Loch Ness is the largest body of fresh water in Britain. It’s 754 feet deep, 22.5 miles long, and 1-1.5 miles wide. It is said that the loch never freezes, which could account for how the dinosaur survived through the ages. Below 100 feet, a thermocline keeps the temperature of the water at 44 degrees Fahrenheit. There is a large cavern system deep in the lake that could be where Nessie lives and avoids detection.

The Loch Ness Monster has been a popular myth since at least 1933, but there have been reported sitings since as early as 565 by Saint Columbia, who wrote that a beast rose from the loch and attacked a man swimming out to retrieve a boat. There was another notable siting in the 1600’s and many in the 1800’s and 1900’s.

Over the past 4 years, people have debated the monster’s existence on a picture I took of a statue at Eccles Dinosaur Park near Ogden Utah of a Plesiosaur. The picture is located in my photo gallery at The Lens Flare. On this page, I ask the question, “Could this dinosaur be the ancestor of the Loch Ness Monster?” People have misinterpreted my question as “Is this the real Nessie?” and hundreds of people have commented. It’s been a fun debate to see what people’s opinions are of the matter.

The picture recently reached 100,000 views and is the first image on The Lens Flare to do so largely due to the fact that it often shows up on the first page of Google’s image search for phrases like “Loch Ness Monster” and other variations, and the number of visits to this picture per week has dramatically increased since the show “The Water Horse” hit the big screen putting Nessie back in the spotlight. I invite you to take part in the conversation of The Loch Ness Monster on my picture at TLF.

I like to take multiple images and merge them together forming a composite image. You can add a sky, mountain, or flower to an interesting sky or you might add animals such as moose or squirrels where there weren’t any previously. Sometimes different landscape and nature elements are added such as a nice looking rock outcropping or cliff. Often, it’s as simple as swapping out a boring sky for one that’s much more exciting to really add to your photograph.

It’s easy to add elements to a picture, but much harder to make them look right when all of the layers are put together. Little pieces of grass and other artifacts are common and time consuming to remove. Photoshop’s Extract tool is a good place to start. It will help you remove an object from one image so that you can copy it into another. It does a decent job of getting the edges right, but you’ll need to fine tune it some. What I do is duplicate the layer, then extract the object out of the duplicate. I convert this new object to gray scale and copy it to a layer mask. A layer mask is a gray scale layer that allows portions of the layer below it to be shown. The different gray values translate to opacity values. By converting the extracted layer to gray scale, I have a pretty good representation of the object that needs to be seen. I then paint on white and/or black to the edges of the layer mask to fix any edge problems in the original extracted layer. Once I have my perfectly extracted object, I can include that layer and its mask into the composite image and position it accordingly. Sometimes there are a few pixels that seem out of place once the layers have been combined, so I’ll fix those individually by zooming in and then I use the clone stamp tool to edit out the problems.

Extracting objects is really an art form all to itself. To do this so, you’ll need to know how to use the extract tool in Photoshop and how layer masks work, which I’m sure there are countless tutorials on the Internet that show you exactly how to use both. If you don’t have Photoshop, check to see if your photo editing software supports these things. If not, you can buy Photoshop Elements for about $99. You can also use the lasso tool to extract an object if it has an obvious edge. Hair and fur are harder to do, which is where the extract tool comes in handy.

Doug Hough from my photo gallery, The Lens Flare, has a lot of really great composites, and the thumbnail in this article was created by Donwrob.

I don’t like Compaq. The Compaq’s that I’ve used/purchased over the years have been pretty crappy machines. If this was school, I’d give Compaq an F. Although I have to admit that because of my poor experiences with them, I haven’t bothered buying a Compaq for over 5 years.

Dell is better. I’d give them about an overall grade of a C. They have decent machines, but their tech support is pretty poor. If you call them, plan on about a 45 minute wait, and then plan on arguing about whether or not your problem is “supported”. We were supposed to be on their best support plan too. I’ve had to get into some really heated conversations with them to get them to actually help me. For example, they had a problem with the front side USB ports on their small form factor machines. I called and told the girl that my bar code reader wouldn’t work and she said that wasn’t supported because I didn’t buy the reader from Dell. It turned out that the USB ports on the front of the computer don’t have as much power going to them as the ones in the back. The solution was to plug the reader into the back of the computer. This was after an hour of arguing about whether or not she could help me, getting a supervisor, arguing with them, etc. The problem was with their USB port, not the actual scanner. I think I left a bloody mark on my desk from banging my head into it multiple times before that problem was fixed.

I’ve been quite unsatisfied with the quality of service from them. Also, their sales staff is pushy and they don’t treat you very well unless you spend $50k or more. I’ve had experience with them at both levels. They were very kind, helpful, and worked hard for me when I was spending $50k+ a year with them. When I dropped below that level, there was a very noticeable change. They gave me the impression that I was a burden of their time. In all fairness to Dell, this was while I had an account level that was supposed to spend $50k or more a year. There are other divisions that deal with customers with a smaller budget. I dropped below that threshold because Tigerdirect.com beat their bids and we made some large purchases with them instead.

