The Supercargo's Web Log Archive for 2009

24th December

I have tried to create an animated Christmas card as my final Advent offering, but I fear it may not work. Have uploaded a static version as a fallback/failsafe. I'm nearly an hour late, but this is my last change to this site now until January. Merry Christmas! Let's see what I can do with this site in the New Year.

22nd December

Not as quick or easy as I'd hoped to complete today's Advent Offering. In the end, the jigsaw behind Door 23 was Plan B. So it goes.

21st December

A little film of snow falling over the Ramberg and Gothenburg. Filmed in the morning, edited in the afternoon, posted in the evening for the 22nd Day of Advent. Spent the evening otherwise looking over the material I have for the last two days. What shall I use? The translation of Viktor Rydberg's "Tomten" is just not good enough. Save for next year. (I have also put up a page with the text of the Goddess and Green Man poem.)

20th December

Completed and posted a sort of animated film called "The Goddess and the Green Man", making use of a poem I wrote eight years ago. Nice to have done something with it at last. This is my contribution for the 21st Day of Advent, but I'll keep the film up even after.

19th December

Completed and uploaded a new Santa film. I actually recorded most of the film last year, but didn't use the first sequence - Santa cooks up mulled wine (Swedish glögg) spiked with cheap brandy. The candle lighting sequence I did use last year - which is why there are only three candles lit, not the four there should be for the 4th Sunday in Advent. Well, you can't think of everything. The background sounds, as credited, I recorded at Pia & Robban's Chirstmas party this year, all but the Santa speaking in the middle of the film - off the camera mike (not terribly good quality and Santa ought to have a deeper HoHoHo voice, really). The telephone ringing I found on the Internet, a site with sound effects free non-commercial use.

18th December

A problem with the 18th of Advent document - which I discovered on uploading to the Internet at midnight - took me ove ran hour to resolve. So much for my planned for 'early' night! A very basic problem as it happened: the first image of the slide show was called Door.jpg, but should hae been called door.jpg. This evening's upload ought to be smooth, though; the jigsaws all seem to work well. This is my most fiendish to date.

17th December

Second entry for the day. It's a great relief to have completed the 18th page long before it's time to upload it. A slideshow of photos taken during 2009 (with comments and links).

Despite my best endeavours, it is now 17th December - I'm more than an hour late opening this door. Making these two films has been a learning experience. One lesson learned: don't trust that the camera has actually focused automatically, and always check the film you've made giving yourself enough time to re-film - or you'll end up having to use out-of-focus stock as here. (Especially the last shot.) Second lesson: I was surprised how little time the inserted still pictures took up when I watched the film through. Editing the film, I thought they were intrusively long, but watching it I see they could easily have been longer.

15th December

Spent much of the day working on a two-part film of me reading Hansel and Gretel. The first part posted today, the second to be posted tomorrow. (So now you know what's behind door 17 if you've visited here on the 16th!)

14th December

A new jigsaw Christmas card for the 15th Day of Advent.

13th December

Today we wrote our Christmas cards, and it seemed like a good idea to film the event for the Advent calendar. The result was less than thrilling though, so I added some intertitles and then it seemed silly not to go all the way and make the film look "old" ... but I forgot to make it black and white too. Oh well. The reason I'm lighting 3 candles at the beginning is because I made it on Sunday 13th December, also the 3rd Sunday in Advent. Hard to believe there are only 10 days left till Christmas.

12th December

After struggling all day trying to make a java applet work and turn a picture into a 15 tile sliding puzzle, I gave up and made this slideshow of winter pictures instead. To jazz it up a bit, I added falling snow and a link to an MP3 file of "Glans över sjö och strand" (Starlight gleams on lake and shore), a Swedish Christmas carol, record at Pia & Robban's party last year. Tonight (12th December) we're off to this year's party. Maybe some of that will appear on later days. You never know.

11th December

The continuation of the gingerbread house construction story uploaded for 12th Advent. Also major revamp of almost all Advent callendar pages uploaded to date so they all now have a very obvious link back to the front page. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kristina!)

10th December

After a ridiculously long time I have finally managed to complete this how to video about making the parts for a gingerbread house. After this, I have much greater respect for cookery programmes (and cookery programme leaders). Although, of course, those programmes are not one-man productions.

