Archive for March, 2006

Taking a good photo is not always east. But with animals, it becomes daringly difficult if the model decided not to cooperate. In a 1000 photos taken during the course of the safari in the Masai Mara National Park in March, there were a few interesting failures or good photos (depending on your taste). The most obvious ones are shown here.

Backstage

Sometimes, I decided that the front is not the most interesting part of the model. This is the case of this elephant whose hindquarters appeared a more interesting subject (because of the lovely leather structure):

 

Elephant, back leather

A zebra, from behind

 

I just noticed (on my own web site) a contextual ad from Google that seemed quite well targeted. Titled “Wildebeest migration” (gnus migration), it promotes a Tanzania safari en Tanzanie in June-July for this great moment of Nature: 15 millions gnus and 3 millions zebras simultaneously leave Tanzania to go back to Kenya. Big show!

Contextual ad is not bad at all, finally.

After announcing by Microsoft that Vista wold not be available before October 2007 (and, even then only for big customers; Christmas buys are in a bad shape for you and me), we learn that Microsoft Office 2007 will suffer the same fate.

Push it a little more and we will have to rename it Microsoft Office 2008!

The most difficult part of this safari, the leopard was tough to find, nearly impossible to photograph (several days without a single observation before driving more than ten kilometers to find one single animal, but a nice animal indeed!)

Leopard

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Yet another black and white German movie. F.W. Murnau created here a marvellous adaptation of the “Dracula” novel from Bram Stoker. On the screens in 1922, you could expect a merely dark movie. As a matter of fact, you will find here a true master piece of horror/terror cinema that did not loose its power on the audience of the 21st century (55 years later, when Werner Herzog created his own Nosferatu with Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani, he will reuse most of the details of the scenario and even some of the images).

This year (2006), we find a lot of elephants in the Masai Mara National Park. Most of the specialists say that this comes from the drought that led these big mammals to group in relatively protected areas.

Female elephant

Elephant and impala

Elephant and impala (Dumbo is free for real!)

Keywords are not naturally generated by WordPress. But, if you know how, you can easily correct this.

I will not let you tell me that keywords are useless in modern search engine. It is more or less true, but not totally true. Their lack in the header of an HTML page is not without effect (I would notice that they are exploited by Google to build beter targeted ads). Nonetheless, I would not shout with those who claim this is needed to get a good search engine ranking either (what was critical a few years ago, is now secondary).

This being said, I still wanted to add a keywords field to my WordPress pages and it took some time looking for a solution. I will share it with you.

Initially, I went to the corresponding page in the WordPress help. It gave me pointers to relatively reliable sources for simple solutions (simplicity is always a critical feature for me) allowing to include keywords in my posts/articles.

I chose Bill Thomas micro plug-in. As a matter of fact, this is a single PHP function able to use the keywords you incorporate manually in your posts/articles.

I had to install it, validate it in the dash board and take two last important steps:

• Add the needed information to the header of the single.php page in order to allow the keywords to appear when requested

  <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="<?php echo keywords(); ?>">

• Add the keywords custom field in the interested posts/articles (with a list of comma-separated key-words).

EAsy when you know how to do it…

You certainly already noticed the appearance in those last days of the following button in the margins of this web site:

This is a feature of the Alexa search engine that provides rankings, user opinions (with Amazon) and visit statistics for web sites (web stats). Started with a 1,533,587th position (an average over the last three months visits), we will see if this is changing significantly in the coming months.

This is more or less the question any blogger asks. This is what a Wired News article tries to answer with the help of Harold Davis you wrote a few books about Google and Google advertising. However, do not expect to make a living out of it right now. His opinion is that you can expect about 10$ per year and per page. This is about what I can confirm in my own web site if… you divide that figure by three.

Lions are everywhere in the plains of the Masai Mara. You bump into them after every tree. Generally, they are sleeping in the shade (their days are spread between 1% hunting, 1% eating and 98% sleeping after eating or before hunting).

My best images follow…

Big males

The king of the animals, Simba (in Swahili), the head of the pride, the one who eats first (even if he did not hunt, he will eat before all the others et the rest of the pride may not even have a piece of the meal after him).

Big lion

Big lion, male

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