I just bought a Dell Laptop this month. I bought it online after talking to a chat sales representative. The person was helpful, and it was a good experience. I didn’t have to wait very long.

I’ve bought many things from Tigerdirect.com. Their service is excellent. Their sale staff is rock solid. I spent a lot with them and thus had a dedicated corporate account manager. He’s now a friend of mine and we talk on the phone from time to time about computer stuff even though I don’t spend money with him anymore - I’ve since moved to another job where I’m not buying all the PC equipment. His direct line is still on my speed dial on my cell phone; however.

I bought 40 computers from TigerDirect one time - their brand is called Systemax. I wasn’t happy with these computers. We had a lot of problems with them. My sales rep assured me that this wasn’t normal and that I got a bad batch, but out of 40 computers, we swapped out 2-3 motherboards, 3-4 hard drives, some bad memory, a couple of power supplies, etc. They gave us great service though. In most cases, a tech came out and fixed it for us, except for the stores where we had a person that could do it themselves. Some of the problem was probably caused in part by us. It seemed that the computers overheated fairly easy, and we didn’t help the fact because we put the computers in an enclosed cabinet with limited air flow. After a the first few problems, we put in a fan in the cabinet to help cool off the computers and that slowed down the problems. So, I’d give them a C when buying their Systemax brand as far as equipment goes, and an A in service. I’ve bought a ton of stuff from them such as extra hard drives, memory card readers, etc and all of that has been great.

Since I’m a tech geek, I prefer to build my own desktop. This way I know all of the parts that are in it and can easily fix it. However, if you don’t know how to build a computer and don’t want the headache of troubleshooting hardware problems, then I’d go with either Dell or TigerDirect.com. Between the two, Dell computers had less overall problems, but each problem took a hell of a lot longer to fix because their support staff sucks. Tiger had more problems, but each problem was relatively painless because their support staff rocked.

In both cases, you’ll want to come up with some sort of backup plan. You can get a hard drive replaced, but you can’t get your files replaced if you don’t have a backup - well unless you spend thousands of dollars with a data recovery company and then it’ll only be a partial recovery.

The only thing I wish was better is the video card; however, I’m mainly going to use it to run Aptana along with Rad Rails and Mongrel (Ruby on Rails webserver) and Photoshop so I don’t need a super good graphics card since both of these programs are processor and memory intensive, and I’m staying with Windows XP - Vista needs too much in the way of Video Card processor, and I really don’t care to have pretty windows. I just need it to work, and XP does a good enough job for that.

I custom built my desktop, and although it’s about a year old now, it’s still pretty nice. When I’m playing games, I use that. The laptop will enable me to program from anywhere, and so that my wife can use her Creative Labs Zen MP3 player. The Zen doesn’t work on Windows XP x64, so this is an added benefit. We’ll be able to use the laptop to interface with Zen’s software, and the desktop as a file server for all the music files.

I suspected that the problem had to do with the navigation. I wanted to test a few things out to see which one would be the best to drive up the pages viewed per visit stat, in other words, which combination or recipe would entice somebody to click a link and visit an additional page on the site. My site is split up into several virtual directories such as artwork, artists, reviews, etc. Using Google Analytics, I took a look at the Top Content report and did a search for any pages inside the virtual folders by putting the folder name in the “find url” box. For example, I searched for “/gallery/”. There were 3 numbers that I was specifically analyzing: pageviews, bounce rate, and exit percentage.

This was so that I could focus on an area of the site that would give me the most bang for my buck, so to speak. I settled on the gallery pages because their bounce rate and exit % was higher than other pages, and their overall page views are a large percentage of the overall site.

This was my first attempt with Google Optimizer, so I didn’t want to try anything too hard at first. I settled on testing the font styles of the navigational links. I tested a normal font, a bold font, a different color font of the anchor tags, as well as a different background color for the navigational headings.

I set up my test as any gallery page (page with a large photograph) and my goal page as any link that could be accessed from the gallery pages. Optimizer won’t count a goal unless a person has visited the test page first, but even still, there was a margin of error built into this test because a person could visit a gallery page and then navigate all over the site, and end up at say the artist pages, which was set as a goal.

A second margin of error is the number of total views per recipe or combination of changes, which in my case was “bold + different color”, “bold + different background”, “all 3″, etc. The more people that receive a recipe, the lower your margin of error drops. This particular margin is calculated by Google and is represented as a +/- %.

With this in mind, I ran the test for 2 days and found that the bold links seemed to be the best (about a 60% increase in conversions). The margin of error that Google calculates was still high enough that the results were non-conclusive. I didn’t wait long enough because I wanted to revamp all the nav, with different links, and knew that if I did that, it would completely mess up the test.

