who found it on Ken's member pages here. Before that sale, Ken was worried that he couldn't afford to frame his work. Now he can buy frames, and maybe update some software.

Ms. Ramirez is in a show, and I try to always link calendared DARts members in shows to their member pages. When I was in Angel Fire and couldn't go out and take new pictures of Dallas art, I put my photo of the James Crowe piece that was in the recent 500X Open Show on the cover, just to change it up some.

Art Shirer got himself — and his page — listed on a kinetic art site somewhere. He's always promoting himself or his friends via E-mail and over the net. If more people did this, DARts would become more popular, and specific member pages would get a lot more hits ( hint, hint. )

The second Joe Stanco page was where I put his obituary and list of memorial events after those left the cover. The events have all passed, so it's just an obit and picture page now.

Which is about as far down that list as I can explain.

Members, please, if you're in a show anywhere in the known universe, E-mail me and tell me about it, so I can list the event — and so I will have yet another reason to place a small, subtle (?) link to your membership page.

I should perhaps note that I finally figured out that since DARts Membership Pages were such an incredible deal and opportunity, even I should have one. So now, finally, I do. But I have not promoted it in any way, except to list it on the Member Page Index.

 

This graphic compares the popularity of various Directory Trees. On Mac, we call them folders. On PC you say directories. More than 80% of DARts readers use PCs. 100% of DARts Editors use Macintoshes. I was amazed to see my lowly, and rarely linked or promoted Small Sculpture in Texas suite of pages listed at the top. Astounded, even.

SSiT — the fourth scribly entity from the right in the nav bar atop almost every DARts page — started life as an idea by my dear friend, the late American poet and artist Gerald Burns ( who is amply represented on these pages, beginning with a sub Index of his presence here. ).

After years of work, it became a manuscript that was proofread by nearly everybody I knew in the late 80s. The resulting, one, single volume was carefully hand-bound then lost ( I hope not forever ).
 

(( Brief Descent into Technobabble

Luckily, everything was on one of my earlier Macintoshes, backed up on a SyQuest removable drive, then transferred to the technology that followed when Zip disks ( first 100 megabytes each, now 250 megs ) killed SyQuest ( 45 megabytes ), and finally onto a CD-ROM ( first 650, now 700 megs ). When DVDs (4.7 gigabytes one side / 9.4 gigs both sides ) get cheaper to burn, SSiT and everything else I've backed onto CDs will go there ( A single 4.7 gigs offers as much storage as more than six, 700 meg CD-ROMs ). And I'm sure, by then, there'll be yet another new technology to yearn for. ))

Two years ago, I began putting the book on DallasArtsRevue.com. For a long time, there were no photographs. Slowly, painstakingly, I found the old photo images and upgraded them to web values. More photos are still needed. But SSiT is what it is. I sometimes even add 3-D art stories to the collection.

For many months, almost nobody ever visited those pages. I began the long process of abandoning hope that anyone would ever read it. Last week, 952 people looked at one page each. Or one person looked at 952 pages. It's hard to tell with this skeletel data. But the average number of pageviews per person is probably still one.

But I am joyed. Maybe I should begin promoting it again.

 

On 625 occasions last week alone, people clicked on a link, and, instead of getting whisked through the internet aether to where they expected to get browsed to, they got 404ed.

The dreaded, 404 - Page Not Found warning means the editor ( Whom else can I blame? ) has linked a page or paragraph to a word or phrase on the same or 'nother page, then moved or deleted or name-changed the link's target. Tracking down those misplaced link connections is one of the most difficult jobs a webguy faces.

I used to get a page full of bad links every Thursday morning. Actually, I still get them, from the same people who parse the pages, so the Search This Site links work as well as they do. Fantastically well, I believe. I like this way of searching this site so well that I use it a dozen or so times every week.

This site has grown like Topsy. Lurching from one organizational method ( madness ) to the next. With each new concept of How This Site Should Be Organized, I want to reorganize everything that's already up. But I can't, because of all those links scattered over the site — and all those Bookmarks and Favorites listed on DARts visitor's browsers. I dare not move anything anyone already knows where to find.

So DARts has all these arcane organizational theories in one sort of action or another. Plus JR's latest brainstorms upon Simplicity. And they're all codified, if not exactly organized, on the DARts Index page ( first scribble on the left in the nav bar. )

Anyway, I still get a list of mislinkers from Master.Com every week. Except now, they only list maybe five ( This week it is five. ) bad links. And I know there's a lot more of them out there. A lot more.

Art Shirer sent me a dozen or so a few weeks ago when Master.Com listed two. I checked using an ancient program called Big Brother ( shareware from 1996 — ice ages ago in Internet time ) a few days after Art's E-mail, and I found a hundred more, and I only checked the more popular pages.

According to Master.Com, DARts now comprises 438 pages, which weighs in at 4,624,609 bytes. Master.Com says I only have 5 errors and 1 duplicates ( sic ) page. I'd complain, but their Search This Site utility is essential to my well being.

So, what I have to do is check a whole bunch more pages with Big Brother. A major time and energy consuming process. Big Brother doesn't fix anything. It just lists every link on every page and highlights the ones it can't find links from. Then I have to check those, one at a time, till I find the real mislinks. Not a fun process, and I'm here for the fun.

Oh, it'll probably be worth it, if I can whittle down those damned 404s.

Eight or nine months ago, when I first started attacking this problem. The 404 rate was at 15%. So this week's paltry 2.1% is a significant improvement, but 625 is way too many. I want visitors here to enjoy and learn so much every time they visit that they'll visit often and oftener.

I don't even know what are the 304, 206, 400, 403 or 301 Status/Errors are about, or I'd have to get all worted up about them, too...

 

Thanks to your popular demand, these pages will be publicly linked after they've been up for awhile.

But please don't give out the URL ( web address ) for the current Ramble. It's a benefit of membership I'd like to keep exclusive to you, until I decide to do othewise. ) Eventually, I'll make them all — but the most recent edition — public.

 

Dallas Arts Revue's Calendar now lists Dallas artists' participation in exhibitions and lectures anywhere, not just in the Dallas area.

The listing is at the top of the constantly changing Calendar, and it's a marvelous place to put pictures. So if you, or anybody you know is in a show anywhere, please E-mail me with full information, including:

• Title of show
• names of Dallas artists
• opening time and dates
• through date — This is very important, because DARts lists events chronologically by through ( end ) date
• gallery or art space name and address and phone number
• city and state or country

This is the same information ( except the data in green ) needed for any and all calendar events. Even DARts members — you — constantly amaze me by submitting calendar events without one vital bit or another. The most common exclusion is the through date, without which I cannot list your events in the DARts Calendar.

To include a picture, please communicate with me before you send anything. I have certain specifications and rules, so my E-mail is not blocked by too many or too-large pictures.

 

Now, for those few who've read this far, you get to look at my vacaion slides.

It's colorful, opinionated, and there might even a little bit of art thrown in, and it'll take at least several mintues to download. Not sure whether this is a first prize or last, but I've been needing someplace to link this extravaganza. So here it is.

Lucky you.

 

 

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