9th December

Back by popular demand (and because I planned it this way), a third jigsaw puzzle. This one using a photo of Gothenburg's Liseberg amusment park's Sagoslottet (Fairy-tale castle) taken by my fellow wannabe author Kristina H. Svensson.

8th December

My niece Cecilia and her friend Emma improvised a music track for a film of some very strange fruit, which I have now posted as the ninth day of my advent calendar.

7th December

And having learned how to make a DHTML slideshow, I assembled and uploaded the 8th day of my advent calendar today. And in earlier news: "Have just discovered my ranking on Alexa.com http://thesupercargo.com ranks 23,353,489th in the world! Hey, only 23,353,488 to beat Google!" And visits are 30% up this week on last week, thanks to the Advent Calendar I'm sure.

6th December

Having learned how to give a transparent background to my embedded "fridge magnet" letters from flash-gear.com, I uploaded the seventh day of my advent calendar.

5th December

The sixth day of my advent calendar uploaded.

4th December

The fifth day of my advent calendar uploaded.

3rd December

The fourth day of my advent calendar uploaded.

2nd December

The third day of my advent calendar uploaded.

1st December

The second day of my advent calendar uploaded.

30th November

The first day of my advent calendar uploaded.

28th November

I've spent quite a lot of time the last month or so trying to make happen some ideas I had for a more dynamic homepage. As I am by no stretch of the imagination what anyone could call a programmer, this has been a slow and painful process. I do seem, though, to be getting somewhere at last. Hopefully I shall be launching an improved site in the New Year (some time in January). In the run-up to that, I thought I would try to turn my front page into an Advent Calendar. We'll see how that goes, but I'm quite optimistic.

On another note, we're coming up to a mile-stone for this site. on the 2nd December it will have been up and running for one whole year. in that time it has received over 2500 visitors. I look on this as a real success - my previous home page received less than about 600 visitors in the 5 years or so it was up. I know many visitors this year have come and gone within seconds, but at the same time there have been quite a number, over the months, who have spent 5, 10, 20 minutes or even longer browsing around. I hope they have found something here interesting and/or enjoyable and that they may perhaps call back again sometime, commit my name and smiling face to memory and perhaps, further down the line, become customers for a book I write or co-operators with me on a creative project.

13th July

Completely updated the Front page. The grand update of the whole site that I was planning over the summer is now on hold. I'm going to be away travelling for the next few weeks. Will continue to update the blogs, of course.

4th July

Updated Speech page with links to voice recordings made in June.

13th June

Today I have completely updated the site's Front page and brought the Swejobb page up to date. Still to update - Scrimshaws (with all the videos).

Now it's time for some more statistics and graphs! On the 2nd June this home page was 6 months old. In that time it had attracted over 1000 visitors, mostly from Sweden (70%), but also from the USA (13%), Germany (4%), Britain (3%), The Netherlands (1.5%) and elsewhere in Europe and from further afield.

The most popular pages have been my blogs At the Quill (302 visitors) and Commonplace Book (222 visitors since it opened in January), though a surprising number (surprising to me) have also visited this page (215 visitors). Apart from the blogs, people have also been attracted to the pages linked to videos on YouTube: the Prora Rügen page (166 visitors since March) and the Scrimshaws page (164 since February). In May especially, visitors have been particularly drawn to the new page of links related to the STF "Sveriges svenskaste jobb" campaign (125 visitors since it opened on 19th May).

My Speech page with links to voice recordings has attracted increasing interest (from 12 visitors in Februay to 38 in May - a total of 113 visitors). My Swedish Byways page, with its embedded voice recording has also attracted an increasing interest (77 visits since February, 34 in May since I added the voice recording). Over the next few months I will continue to investigate the possibility of starting a voice podcast.

My Images page has also enjoyed a good number of visitors - 153 since February. Sixty-two people had also found their way to the free desktop download images I posted in March, though I don't know if anyone has actually downloaded any of the pictures. A few people, only about 20, have moved on from this site to visit my photoblog at Ipernity. That suggests the to date 24,000+ visits to the 700+ photographs on that site coame from a completely different audience. I shall continue to try to cross-link the two. In this context, the 4,000+ views my STF campaign videos have received represent another, largely separate audience, though I'm sure the surge in visits to the home page (see the graph below) indicates a degree of cross-linking.