In a few days, when the dust settles down after all the regular users have got over the shock of different navigation, I’m going to rerun the test. This time; however, I’m going to set it up differently. Optimizer allows you to set an event on the page as a goal. Therefore, I’m going to set an onclick event on each of the page’s links to register the goal. This way, a person can’t just stumble on one of the goal pages and have it counted as a conversion. They have to actually click a link on the page, which will reduce the overall error margin.

There are two ways to set up your test. The first is a page element, and the second is a combination of a page element. I set everything up as a combination, so I manually set up “bold”, “bold & orange”, “orange”, “bold & blue background”, “bold, blue bg, & orange links”, etc. This was a mistake. Rather, I should have set up bold as a page element, orange as another element, and the different background as a third. It would have made it a lot simpler because I would have only had to set up 3 things instead of 8.

All in all, MVT or Multivariant Testing, is the way to go to increase your conversion rate for whatever your site goals are. There are many companies out there that offer this service, but most are really expensive as in thousands of dollars per month. Google’s Optimizer is free and is #2 on the list of MVT programs that I’ve used. The only better is SiteSpect, but they are over $1k/month for 1 domain and more like $5-6k a month if you want unlimited domains. Google’s Optimizer is free and is relatively easy to use as long as you know how your website is set up. I’ve used Vertster and Optimost and found that they were more difficult to set up and manage than Optimizer.

The second number is Alexa’s Traffic Details. Alexa is a company owned by Amazon. They have a browser toolbar (for IE) and a browser plugin for Firefox. The toolbar/plugin sends anonymous data to Alexa for each page viewed. They compile all of the pages viewed, and the number of different people viewing those pages, and rank sites using a combination of both numbers. The Lens Flare is currently ranked at about 300k for the 3 month average (1 being the best) out of several million websites tracked. Since they are only counting people with the toolbar or plugin installed, each person can affect the numbers greatly. There are a few million Alexa users, but overall, the sample is a small percentage of the entire Internet population. Alexa’s stats are updated weekly for sites above the 100k mark and daily for sites under the 100k mark.

The ranking is a fun number to watch and see how it improves (or declines) over time.

If you’d like to try it out, you can download the browser plugin at:
http://www.alexa.com/site/download

Personally, I like the plugin on Firefox better than the toolbar on IE because the info is down at the bottom of the window tucked out of the way.

However, it causes some problems with X-Cart. One such problem is the Review Product form on the product detail page (product.php).

To fix this bug, you need to add hidden fields to the form instead of having them inside the form’s “action”.

In other words, change:

<form method=”post” action=”/product.php?mode=review&productid={$product.productid}” id=”reviewform”>

To:

<form method=”post” action=”/product.php?productid={$product.productid}” id=”reviewform” method=”post”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”productid” value=’{$product.productid}’ />
<input type=”hidden” name=”mode” value=”review” />

Next, you’ll need to edit vote.php at the document root of your Xcart install and add a slash at the beginning of the link.

So change:

func_header_location(”product.php?productid=$productid”);

to:

func_header_location(”/product.php?productid=$productid”);

This is because the CDSEO module creates a pseudo-directory and thus your browser thinks that it’s in that folder and tries to redirect you to the wrong path.

Apparently, IE6 has a bug people have dubbed the double padding bug or double margin bug. The problem can usually be fixed by using the CSS option: “display:inline” on your DIVs that have the double spacing problem. This fixed most of the spacing issues, but it didn’t fix them all.

To fix the last spacing problem, I had to resort to an Internet Explorer Kludge called conditional comments to include a separate CSS file when IE6 is loaded.

To do this, you put the following code after your other CSS files in your HEAD tag:

<!--[if IE 6]><link rel=”style sheet” href=”ie6.css” type=”text/css” media=”all” /><![endif]-->

This loads the ie6.css file when somebody is using IE6.

The main CSS file has the following directions for the col2 div:

.col2 {
width:338px;
position:relative; float:left;
margin:0px 0px 0px 5px; padding:0px;
display:inline;
}

The ie6.css file overrides col2 with the following directives:

.col2 {
width:338px;
margin:0px; padding:0px;
display:inline;
}

In IE6, floating the div to the left and adding a margin on the left side messed things up. From what I can tell, it started the location of the div in a slightly different place than IE7 and Firefox does and therefore has to be positioned differently to appear in the same place on the screen.

Also, another trick I learned while dealing with IE6’s limitations was a handly CSS tidbit called: “overflow:hidden”.

There are several places in my layout where I have a 2 pixel tall div with a background color to act as a horizontal rule. For example, this gray line:

.gray-line {
position:relative;
width:99%;
height:2px;
background-color:#ddd;
margin:0px; padding:0px;
overflow:hidden;
}

However, without the overflow:hidden aspect, IE6 renders a line about 5-8 pixels tall.

Lastly, “background-repeat: no-repeat” solved one last IE6 problem. Since it seems to use different heights for things, in places where I’m using a background image, the image would start to repeat itself again for about 2-3 pixels. Setting this directive on those areas solved that problem. Combine that with overflow:hidden and we’re good to go.