Meta Archives, page 3

Not only do I blog about blogging, I also blog about this very blog! So meta!

Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org?

Back in 2007 I stumbled upon something called a QR Code. It was a neat two-dimensional barcode that encodes textual information visually—with URLs being a promising application for the emerging smartphone market (thanks to the release of the iPhone that year). So I did what any self-respecting personal blogger would do: I QR-encoded my own URL. And posted it to my blog.

QR-Code for http://justinsomnia.org/

At some point between then and March 2011, my QR Code image got lodged in the second position of Google Images’ search results for “qr code”. As a result, my self-referential QR Code blog post became one of the most requested pages on my site, regularly clocking in several hundred views a day. But what happened next almost defies explanation.

Google Images results page for 'qr code' highlighting a result that points to justinsomnia.org
Screenshot of Google Images, circa March 2011, with my QR Code highlighted
Graph of monthly requests for http://justinsomnia.org/2007/12/qr-code/ from December 2007 to February 2011
Monthly requests for my QR Code blog post from Dec 2007 to Feb 2011

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My photo smiling back at me

So I’m flipping through The Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide, (36th edition: Dec 2010 to Mar 2011), and exactly halfway through the magazine, there’s an ad for MekongBank. Half the ad is an image of one of the many smiling faces from the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, portraying Buddha or Jayavarman VIIor both.

Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide, 36th edition, open to MekongBank ad on page 76
Siem Reap Angkor Visitors Guide, 36th edition, open to page 76

Something about the photo in the ad caught my eye. Almost immediately I realized, “That’s my photo”. Not “I took a photo like that” or “I happened to take a photo of that same face”. No, “I took that very photograph”—during my second trip to Cambodia in May 2003. It happens to be one of the few photos of my own that I’ve had printed. It was hanging in our foyer in San Francisco.

I’ll admit I wasn’t 100% sure. It’s hard to fathom how many photos have been taken of the Bayon temple’s smiling faces over the years. I was willing to allow that there was a chance, however slim, that someone had taken a remarkably similar photo.

Later that day, I looked back at my photos from May 2003, compared the ad to the original, and sure enough it was my photo exactly: uncropped, same perspective, same shadows, same sliver of blue sky in the top left corner. A dead match. The shear improbability of it blew me away. Here I was, in Siem Reap, stumbling upon a photo in an ad in a free tourist guide that I had taken during my first visit nearly 8 years ago. Does this sort of thing happen to anyone else?

Close up of a smiling Buddha and/or Jayavarman VII face in the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom
My original photo of a smiling face at Bayon, taken in May 2003

How did it happen? After that trip to Cambodia, I put some of my best photos online, including this one, to share with friends and family. I made the original versions of the photos available for download since they were only 2 megapixel files. I also dedicated my initial photo galleries to the public domain, which helped some of them find their way into Wikipedia and which may have been where this photo was found. Or maybe it was just a swipe from Google Images, without regard for my permissive uncopyright. Who knows?

To make a long story short, we took the guide with us on our return trip to the Bayon and actually managed to find the very same smiling face I’d photographed in 2003. Even that seemed unlikely, given the roughly 150 surviving faces, each a little different. Only a few were visible at eye-level, which made the search easier. As a souvenir, I posed next to it with the magazine.

Priceless.

Justin posing with a smiling face in the Bayon temple at Angkor Thom with the magazine showing the same face from 2003
A smiling Bayon face and the ad that features its likeness

Thinking back on Cambodia

Of all the places we’ve been and will go on this trip, Cambodia is the only country that I’ve traveled to previously. In fact I visited twice, both times for work, first in January 2003, and then again in May. Those dates are interesting because that’s not long after I started my blog. So there’s a record to look back on.

It’s funny to see my growth even in the 4 months between those two trips. I took 120 photos during the first trip, with my 2 megapixel Kodak, though hilariously most of them I took out the window of the plane—only 54 were taken on the ground in Phnom Penh. The shear absurdity of the journey itself (3 layovers!) partially accounts for the number of windowseat shots: Raleigh > Detroit > Tokyo > Bangkok (overnight in hotel) > Phnom Penh.

I was a shy photographer (I still am), and I was also likely overwhelmed by my first exposure to Southeast Asia. It’s hard to know what to capture when everything is different. At the time I didn’t see my blog as an outlet for photography. In the early days, embedding photos in posts was a hassle—blogging was all about text!

However, two months before that first trip I set up a web-based photo gallery (which I’ve long since converted to blog posts) so I could more easily share photos with friends and family. Realize this was before Flickr and most photo sharing sites existed. The photos I chose to share from that initial trip represent a pretty random smattering of things I saw and was able to quickly capture without drawing too much attention to myself: parked scooters, gas in glass soda bottles, shacks by the side of the river. It was a world I was wholly unfamiliar with. And of course my primary purpose there wasn’t to traipse around and explore. So I snapped what I could in the short time I had between work ending and dinner.

These were the blog posts from my first trip to Cambodia:

My second trip, only 4 months later, paints a very different picture. For one, I was there over Memorial Day—a rare three day weekend which I was encouraged to use to visit Angkor. I blogged more during the trip. And I took a lot more photos. Nearly 800. Of course much of that was due to the Angkor visit—over 500 photos. But still, not counting that excursion, I was taking a lot more photos, and not just out the plane window. It was as if I finally realized what a rare opportunity I had, and what an interesting place Cambodia was, and I wanted to capture as much as I could to share with friends, family, and the internet at large.

These were the blog posts from my second trip to Cambodia:

*originally photo galleries

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Updating WordPress from Bali

WordPress logoJust happened to notice the WordPress 3.0.4 security vulnerability update in my feedreader this afternoon. Was even more alarmed to see the following post from Dreamhost: WordPress hack cropping up on some customer sites. Eeek!

On the plus side, our new bungalow in Amed has wireless internet at 40,000 rupiah/hour, on the downside, they block port 22—a first in all of my travels! So I couldn’t SSH into my webhost and update Justinsomnia or La Vie Soleil via Subversion. Angst!

So what to do?

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For those who like to browse

Browse, Utah exit sign
Browse, Utah that is

I recently updated Justinsomnia’s category archives to look more like the homepage, complete with links at the bottom so you can page backward and forward in time. This means that if you’re behind on your Justinsomnia reading and would like to catch up, but only want to focus on my food posts, you can now browse through them to your heart’s content, blissfully unaware of my tech posts (and vice versa).

What’s more, I’ve connected my home-grown analytics tool with the category archive pages to generate a list of popular posts per category. So if you’ve just stumbled upon Justinsomnia for the first time and happen to be keenly interested in my posts on photography, you can now get a quick sense of which posts are the most popular in that category.

Also new, in the right sidebar on every page (above the monthchunks), I’ve added a box called “subjectslices” that links to all of my categories in five groups: fun, arts, personal, meta, and legacy. So now there’s a quick way to return to a given category, regardless of what page you happen to be on. Enjoy.

Screenshot of the Justinsomnia category archive