What else? Well, my non-existent pages have also received their share of visitors - the English Language Services page, the Teaching and Learning page and the Shop have between them attracted 360+ visitors who may well have been disappointed. These are three pages I plan to develop over the next few months.

Finally, I have to share a few of the searches that appear to have brought people to these pages. Apart from the obvious (variations on supercargo and variations on my name), people searching on the following search strings have all found their way here:

• +"swedish" +"letter w"
• #ssjobb
• bibliography english gentlewoman richard
• englishman in gothenburg
• fart hinder english
• german wovels
• how do you pronounce "bebis" in swedish?
• ifeelmyself piratebay
• prora kraft durch freude
• right worshipful husband
• rügen nazies
• scrimshaws
• shakespeare reference supercargoes
• smorgasbord ombudsman english modern swedish
  
• somewhere in the big world
• swedish roadsigns fart

I hope they all found something to satisfy their curiosity.

The bar chart below shows the numbers of unique visitors and returning visitors to TheSupercargo.com site between 2nd of December 2008 and 3rd June 2009. (Returning visitors are those whose computers have accepted the site's cookie and returned at least once within a month of their first visit. )

4th June

Updated Swejobb page and Front page. Major revision of Front page coming next week. Major revision of whole site sometime during the summer. Statistical summary for the first six months also coming next week.

1st June

Updated Swejobb page and Front page. Still no news about the results, but I've more or less given up hope now. Don't care. The publicity I and this site have received, and the experience of video making, have made it all worthwhile.

27th May

Updated Swejobb page and Front page. Spoke too soon - STF have extended the deadline. Clossing date for application now today and a decision about the winner to be made after a "screentest" of a short list of five candidates. The five to be chosen ... when?

26th May

Updated Swejobb page and Front page. The campaign for "Sweden's most Swedish job" is over today. I expect the results will be published tomorrow. As STF have not yet been in touch (it's 10.30 pm as I write) I don't suppose I won, but the last 10 days have been interesting. Expect a new blog tomorrow, a new Front page soon and a statistical update next week.

22nd May

Updated Swejobb page and Front page.

21st May

Updated (and corrected errors in) Swejobb page.

19th May

Added Swejobb page to keep in one place all links and updates related to the campaign to win the summer job with the Swedish Youth Hostel Organisation STF. Updated the Front page and this page appropriately.

17th May

Busy day and a half ... shouldn't have had that espresso to round the evening off - still wide awake at 3 in the morning! Heigh-ho. Updated the Front page with a semi-permanent link to Twitter as well as links to the new video, blogs etc. Updated also the Speech page with the newest Librivox links and the Scrimshaws page with the new videos. On 15th I spent a good deal of time on my c.v. which I want to post but am still not decided whether it's in the right state yet.

10th May

Updated Skrimshaws page (with the May Day video) and the Front page. Downloaded statistics from the Stat counter and Web Hotel pages. Noticed a significant jump in traffic from German servers - I suppose because of the Prora Rügen video and page. My visitor count as of this evening stands at 584 since 2nd December, which is about as many visitors as my previous home page ever attracted in more than 7 years, so I'm very pleased. In April, 52% of traffic on the site came from Sweden, 17% from Germany, 11% from the USA, a little over 4% from Britain and 4% from Canada. The Prora Rügen video has attracted 285 views since I posted it on 20th March and the May Day video has been viewed 41 times in 5 days without any significant promotion.

9th May

Yesterday I managed to complete and upload to my Ipernity site my first voice recording of my own material, a recording of the "Swedish Byways" article. I also received confirmation from Librivox of the publication of two more poems (by Walter Savage Landor) that I read for their short poetry collection number 77. Today I have updated both the Swedish Byways page and the Speech page to link to these recordings.

29th April

Completed yesterday's updates on the Front Page - forgot the Librivox link. Have also updated the Featured Links archive page.

28th April

Update the Front Page with links to some of the newer entries. Tried to give it a 'spring' feel. Note that the Prora Rügen video has had more than 190 visitors on YouTube (plus about 18 on Ipernity). Updated this page.

