It's Called Winter

Yes, that would be .5 degrees Fahrenheit, as in 1/2 tick above zero.
The night is young...it will be below zero shortly.

This calls for remedial hot soup!
A new/old recipe for bean and barley soup.

Buds about to break open spied on the first day of the blizzard.

Today, this corner of the house thinks it's in the tropics.

And it's so nice to have a real smile-maker join the party.

Party? What party? I'm trying to figure out some new ads to get some visitors to my new and improved ArtFire Studio. I figure if I try enough ideas, one or two will end up working when they are published. What do you think? Which do you like best? Tried to keep them tiny like they will eventually be seen! And the burning question...where are good places to PUT them?!

No it's not an interactive image but if you feel like putting on your art critic's cap, and telling me what you think, I'm all ears! So much for a "wordless wednesday" not....

Thanks for dropping by & keep warm!

The Hows, Whats & Whys of a Deleted EC Account

OK, I'm at the cross-roads again with Entrecard. After Monday's fiasco with having my entire Entrecard account deleted, I did hear from them. Here is their later email to me:

-----Original Message-----
From: Entrecard Support
To: willoaksstudio@aol.com
Sent: Mon, Mar 8, 2010 6:09 pm
Subject: Re: Your Entrecard account has been deleted

hello,

your account is active. It was reported that there was not widget on your blog and we seem to missed it also. we apologize for the inconvenience.



And, I did follow up with this rather exasperated reply:

To E.C.

So this means all the ads bought from me and all the ads I had queued up for my blog are just..poof, gone?

And I'm curious, you have my email address in order to report to me that you have deleted my account....but you cannot use it to confirm the anonymous "report" of no widget on my blog? which I also think you could have figured out by all the drops I both made and received earlier today as recorded on my dashboard?

I really don't understand this operation but I do know that an awful lot of great blogs have dropped out of EC...it's all really just sad. I used to think this was a pretty cool program and have even spent a bit of real money to put my blog on other widgets.

You're darn right I'm inconvenienced.

Karen
WillOaks Studio


The "Net Effect" of Being Cancelled

So, fellow ECers and blog readers....this is what my full, active dashboard looked like just yesterday morning! A nice long queue of blogs who had "purchased" ads lined up to show on my site. A pretty nice price for my ads (because I refuse to be a compulsive dropper here anymore, it's not terribly expensive.) Worst of all, what doesn't show up here, was the list of ads I had purchased ahead of time and was so excited to finally be showing up on (it included Admaster.)


OK, so below what a reinstated, but wiped out dashboard looks like after they have "deleted" and then "reinstated" your account.

I'm truly at the cross roads now about Entrecard. I've seen so many great blogs drop out. I've joined CMF and Adgitize since the last serious crossroads with EC....guess I'll just sleep on it a few days and decide what to do next....sigh. This really, truly bummed me out because I thought I had this program on a nice, sweet nearly auto-pilot and was happy with how it was going. And now? It all seems kind of stupid in light of recent developments....

Yep, my slate has been wiped clean, space on my blog sells for 2 ec (and I've been turning down ads for now), I've lost all the value I expected to earn from the reservations lined up at an average of 256 and 384 credits per day, and I have nothing scheduled now for showing my own blog ad. Obviously, I'm still pretty frustrated...I've dropped a note to EC to point out that while "sorry" is fine, there was a lot of value lost by me due to their mistake and asking them if they intended to make it "right" with me for all the credits I've lost due to being capriciously deleted....we'll see....

And still later, yes, they have sent 3000 credits to my account accompanied by this note:
You have been sent 3000 Entrecard credits!

These credits were sent from Entrecard direct to your Entrecard account and have
been applied to your balance. The transaction included the following note from
the sender:

error on ec

I also received a personal note from Larry, and I wrote back with a thank you and with the suggestion that a blogger be contacted before an account is just deleted--here's what he wrote:

Hello Karen,

Your credits were never lost. It has been refunded to your account. please visit http://entrecard.com/user/47608/transactions. In all fairness, I'vecredited your account another 3000 credits. I hope that helps.

Larry

And my response:
Thank you very much, Larry. It does make me feel better and I will append this to my blog post.

