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Hi guys, I've been blogging for a while, (10 plus years) and I thought I would post a few suggestions that will help with linking from your wordpress blogs to your photo galleries on FAA...
First, Tags and Categories are useful for your blog only. They don't help your FAA/AW gallery at all... Except! if you write a popular post and tons of people see it and you have liberally laced your article with links to your artwork in your AW gallery.

If you want to see how Tags and categories get used click this link http://www.jeff-foliage.com/foliage-articles/archives/2015-posts/ This will take you to one of my fall foliage archive pages (specifically for my articles in 2015) you will see under each title the Cats and Tags. They are not abstract, they are concrete terms about what your article is about.


Frequency... do you track your numbers? If not and you should, you can do it very easily. First if you are on a free WP blog and you log in, look in the upper left corner.and there may be a black box with a white line and little white spikes. If you see this and you click on it, it will take you to Wordpress.com and show you your stats and it also shows a monthly visual graph to show when and how often you have posted to your blog. (I just noticed I didn't post in January) Damn...

If you don't see a black bar across the top click dashboard and "my stats" that will do the same thing.

From everything I have read, being regular is the best policy, so that folks know and come to expect your loving words and images.

If you are writing daily or more often... I consider this to be spam... UNLESS! What you are writing is so damn useful that I can't get through the day without it... If what you are writing is like Crack cocaine for the masses then you need to give up art and go with what is working because folks who have cracked the code on writing popular articles can make big bucks.

OH! definition of popular... I'm not talking 10 people read it today, or 100 but 10 thousand visited your blog today and they stayed on your site reading other things...

For my primary blog Jeff-Foliage.com I got a little over 300,000 views last year. These are decent numbers and if you thought the 2,500 views you had was great... well it's all relative. There are people with millions of hits a year and a few with 100K a day...

But I digress... Links in your articles. First it does matter which type of blog you have, a paid self hosted blog has more abilities. I have both.and I'm going to post an article that demonstrates the different methods of linking and sending them to your AW page.
These three all work for self hosted blogs. (but only the first 2 work on the free blogs)

Go to this link. http://new-england-foliage.com/2016/02/a-scenic-vermont-village/ and you can see three different types of links.

First click the image it will take you to the image on my AW page.

Second the caption under the image is a subtle link.

And third you will see one of my AW images embedded in the page. Of the three this is the only one that will not work on the free version I've checked it in Chrome, IE edge and safari so Rick it's not a browser thing but a wordpress thing...


for the first link (click on the image) In edit you click the image and hit the pencil to edit the data for the image. Here you can edit the caption (used next) and below that you can determine it's size and whether it opens in a new page and what happens wen you click the image.

By default it will open a separate view of the image. but if you change that to custom url and put the url of your AW image in, click save and update the page. Now when you look at the blog page and click on the link, it will whisk the viewer to that image on your AW.

Note ( don't use this much as I hate to be switched to another site without being asked or informed. I think immediately od scam or spam before I even get there. I have read that this is the general consensus out there.

Next my preferred method is to change the caption to a link. THERE IS NO EASY "CLICK HERE" TO MAKE IT HAPPEN! Go to this page at HTML school page (http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_basic.asp) and go to the 4th topic, copy their code for Html links into your caption block.
Now where theirs says This is a link, change that you what you want the caption to read. Next you will see "url" Paste the url of your AW image between the quotes and don't lose the quotes (") because they are needed in the syntax of the html...
Hit save and update the page. View the page and you will should see the caption as a link. If not look ad see what you may have deleted. each character and even the spacing matters.
Lastly go to your AW page and copy the embed code on the right, under the description and copy it. Go back to your blog in edit mode and here is where you will go blind and crazy...

You can not paste this code into your page in visual (look above the edit area you will see two tabs. Visual and text (or html) and you have to put your article in text or Html mode... It's now up to you to read the ugly text and locate the place where you want your embedded image to show up. You click the cursor to position it in the article and then paste the embed code in. switch back to visual mode and you should see the thumbnail of your image. Here is where the paid wordpress versus the free version differ. When you go to the preview of your blog article, you will see the embedded image there. If you see a symbol that may or may not link to your image then you are on a free version... OR you pasted a partial code or you did some other thing..

There few things about this that are easy. You don't have to memorize the html code, All I do is google html code and that html school comes up everytime. Mine even tells me that I've visited this page many times so I know which one to hit.

Just like in your life, you have to put the work into it to make it worthwhile. Make your blog posts useful and a value add to someones day and people will come to you.
If you want to book mark the blog article,
http://fineartamerica.com/blogs/how-to-get-people-from-your-wordpress-blogs-to-your-photo-galleries.html

Jeff "Foliage" Folger
Vistaphotography

Jeff "Foliage" Folger
http://www.vistaphotography.com
http://www.jeff-foliage.com

Just a quick article on lighthouses out on the cape. I was out on Cape Cod for two days and crossed 4 sets of lighthouses off my checklist. I was able to do Nobska twice, Nauset light out on the National seashore, The three sisters while I was out there and them we took the ferry out to Nantucket and I got Brant Point light from the ferry on the way in and on the way out.