20th April

At the suggestion of Birgitta, one of my readers, I added e-mail contact details to both At the Quill and Commonplace Book. Need to add contact details to the masthead at next major revision. Also checked through both blogs and found comments I had not realised I'd received from another reader, Lena. Replied to all. Also added what I hope is functioning sitemap for web spiders. Delighted to note that my visitor counter has passed 405. At this rate I might well reach 500 by the end of May and perhaps even beat the 558 visits I registered on my previous page!

12th April - Easter Sunday

A bit late with the Easter Greetings, but there's an Easter card from the Supercargo up on the front page now and updated links to various pages on the site and elsewhere.

9th April

Time for some statistics. Whoopee!! The 10 most popular pages on this site during the last month were as shown in the graph below. The number of visitors each page had are given at the top of each column. Interesting to see how many visitors are still looking in at the Weblog (here) and Copyright pages. Also at the English Language Services page - I really ought to expand that one a bit! I'll see what I can do in the coming month. It's very gratifying that so many people are also visiting the blogs and the Scrimshaws. As of today, the Prora, Rügen video has been viewed 111 times on Youtube (and 10 times on Ipernity) and the Seagull scrimshaws have been viewed 25 times (for the one with a sound track) and 5 times (for the one without sound). Set that against the 189 views for the 'Christmas card' 51 at Christmas.
(With any luck there are hyperlinks on the picture below!)

There were 111 unique visitors to TheSupercargo.com during March. About half of those were returning visitors (returning within one month). At the end of March, the site had received more than about 340 unique visitors since the beginning of December last year (361 as of today). During March, 80% of the traffic on the site came from Sweden, with 4% from Greece (Hello, Fiona!) 3½% from the USA, 2½% from the UK, 2% from Canada, 1½% from Australia. The remainder came from all sorts of other places (see the map below).

I'm delight to have had so many visitors, so many returning visitors, and to see that so many have actually stayed on the site for a longer period. (During March, about 50 people had visits that were longer than 5 minutes in duration, and about 12 had visits that were longer than 1 hour.) As I wrote here before, everyone is very welcome to drop me a line or write a note!
The statistics counter I am using is StatCounter and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone else who wants a good - free - stat counter to add to a home page. For the more detailed info about visits to specific pages, I am relying on the statistics provided by my web hotel, One.

8th April

Updated Speech page with links to Librivox.org, Librivox Short Poetry Collection 076 my two poems therein and crosslinks to the texts of the poems in the Commonplace Book. Yesterday I downloaded the last month's statistical details. Will be uploading more details and changing the Front Page over the next few days.

21st March

Hopefully this (relatively) major update of the site is about complete. The final piece of the puzzle is the new Front Page with the Prora, Rügen film embedded from YouTube (already viewed 26 times it seems), one of the Seagull films, links to various items in the Commonplace Book and At the Quill, and links to the first desktop download page. Oh yes, and I finally got the 'Featured Link' up on the Front Page as well. Scrimshaws also slightly updated. And this page. As of this moment, the site has received 313 distinct visitors since 2nd December '08. Very exciting!

20th March

Up until all hours last night trying to get the revisions (see entry below) up on the net, but my modem kept losing contact with the webhotel servers. In the end I gave up. More success this morning. Have also uploaded the Prora, Rügen film to YouTube, licensed it with Creative Commons and embedded it on the Prora, Rugen subpage. (Also the Seagull Stretching snips to YouTube - viewable on the Scrimshaw page for the moment.) I want to update the Front Page with this film too, but I just don't have the energy right now. Next week.

19th March

Big series of revisions. Additions to the Scrimshaws page. New subpage added for Prora, Rugen film. Updated Images page with link to set of "Sea and Shore" desktop downloads (and built eleven desktop download pages). Update to the front page planned.

13th March

An update on the below. Yes, "/" is indeed the Front Page. My next update for the Front Page will display the newest Scrimshaw - Prora, Rügen: Kraft durch Freude. As with the "Christmas card", I'll post on YouTube and Ipernity - see if the number of visitors jumps again. On MySpace to scout out possibilities for a home for my projected podcast. Discovered a guy in the USA calling himself "Supercargo" and another in France who has taken posession of "Thesupercargo". Damn! What to call myself on MySpace ... "TheRealSupercargo"? "TheNordicSupercargo"? "Voice_of_the_Supercargo"? "TheSupercargos_Voice"? "TheSupercargoVoice"? Something like that probably. Have to be. If I decide to go with MySpace.