You're correct, I didn't loose any past credits. I lost the value of my blog for ad placement going forward, though, and credits for the ads that were queued up for showing on my blog for the next 8 days, purchased at between 256 and 384...and I am now valued at like 8 ec instead of 384...that's sort of like starting over again. Plus I need to contact all the bloggers that were scheduled to show on my EC widget and were canceled without notice. So it is actually a pretty big deal if one is using EC seriously.

I wonder, might you consider contacting a blogger about the widget lack or widget placement before just deleting an account going forward? Maybe you could have a posted policy that you'll contact them once, if there are any anomalies, and if there's no response in a given time, then you reserve the right to delete the account? Just a thought. It happened so quickly to me and I never saw it coming. I was dropping this morning, and came back to a deleted account in the afternoon (besides the fact that an anonymous blogger has that kind of power over another blog!)

It's just a thought,
Karen
WillOaks Studio

And a final P.S? In the middle of all this, the blower motor on my furnace burned out. It filled the house with that stink of burning motors or electronics or plastic or whatever reeks when it melts. It was scary and took awhile to figure out what was burning, and then I got very lucky. I plucked a repair company out of the phone book based on my furnace model...and they got here within half an hour (for a price, of course!) and it was fixed really quickly. Very lucky as it was 4 p.m. when I started calling! And very lucky as it's below freezing here again last night...
Whew, what a DAY!

New Ad Designs

New Blog Avatar

New Etsy Ad for the "Made With Silk" series

My pretty new rock! Mainly, a new photo prop.

Trial layouts, experiments for new ad designs.

I'd be curious to see what you guys think about these new "tiny ads." That's what I call the 125 pixel square--tiny, very tiny. Earlier, I didn't list all the photos that I was fooling around with of my new series and I also didn't show photos of a new beautiful rock I was recently given....yes, you read that right, a rock. A druzy, to be precise. A white druzy. Why do I feel like I'm speaking a foreign language here? It's kind of a goofy word that my friend said means "tiny crystals."

Anyway, the two self-selected ad "winners" are up top. The "druzy" portrait is next down. And a few new "runner ups" after that....whew, I'm exhausted!! These computer days wear my eyes out more than working at my jewelry bench (yes, time for an eye exam!)

New Ad Box Designs

I interrupt my regularly scheduled foliage tour to bring you this special announcement:

Readers here have seen this before--I go on a tear with trying new ad box designs when I get antsy with the one I'm using. In a funny way, my art school training is showing here. The assignment: how many different designs can you invent to fit the "XYZ parameter"?

This grouping includes the ones that are a little better than the rest. I'm glad I've laid it out like this, because I'm seeing that trying again with photos of more colorful pieces would be a good experiment, too. Heaven knows, the "ad box noise" between EC, Project Wonderful, Adgitize, CMF, etc. etc. is loud enough--just look at the sides of any blog!

And as I mentioned in my earlier Winter hint post, the icy crystals are prevalent here, for sure! By the way, these ads are being designed to eventually link to my Etsy and Artfire shops. I put the red one in play already as a new Adgitize ad before their rates go up on November 1.

More autumn foliage will come over the weekend!

Entrecard Versus Bloggers

Macro view and Over view - Early Autumn at WillOaks Farm and Studio

I love to blog and I love to read other blogs. The connections I've been privileged to make, blog to blog and person to person, since I began with Entrecard back in early May, have been absolutely wonderful, inspiring and supportive. The Entrecard PROGRAM, on the other hand, will begin a new phase on 9-29 that, in my opinion, further devalues the BLOGGER!

They have announced that starting Monday, they are claiming 15% of all ad space/time. In other words, if a blogger spends a day (or two or three) dropping on hundreds of blogs, in order to build up enough credits to put an ad on my blog...they are now obligated to share their time and space on my widget with a paid ad, courtesy of Entrecard, over which I have no control, no choice, it's just being imposed. Prior to this, when paid ads were offered, I declined all of them because in the early days of these ads, 50% of the time on an EC widget was taken by the "paid" ad versus 50% for the ad earned with just credits. It didn't seem fair to the blogger, so I used my option to decline all of them. I no longer have that option beginning on Monday.