Shooting from the ferry is one way and you can also walk there from downtown. So this is a very accessible lighthouse.






View more of my work at www.http://www.jeff-foliage.com/
Also you can view my work on http://www.vistaphotography.net

Thinking about the road not taken that we hear about from time to time. I look at this lone wanderer and think about that road and wonder what would have been...
The grizzly bear, also known as the silvertip bear, the grizzly, or the North American brown bear, is a subspecies of brown bear that generally lives in the uplands of western North America.
I was on a trip through Denali National Park with friends and believe it or not this is not a photoshop creation. The bear was crossing the pass and the rainbow picked this moment to come out. Such is the life of a photographer and artist. We wait for just the right moment. Sometimes we are taking shots before the "right" moment and we continue taking images after it.
I only had 3-4 shots of this moment because the rainbow faded very quickly. I did enhance the contrast to bring out the colors of the rainbow but this is much as I saw him and it, that day.

I've slipped from pure photography to something that blurs the mediums. I like to create paintings from my photography... Especially when folks come to FAA for art.
Now, you may say I'm gone over to the dark side, or you may ask, why would I do that to a perfectly good photograph? I'm not sure what the "right" answer is to that. But I like to see where my photographic expression can go and what I can create.
Maybe it's all about the commercial side of things and being able to create a painting from a photograph to appeal to somebody who's looking for a painting� I'm not sure if that's truly my motivation, I think it's more about my inner artist trying to express himself.
Either way, I would love to hear from you on this subject, what do you think of the image? Are you a purist and don't believe in blurring the lines to see what can be created or just the opposite a devil may care who doesn't care what boundaries we break.

I'm not a traditionalist or classically trained at a school. I was basically given the camera when I was young and shown how to use it and I've been on my own ever since. Maybe if I'd gone to a fine arts school and gotten a degree. I'd be more of a purist, but that's a different road, I didn't take.

If anybody looks at this blog which I'm not sure at this point anybody does I would love to hear from you on these different viewpoints.

Jeff Folger
Vistaphotography

I hope you'll find these Salem and Rockport contests to be of interest!
I created two new contests, the first is accepting entries for everything Salem Massachusetts until 7 Feb at 4:40PM
http://fineartamerica.com/contests/everything-salem-massachusetts.html?tab=overview


The second contest, everything Motif #1 in Rockport Massachusetts until 8 Feb at 3:58 PM
http://fineartamerica.com/contests/motif-number-1-rockport-massachusetts.html?tab=overview

If you are a fan of fall foliage, then you need to stop in and visit this contest that I have running on Fine Art America. The title of the contest is "Show us your best fall foliage image".
There are over 800 images in many different media, from traditional paintings to photography to digital medial inbetween. All in all it's a great way to view fall foliage images.
You can click this link to visit and while you don't have to, if you decide to vote for the one that moves you the most then either log in with a facebook ID or create a free FAA account.
OR, just go through each of the wonderful fall foliage images and enjoy the colors of autumn.
http://fineartamerica.com/contests/show-us-your-best-fall-foliage-image.html?tab=artwork

(if this doesn't show as a live link then highlight, copy and paste into your browser.

Jeff "Foliage" Folger

Lisa and I were out the other weekend and we drove up route 107 towards Alton Bay and then back down. We spotted the historical marker for the Smith Meeting House outside of Gilmanton NH and decided to go find it.
This is what I want all of you to do no matter where you are. When you see a historic marker or some such sign, I want you to stop, go back and take the turn and see where it leads you.

The road (Smith meeting house rd) leads you off a ways until you leave the pavement behind. You follow the dirt road until you come to a left hand turn and where you re-acquire the pavement. A short distance up on the left is the cemetery, school house and Meeting house. Now, just so you know, this isn�t the original that was started in 1774 and finished 16 years later in September of 1790.
I won�t go into all the details but I will say this restored version which took much less time to rebuild than the first time around and is really beautiful.

The white buildings are surrounded by sugar maples. So if you go there in a few weeks it should be in full color.
For those of you who like to visit graveyards and see what famous person might be buried there, this one won�t disappoint.

But don�t ask the locals since the famous person is Grace Metalious (author). For those who are very young (like me)  you may not remember her.
Grace wrote the scintillating novel 'Peyton Place' (Very risqu� by those days, standards) and many of the town residents, to this day are still sensitive about her racy book about Gilmanton.
I didn�t ask about it but the local historian Barbara Macintyre filled me in. So if you go and find this place, take a walk in the cemetery and sneak a peak at their only official landmark that she was ever there�

Jeff "Foliage" Folger
Got Foliage?