Tweak!

I did a few switches in the CSS of my WordPress theme. Primarily, I swapped out the serifed fonts (well, except for my name up there), got rid of some white space between lines, changed some colors, and added a textured background (although this particular one might be a little too dark).

For comparison’s sake, here’s what the Twenty Ten theme looks like as a default.

Let me know if there’s anything else you think I should tweak.

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Battling the fences in baseball

We’re in full swing of baseball and softball season in California. These are probably the two most popular sports in my area of the Golden State outside of football, so I’m busy filming games – two or three games a week in addition to podcasting and blogging and newsletters and story uploading.

And I’ve met my nemesis: The chain link fence.

Every high school ballpark in the area uses chain link fencing for a backstop. And this stuff can be an absolute nightmare to try and film through at the best angles for catching action.

However, there is a way around it. But it comes at a cost.

Following the jump: A little case study of two ways to film a baseball game. Continue reading

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New recommendations page

I’ve added a page that features recommendations written for me.

That is all.

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Let’s play “How well do you know Robert?”

All these places make great wine. But one of these business cards is not like the others...

I was invited by my friend Kristy (If you’re in Sacramento and need a cake baked, talk to her) to a special Irish-oriented wine tasting event in the small Napa Valley town of Rutherford this weekend. I’ll admit I was a bit of a fish out of water:

Me: Wow, I can really taste the oak in this.
Vintner: Sir, that was actually fermented in a stainless steel tank, not an oak barrel.
Me: (awkward pause) Wow, I can really taste the stainless steel in this.

OK, the above conversation didn’t actually happen, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it did.

The photo above are six business cards I got from wineries at the event.

Now, I’m going to show you the opposite side, and see if you can guess which one of these cards grabbed my attention, based on what I do in my day job when I’m not taking a sip of pinot, munching on a piece of cheese, and trying to act like I know what the heck I’m doing when doing so:

Flora Springs, based in St. Helena, grabbed my attention with its use of not only social media links on business cards, but a QR code. The code links to a page on the winery’s website talking about the 100th birthday of the family matriarch. A good way to take the humble business card and attach some unique promotion to it.

I know many of the folks on the advertising side of my paper now have QR codes on their business cards as well.

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The numbers are in…

A few posts back, I wrote the following, part to pay particular attention to is bolded:

So, thus far I’m really excited. Based on some early projections, we’re looking at around a 20 percent YOY growth for the month of February, which is good heading into the spring season, since baseball and softball are traditionally very popular sports in the area.

In case you’re not familiar with the lingo, “YOY” is the acronym for “year-over-year.” In other words, I was expecting that when traffic numbers came in, there would be 20 percent more pageviews on ADVarsity in February of this year compared to February of last year.

Well, the numbers came in. We hit that target, and a little bit more.

The year-over-year growth actually wound up being 35.9 percent for the month of February. If you include mobile traffic (ADVarsity didn’t have a mobile site last February, but does now), the total YOY growth increases to 46.4 percent.

But there’s more to life than pageviews. The YOY growth on unique visitors was 41.4 percent. Total visits went up 21.6 percent.

In short, so far, so good. So very good.

Here’s to March.

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