Mind you, this follows on the heels of other recent EC changes:
--no credits for all the visitors that a blogger has worked hard to bring to their blog
--no credits for writing and posting regularly (the meat and potatoes of blogs!)
And now, obligatory paid advertisements - all moves, in my humble opinion, that continue to devalue the efforts of the BLOGGER, upon whom this program's success rests.

At this point, short of paying cash, the only way a member blogger can benefit from the EC program is by stopping by and dropping on up to 300 other people's blogs per day...an activity that can, truly, take HOURS!! And this becomes 'currency' that the blogger uses to buy an ad on another blogger's pages, in the hopes of interesting new readers in their blog.

Advertising on my blog with EC had become pretty "expensive" as for quite awhile now, WillOaks Studio - Behind the Gallery View has been at the top of the heap for EC blogs in the Art Category.

I disagree with the direction Entrecard is going right now. Right after their latest announcement on Tuesday 9-22, I dropped notes to all the advertisers who had purchased (with credits!) space on my blog for 9-29 and later, informing these bloggers that I was canceling all ads scheduled to run when the paid ads resume. Then I suspended accepting ads, rejecting each one until further notice. And yesterday (rather than manually rejecting each applicant as I had been doing) I selected the option to not accept new ads, and so I was dropped from any view in the Category listings.

This break is very important, because on Sunday at midnight (11 p.m. CST) I will move my EC widget down to the very bottom of my side bar. It will no longer take up the prime real estate above the fold. And then, once folks see where it is and if they are comfortable buying ad space there and sharing it with paid ads, then that's fine, they are welcome to use their credits to place an ad (still subject to my approval) on my blog on my newly repositioned widget. Plus the EC widget will be available to "drop on" for any visitors who want to "drop," although I imagine it will be much less desirable to the so called "click farmers."

I know a lot of bloggers are completely leaving the Entrecard program due to these recent, negative changes. I think I was taking Entrecard too seriously. It seems my attitude is changing as I'm not dropping much and have taken a break from all of it the past few days. I was seriously considering dropping out of the program all together. I'll try this compromise for awhile and see what happens next, but I just don't feel the connection and, yes, the pride in this program and my high "popularity rating" that I did.

But my blog has been, and continues to be, a labor of love and when it helps me share things, connect with others, and feel that satisfaction of creativity, then well, that's truly what it's all about! And I can be grateful to Entrecard for, first, helping me begin to begin to connect with other bloggers and second, for starting me on a new path of continuing to find different ways to expose my blog to new readers because you just never know when someone will enjoy what it is you have to show and tell!!

And so, dear reader, thanks for stopping by, whether or not you chose to "drop." And whether or not you choose to comment, I appreciate hearing from you.

I'm going to add links here to fellow bloggers who are also struggling with the whole Entrecard debacle -
Split Rock Ranch has written an excellent overview of the program AND her personal decisions.
Living and Writing in China has a different perspective on the paid ad, but makes a good point about how careless Entrecard has been about changing the rules all the time here.

Thinking About Advertising-A Visual Challenge

I'm starting to think about changing my tiny ad design and image. I don't have a very long history with this, and was pretty clueless when I started. In fact, about 8 months ago, when I began to realize I needed a tiny 125 pixel square, I had one heck of a time getting something to work. There are several folders here of early efforts--some of them make me laugh now and maybe in due time, I'll post some of the "outtakes" for some chuckles. But eventually, I settled on this one and have happily used it for several months and many ads, etc. now.


A few months ago, I added this one, but haven't used it much yet. I guess I decided that the earlier one was better somehow.

So recently, I decided to see what some of my new pieces/photos might look like squeezed into "my ad" and for now, there are 8 that I'm sort of looking at, randomly clumped into 2 groups here, and sized to something like the tiny size that they'd be viewed...



I welcome any feedback--good bad and ugly--on these efforts! Although I did study art, I was mainly in sculpture, and I didn't study graphics or web design or the like, I've just been sort of stumbling my way through it for the sake of my blog and my little shops.

So lean back, squint your eyes, and then tell me which one or ones JUMP OUT for YOU!! I've often done my best work with a good editor(s).

I was thinking this would be good in some kind of "poll" format...but haven't figured out how to do that little trick yet. Thanks for any ideas here...and yes, "none of the above" is a choice!!