9th March

After a "chat" with my Web Hotel I discover it's NOT possible to insert external statistics counters on my blog pages, so not possible to see which entries have been viewed. It is possible though to see how many visitors the blogs (and all the pages) have had overall. Checked for December, January and February. The stats turn out to be incomplete - only the 30 most visited pages are given and some of these are a mystery to me. I've no idea what this is, for example: auth/filedialog/files.se.php. It attracted 187 visitors in December though. Also the biggest number of hits were on "/" - which I take it is the front page itself. For the other pages, see the table below:

Interpretation. The number of people visiting At the Quill was biggest in December after I launched the site and advertised it by visiting my former colleagues and students in Falköping, and posting information on Facebook. The increasing number of visits to the Commonplace Book (not opened before January) suggests my occasional adverts for it on Facebook and in e-mails are having some effect. The increased number of visitors to WhoisSC probably has something to do with my starting to record for Librivox.org. Surprised at the number of visitors to the Visitors' Book considering how few people are writing in it - I suppose people want to see who else has written but not commit themselves to any comment. OK, I can live with that. Also surprised at the numbers looking at the Weblog, but I can live with that too.

Updated the Front Page and included four social bookmarking widgits - Delicious, Digg, Reddit and StumbledUpon. I'd put Facebook in too, but it's just too complicated.

6th March

Downloaded the visitor statistics from Stat Counter for February. New visitors from Germany, Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Greece besides USA and UK and (of course) Sweden.

17th February

Changed the picture of Colin Campbell on the whoissc page.

11th February

Updated the front page (index), whoissc and this page.

6th February

There were two hundred or so unique visitors to TheSupercargo.com since the beginning of December 2008. During January, 92% came from Sweden, with 6% from the UK. The remainder came from the USA, Finland, India and Brazil. In Sweden, most came from Gothenburg or Stockholm, but I had visitors also from Falköping, Borås, Motala, Skövde, Gävleborg and Uddevalla. In Britain visitors seem to have come from London, Crawley and Guildford, and in the US from California and New York.
Below is a screenshot of the map my statistics counter service provided to show where everyone came from. The statistics counter also tells me that 52% of my visitors are using Internet Explorer, 23% Opera and 21% Firefox. Then there's the odd person using Safari, Chrome or another browser. That's good as I've only tested the pages in IE, Opera and Firefox. I'll look at other browsers when I can.
I can also see that about 10% are connecting from a Mac (using Firefox). It would be interesting to know if any of these visitors especially are experiencing problems. (I use a PC myself.) If you are such a visior and (ignoring my rather pointed comments at the head of this) you're reading this, you can drop me a line here or write a note in the visitor's book.
Also a few visitors seem to be connecting with a screen that only has an 800x600 pixel resolution. I'm also interested to know how you experience these pages since they are optmised for 1024x768 resolution. So you are also welcome to drop me a line here or write a note in the visitor's book.
Well, of course everyone is very welcome to drop me a line or write a note!
The statistics counter I am using is StatCounter and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone else who wants a good - free - stat counter to add to a home page.

1st February 2009

New Scrimshaw page with the Christmas card and animated ship GIF. Updated Front page with links to Commonplace Book, Scrimshaws and quotes from blogs. I note over 200 visitors since 2nd December and over 180 views of the Christmas card.

29th January 2009

Mended some of the Visitors' Book links - should work from all the main pages except Scrimshaws, Teaching & Learning, English Language Services, Links, Shop. Updated Texts page and added a first text to a sub-page - "Swedish Byways". Also changed the blogs on this site to give them a uniform style with the rest of the site and added a new banner to the Commonplace Book. Updated the front page to reflect changes. New entry to At the Quill posted today (and several to Commonplace Book yesterday).

27th January 2009

Updated the Blogs page with workling links to all the blogs. Updated the index page.

