“Is it raining there yet?” Pa Wetzel was phoning in from someplace. N.B.: Ashton cigar for lunch. Not that great.
1) Wasn’t raining and the morning was clear, blue sky, promising to be as hot as could be.
2) I took a short track version of the trail, needing to hit the bank and the P.O., and thinking, after a few minutes on the trail, I was frying my brains. Got myself confused about time zone and phone appointment, though, and figure it out – albeit – almost too late.
3) I took a call while I was walking, and I’m sure the ear bud wasn’t obvious to people passing me on my left side. Looked like I was talking to myself, as I conversed with a Gemini about charts, Mercury & Mars. I caught myself gesturing with my arms while walking and talking. Just another freakazoid?
4) Redneck heaven, a hotlink, a giant cup of coke, and a lottery ticket. The guy behind the counter was smiling, “No man, it’s not really hot, it’s all in your head,” was how he started out.
5) Thunder and rain. Just in time for rush hour. Thunder boomers echoed through downtown. “Rain? Here? Not a chance,” what I said earlier in the day, to Pa Wetzel.
And now? The big picture, from Greg, from the last Mars Retrograde:
Bandwidth = $$$; ISBN = $$$
I was looking at Bubba’s stats. Last month, he put almost a gig of text and data down the pipes from the whore. While that’s a lot, it represents littler less than 20% allotted to that account.
I’ve done a number sites with that service/company, devota dot org, cranky amy dot com, the now-offline dominatrix site, and several commercial concerns.
Through prudent trimming, plus the onerous addition of paid subscriptions, I’ve dropped my bandwidth requirements, from a high of well-over 6 gigs in a month to a little less than 3 gigs these days.
Think that’ll change much? I’m not sure. I’m not doing any advertising. Less than 5% of my site’s traffic is generated by outside referrals, which means that the most folks are either getting this from a bookmark or word-of-mouth.
I tried to switch servers last spring. My experiment with cheap hosting failed miserably. There was a little problem with the host’s downtime. Not much good to have a website if it’s not accessible, like, 50% of the time.
That sucked.
The host I keep coming back to, though, I’ve had nothing but excellent luck with them thus far. The problem?
Bandwidth.
Their monthly limit on throughput is 5 gigs. While I’m well under that these days, a single link from a high-traffic portal could bounce me over that in a single day.
Plus, and I’ve been thinking about this for a while, the pictures eat up a lot of space on the server. While I’ve got two cameras now, that doesn’t mean that the web pictures have to be larger. Plus there is untold megabytes of useless images, and even some stuff that’s not linked, still drifting in back directories on the server. Way too much crap to clean up.
It’s not like I don’t have a lot of other details I’m concerned with keeping track of.
Got another ten day or so before the ISBN numbers arrive. In self-publishing, it’s possible to get into all the big book catalogs by purchasing ISBNs. Did it, but I couldn’t see that it was worth the extra $100 – $100 I don’t have – to have the numbers “rushed.”
I started the romance text, as a book, under orders from an editor, back in 1997. For years, it was a leisurely task, filling it in as I had a chance, especially when I had a particularly good example presented by clients.
Back then, I was also planning on answering each and every romance question by writing another entry. Nice idea, didn’t work.
Couple of years ago, I fleshed the rest of it, and left it up here for a while. It was never intended to be a web reference, though, it was written to be a book. Why it was titled “experimental.”
Shopped that text out to a few agents, never had a nibble. One agent suggested he was great at selling astrology & horoscopes, but he never made it by, like he promised.
So the book will launch, just as soon as everything gets itself together. Full-bleed cover, too. With a real ISBN, the new imprint, “astrofish.net press.”
But damn, these efforts are running the bills up again. I was all set to cut up another credit card when I realized that I could, actually, get the ISBN deal handled. Right away. Or, in ten days, anyway.
I’m averaging two requests per day for access to the current weekly scopes, for free. Makes me wonder what folks are thinking. While that book text started out with an altruistic ideal behind it, the amount of effort that has gone into it? Years of work? I seriously doubt I will ever recoup a fraction of what I put into it. Same problem with the scopes.
$17 is lot to pay for a book that takes six weeks to be delivered. Plus shipping. However, with no big publishing concern to back that book, looks like I’ll have to stick to that price.
In fit of late-night madness, inspired by coffee and two mutable signs (Virgo & Gemini), I had to add two pages of fine print, at the tail end, too. Just couldn’t pass it up.
This reminds of racing motorcycles, that age-old expression, “nothing that cubic dollars can’t fix.” I’m going back to writing horoscopes, makes me a lot less cranky.