Just a quick FYI for anyone interested…

I’ve just moved mikesalway.com.au to a new hosting provider. I did have my site hosted on the IceInSpace colo box in the US, but have now transferred it to a local host, here in Australia.

So the site is now much faster for my Australian friends, and will be a bit slower for my US and overseas friends (sorry!).

At the same time, I’ve upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress, version 2.8. A pretty smooth and trouble-free upgrade. You won’t really notice any difference from your side of the fence, but there’s a few nice improvements from an administration point of view.

If you notice any broken images, downloads or other content, please let me know.

Hi all. While checking out the calendar on the weekend I just realised it’s been 6 months since this site, MikeSalway.com.au was launched. It’s been quite an experience so far. 

Having a personal blog site and image gallery has been great – a place to share my images, share my thoughts and learn some new technologies too. Getting more involved in blogging, WordPress, twitter, marketing and social media to help develop and grow this site has given me a lot of new ideas and experiences that will help me for the future.

I’ve had a lot of great feedback from people who have visited the site and have started to build up some regular traffic, from search engine traffic as the content builds up, as well as through subscribers, twitter, and referrals from other sites.

The graph below shows a graph of the daily visitors since the site was launched, and you can see that the trend is upwards – it’s heading in the right direction which is great. The huge spikes are from having my images published on APOD on the 5th December 2008 and 26th February 2009, and the smaller one between is when one of my posts went viral on StumbleUpon.

MikeSalway.com.au Visitor Stats

The most popular and most read posts have been:

• Pictures of the Smiley Face Conjunction
• Photos of the Moon, Jupiter, Mercury and Mars Conjunction
• The Top 10 Best Astrophotographers in Australia
• From the Vault: Dynamic Jupiter in Motion
• Moon and Planet Conjunctions in February and April

My Equipment and Planetary Imaging Equipment pages have been very popular, as has visits direct to my gallery.

So what’s next? More of the same I guess. I’ll be continuing to do what works well:

• Post my astrophotography and landscape photography, 
• Feature images and highlight the work of great astrophotographers,
• Write articles about upcoming celestial events
• Share my personal highlights with you too, including karate, family and more.

I’m also happy to hear your ideas and suggestions on how I can make MikeSalway.com.au a better site. Please feel free to contact me or comment using the form below.

I’ll probably also work on a site redesign later in the year, maybe for the 1-year anniversary – we’ll see.. it’s a busy time of year in October with IISAC planning and execution.

Thanks for visiting and thanks for reading!

MikeSalway.com.au runs on a WordPress blog system, and yesterday I upgraded to the latest version, WordPress 2.7.1.

Most of the changes benefit the administrators, so from a readers point-of-view, you won’t notice much of a change. However there are some additions to the Comments system, where some nice enhancements have been made. I re-styled the comments section yesterday to take advantage of those new features, and took the opportunity to do a general cleanup of that area and will explain the changes here.

Continue reading to see an explanation and some screenshots of the new changes. Read the rest of this entry »

Well so far today hasn’t gotten off to the best start.

The Titan Transit occurred this morning – a very rare event which I was planning and hoping to capture, but after days of clear and hot skies, the southerly change came literally about 1 hour before the transit begun. So it was completely obscured by clouds. I haven’t seen any other reports or images yet but I’ll post here when I do.

Nevermind, can’t control the weather. I’ll try again at the next opportunity on February 24th.

Also this morning I attempted to upgrade my version of WordPress to 2.7 (the latest version), which has some cool new features such as threaded comments and a new admin interface – but unfortunately the upgrade failed. I started debugging through several files but gave up when the files became too large and too complex.

So I had to roll back and restore from the backups. The only positive news there, is that the backup/restore process has been tested and works fine! (phew!)

I’ll attempt another upgrade using a different process maybe tomorrow morning.. wish me luck!

One thing that didn’t fail was on Saturday – the Wedding Shoot! All went to plan, we had a great day. I’ll post more news about that and some pictures in the next few days or weeks. I took about 650 shots and have whittled them down to about 300 now, and will need to go through another round of culling before I attempt to process them!

I hope my luck for the rest of the day improves! Thanks for reading.

Hi all

Over 4 years ago when IceInSpace was first created, it was originally my little home on the internet – a place to upload my images and share and write about my experiences in astronomy. It soon grew into a community site for amateur astronomers in Australia and across the world. I still kept my personal image gallery on IceInSpace but it always bothered me that it wasn’t really the right place for it anymore. 

Earlier this year, I decided it was finally time to completely separate my personal work from IceInSpace and create a new site specifically dedicated to my thoughts and my images – and here it is, mikesalway.com.au.

It’s been a long time coming – I started it back in April 2008 but have only found time to work on it in shorts bursts, before being dragged off to do more work on IceInSpace, or just being able to find the time outside of real work and family life.

I chose to use WordPress as the main site framework and Coppermine as the Gallery system. They have a reasonable level of integration for what I need it for, and sticking with Coppermine meant I didn’t need to upload all of my old images into a new gallery system. I went with WordPress as it’s easy to add new content to after the initial setup phase.

So what am I going to use this site for? At this stage i’m not really sure how it’s going to evolve. Without a doubt, as a minimum all of my new images, articles and reviews will be uploaded here. Beyond that – who knows. I’ll be feeding my blog with my thoughts about a wide range of topics, not just astronomy, so hopefully there’ll be always something interesting enough for you to bookmark mikesalway.com.au and to check back regularly. If you want to keep up-to-date automatically, you can subscribe to the RSS feed which will display any new posts in your feed reader.

I’d started writing posts many months ago while development of the site was ongoing, so you can see previous posts by using the archives links on the right. The articles and reviews I’ve written can be found in the articles and reviews pages, and you can find out more about me at the About page. All of my images can be found in the image gallery, though I still need to make a few minor changes and enhancements to the gallery section. Just as a heads-up, when you click on the image thumbnail, the pop-up image has a bunch of icons across the top to see the larger version, comment on or rate the image or to see additional information.

Like any blog, you can search for content, make comments to the articles or posts, and you can also make comments about any images in the Gallery section. If you know of any great astronomy or photography-related blogs or homepages, please contact me and I can add them to the list on the right-side of the page.

I want to improve this site and am happy to take on-board your feedback and suggestions – things you like, things you don’t like, things you’d like to see or site-related issues/problems. Contact me with your ideas! There are a few minor issues rendering the site in Internet Explorer, so please have patience while I get time to fix them. I’d recommend using Firefox as a browser, or even giving Google Chrome a try (although it’s still beta, my thoughts here).

I’d love to hear from you about anything – questions, comments or even just to say hi. Please use Contact page to send me an email.

If you like what you see here, I’d be grateful if you could add a link to MikeSalway.com.au to your sites, blogs and galleries to help people find my new personal site.

Thanks for reading!