26th January 2009

I've spent a lot of time this January working on a new look for my homepage. I thought I would be able to get it up last week, but here we are at last. Not all the links work yet, but the roll-over effect on the pictures and the navigation bar at the top of each page is very satisfactory. (Well, there should be a roll-down list of blogs under 'Blogs' up there, but there isn't so something's not right.)
There is a cascading style sheet which seems to function (though, to be honest, I'm not at all sure exactly what all the bits of code are for, and I'm not entirely happy with the size of the text in every instance.) I am pleased with the background and with the general colour scheme though.
The structure of the site has been a matter of trial and error, but now it seems OK, and something I can let the site grow with. The links to the blogs and photo gallery worked straight off, the link to the Visitors' Book didn't, and still doesn't on some pages, but I know what's wrong and will rectify it during the week.
All in all, quite satisfactory.

25th Jan 2009

I started a new blog - my Commonplace Book - that I've been thinking about for years. Last night I saw my first film of this year's Gothenburg Film Festival, and it seemed a good subject to start with. Perhaps I will eventually be able to add to the blog directly from my mobile phone, but right now I can't get the phone to talk with my computer let alone connect to the Internet, so my rapid notes from post-viewing as I sat on the tram coming home last night, were laboriously transcribed from my phone's little screen to my computer's big one, word by word, letter by letter, with the occasional curse everytime the phone's powersaving screen dimmer function cut in.

3rd Jan 2009

Removed the 2008 Christmas card but added link to the YouTube page for anyone who still wants to see it. Uploaded a New Year's Greeting in its place. Uploaded 96 pictures to a new photo gallery (Favourite Photos 2008). Struggled but failed to make the link to the gallery open in a new Internet window instead of using the same window. (I know it's possible having seen my brother-in-law do it over the holidays , but can't see how myself.) Alternatively, tried to insert a "Home to the homepage" link into the coding on the gallery homepage. Couldn't manage that either - as yet. Have to hope visitors will use the back step in their Internet viewer till I can fix this. Still working on the homepage v2 in my home computer as I have been doing on and off over the holidays.
I note the Site has had 136 visitors over the month since 2nd December. The Christmas card has had 162 views on YouTube since I posted it on 20th December and 58 visits on Ipernity since the same date. Very satisfactory

22 Dec 2008

Uploaded a final entry for At the Quill for the year. Added a link from the "About" section to the WhoIsSC page.
I note 115 visitors since 2nd December according to the pasted in visitor counter. According to the web hotel's own traffic counter I've had 140 visits. According to YouTube my Christmas video (uploaded two days ago) has been seen 79 times so far. One comment and one rating (***).

20 Dec 2008

Added a page about myself "Who is the Supercargo?" Replaced the Web Log Blog with this page - it makes more sense to me. Updated the Frontpage.
Vistor count as of this morning is 92.
And finally ... I just embedded a link to my first ever YouTube video. Merry Christmas!

11 Dec 2008

Struggling and failing to insert a rollover picture of the author at work.
This morning I'd had about 45 visitors, this afternoon over 60. This morning's e-mail heads up to former teacher colleagues obviously bore fruit!

10 Dec 2008

Added a visitor's book and checked that it works. Added statistics counter from StatCounter.com.

8 Dec 2008

Uploaded new entry to At the Quill. Tried to fix a problem with the IMG alt tag. No joy - work around. Testing different visitors book scripts.

5 Dec 2008

Fixed grammar in "Copyright". Tested comments in "At the Quill" - added a comment as an anonymous visitor, deleted it as administrator.
Not wildly impressed by the layout of the blog comments - visitors can only see them if they try to insert their own comment. This means comments focus on the text of the blog, but conversation between commentators is made difficult.

4 Dec 2008

Uploaded all my texts for "At the Quill" written since July. Edited for grammar mistakes. Added illustrations, hyperlinks, some notes. Added a copyright notice and a statement of policy (called "The Rules of Engagement"). Updated this.
This took most of the day.

3 Dec 2008

Created a trial version of the front page using one of the web hotel's templates. Added text and changed all the template graphics. Uploaded some "qiuillos", a banner illustration and the animated gif I created yesterday. Opened two blogs, this and At the Quill. Opened a mailbox. Added links to these from the front page. FTP is drag-and-drop nowadays - it used to be more complicated! Wrote this.
Additionally, I just changed the banner on this page.