Handmade Christmas card from a friend. December 26, 2006 10:56pm

It's 12:14am on Wenesday as I type these words. This'll be a quick blog--got personal stuff to do that'll keep me up late, again. Anywayz, 'bout an hour ago, a dancer friend dropped by to deliver something from Santa. Hehe. Actually she texted me earlier but I was at the movies and didn't get the message until I got out of the theatre. (I saw The Good Shepherd starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Robert de Niro etc--good movie by the way.)

So I received a bag full of goodies including lots of delicious homemade culinary treats and some other cool stuff. And it was all accompanied by a handmade Christmas card--the best kind (see photo above). While I still do very much appreciate thoughtful gifts that my friends buy for me, there's nothing more special than homemade gifts knowing that my friend cared enough to make the time and effort just for me---sooo sweet!

The past few days and nights, I've been wearing my webmaster hat, so to speak. Thing is...I used to do a redesign of DCFlamenco.com and publish it on New Year's day--speaking of which the 11th birthday of the website is coming up on January 10th. Instead, I'm working on important technical behind-the-scenes stuff focusing on search engine optimization, tweaking stuff like sitemaps, robots.txt files, keyword analysis and poring over numerous Google Analytics charts. It's not that I'm trying just to boost my rankings--although that would be a good thing. Besides, my site already has a respectable page 2 Google listing for the search term "flamenco." It's more like I'm making sure that ALL the relevant pages on my site are indexed in Google--and I've got hundreds of pages in DCFlamenco.com! And also making sure that my site shows up in search results for the most important flamenco-related keywords.

I'm doing all this for you, my loyal readers. But I'm also doing it for myself. For example, I'm putting together publicity materials for an upcoming show and I use Google to find old pics of my flamenco colleagues. Think about it. I take, on average more than 5,000 pics a year multiplied times 7 years. That's more than 35,000 pics to sift through. OK, I don't publish all those pics, but more like a few thousand. Still, as this site grows in the coming years, I'm going to need a good quality index to find the pics I need.

Yeah, it's a lot of work, but I seem to be in my computer geek phase right now.

Another thing you may have noticed recently is that there are a lot more Google ads all over the site--hopefully displayed in a undistracting and tasteful manner. It's kind of like a game of strategy--well, it's mostly trial and error where I try out different layouts, color schemes with Google ads while keeping a close eye on the statistics to see which tweaks increase click-throughs. It's fun in a geeky kind of way, but I actually do make money each time my website visitors click on a Google ad. Mulitiply those clicks over the thousands of visitors I get each month and the money adds up! It's not going to make me rich but it's more than enough to pay for web hosting services for a year and still have some money left over. As this website grows in size and popularity, I'll need more and more diskspace and bandwidth.

OK, so how did I spend my Christmas? Don't worry. I won't bore you with details only of interest to my fellow familiy members. I'll just give you a few hightlights. Here are a couple of pics...