The Return from the Vacation

Hello again. I’m back from my exciting four-day vacation. I stayed around Palm Beach for three days with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and grandma. It was 200 miles down there. We had a lot of fun, my aunt cooked great food, there was a cool storm, and we played volleyball in the pool. Afterward, I stayed with my Grandma for Sunday and part of Monday, and my Dad brought me home three hours ago. I’ve been unpacking and clearing out emails.

Here’s some photos. I won’t show family because they don’t want to be shown.

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The portrait is me. I’ll be cooking up some edited versions which you’ll see over the next few days. It was hard not having Internet for four days; no computers or Wi-Fi with the family, and all the neighbors had passwords on their networks. I’m glad to be back working on the mission here. I wrote two photography articles I’ll be polishing up tomorrow.

This site and the thripp.com network chugged along fine while I was gone. 2000 unique visitors across both. The HTML caching + gzip compression is working great. I had about 60 new users, but 30 were blatant spam by the same person, which I deleted on the spot. Two-thirds of the rest are non-blatant spam, but I don’t mind that.

The total number of thripp.com blogs is 115, and the MySQL database is up to 40MB. Still working fine on SYN shared Hosting, fortunately. I’ve used 4GB of bandwidth in my 10 days with them. I have 120GB/month, so I’m at 10% capacity. Most of the bandwidth is from my photography, especially the high-res stock photos. If the going gets rough, I’ll outsource the busiest to ImageShack and hotlink.

I made a decision: I’m going to switch to rxthripp.com for future labeling on my prints and photos here. richardxthripp.thripp.com was the old one, but it’s a bit lengthy and just redirects here like rxthripp.com because I’m using subdirectories for thripp.com users (I’m richardxthripp.thripp.com), so I may as well use the shorter one now. All three addresses will work forever. I set up a regex expression with Apache’s mod_rewrite, so even subdirectories redirect: rxthripp.com/gallery goes right to richardxthripp.thripp.com/gallery, for example. Cool stuff.

I came home to find that I’ve made $6.91 from the Google AdSense advertising on thripp.com. $2.51 is from ads on my photography pages here, while the other $4.40 is from clicks on ads on my users’ pages. While it would only take me an hour to earn this when I was working at the library, this is particularly sweet because I earned it while on vacation, not working at all. So it’s “passive income” instead of “active income.” Instead of working every minute for every dollar, you earn while you sleep. A website with ads is the perfect way to do that.

I’ve got till August 25 (when college resumes) to work on my photography. Expect a lot of stuff from me here. :grin:

Going on Vacation

Hello! If you’ve been following my Twitter updates, you know I had my final test in precalculus algebra today, got my grades back, and passed with an A. I have two months off now. I’m traveling to South Florida with my Grandma to visit family in a few minutes, and I’ll be gone till Monday (2008-06-30). I haven’t been posting as much here, as I’ve been making a lot of progress with thripp.com, but I’ll come back with some great photos and ideas for articles, plus plenty of time to execute them.

Thanks everyone, and leave me some comments to come back to. Till later. :sunglasses:

Back to School

My winter break ends tomorrow, when I begin my second semester at Daytona Beach College. I’ll be taking six courses (sixteen credit hours), but three of them are with the same wonderful teachers, and one of them is Photography I, so this will be my most fun semester.

The photography course is in-class for four hours weekly, so I won’t be there till Friday. While I do some black-and-white photography, this course will be mostly black-and-white film. I haven’t worked with film before (only digital and digital editing), so this will be a useful learning experience.

The courses I’ll be in: English II, Humanities II, American Political & Economic Issues, Trigonometry, Photography I, and a one-credit course on Internet research, which is good for my intended majors (computer science, and library science as my master’s degree).