Copeland Christmas captured by Google Street Vehicle

I'm thinking the Google Street Vehicle came through our neighborhood early to mid-January.

I figured this street view shot had to be one of Google's messiest shots. I was wrong. After googling "Google Street Vehicle" to see if the vehicle had a name, I found dozens of websites dedicated to bizarre Street View photos.

The vehicle cam captured everything from ET to sunbathers to crimes in progress (allegedly). I'm sure most of the photos are bogus but it sure makes me feel better to know it could be much worse.

New year, new website

Here's a photo from our sushi party on January 15th. It was so fun. The porch and garage was still half up then. Now, the porch is done and the garage is 75% done.

For two years now, I've wanted to revamp www.CopelandChristmas.com. I finally did! It's been streamlined big time. I'm now using templates and css, so updating will be much much easier. Things were a bit hard to find (in my opinion), so I changed that too. Now, if anything, the site is too simple....but I like it that way.

Lots of International Traffic at www.CopelandChristmas.com

I received an email this morning from a woman in Sydney, Australia. She met my brother last month when he was on his way home to surprise us for Thanksgiving. He bought a boomerang from her gift shop and told her about our Christmas display. Apparently, she visited our website yesterday and has been emailing it around the other side of the world. Pretty cool.

So, then I was interested in recent international website hits...so I pulled up google analytics...

In the past 30 days, www.CopelandChristmas.com visitors ranked as follows:

1500 visits from USA
100 visits from Canada
8 visits from UK, Canada, Germany
6 visits from Australia
4 visits from New Zealand
...1 from Bahrain
...1 from Vietnam

The list goes on, but these are the highlights. Pretty cool.

Fixing Broken Links on CopelandChristmas.com

Been fixing broken links on the website recently. Here's one of the newest...it's from 2008.

Copeland Christmas from danielle copeland on Vimeo.

Updated the website today

For the first time in a year, I updated the website (www.copelandchristmas.com) today.

While I was updating, I figured I'd check out my google analytics account to see how the website traffic is going. I had a whopping 12 unique hits today. I need to call a friend in Fort Lauderdale at www.LauderdaleChristmas.com to thank him for having a link on his website. He has an AWESOME display...definitely worth a drive to check it out...he uses all LED lights too and the blues are beautiful.

A peculiar thing happened to me yesterday. A guy showed up at the door while I was in the garage setting up the display. He is from Venezuela, owns 11 shopping malls, and wanted to know if he could buy Christmas display items from me. He had a print out of our website and a car filled with 600 strobe lights that he was bringing back to his country. He said he was from Miami and wants to do big displays for his malls. He flew into Miami to buy stuff and ship it overseas. Dunno if the story is true, but it's definitely a unique one. "Good luck, guy from Venezuela!"

Web Stats for Copeland Christmas

After the Post article and the news broadcast aired, we had a HUGE spike in web hits. We had a fairly significant spike in the last few days as well. I noticed a nice post about our display on a Christmas Enthusiast forum of which I'm a member. As a result, we had a bunch of hits. I enjoy understanding and thinking critically about the correlation between website hits and outside chatter about our display.

Starry Starry Night Backdrop for Garage Display

Did I mention we finished tearing down the garage two weeks ago? I painted 1/3 of the garage this weekend and will finish next weekend. Here's a shot I took two weeks ago while I was tearing down the backdrop. A How To for this backdrop can be found on our website here.
This is a photo of the ceiling. You can see the fluourescent light to the right. I had just torn down the plastic sheeting which was stapled to the ceiling between the cup hooks and the light fixture. You can see two sets of lights here (one blue and one clear). To the far left, you can see the black sheers (or curtains) that face the driveway where visitors stand.

How to Photograph Christmas Lights

I've been obsessed with learning how to take GOOD photographs of Christmas lights. I've learned a tripod and a disabled flash are the two most important steps to get great shots of lights. However, what about ISO, exposure, aperture...etc?

Here are 6 links that will mark the beginning of your crisp and vivid Christmas light photos.

http://photojojo.com/content/websites/photographing-holiday-lights/

By the way, I loooooove photojojo. It is one of two RSS feeds I religiously read. Lifehacker is the other. This is NOT a paid post (I don't do that).

100,000 website hits!

Atcually we're at 111,000 since June when the stats were activated. I'm pretty impressed and will use the next few paragraphs to brag a bit.

I did all the tedious SEO stuff that webmasters do to ensure to get a good page rank in search engines like google. I am proud to say that we are number one on google....the famous band Copeland is even behind us. Most any keyword that you would think of to find us...works!

SO, to celebrate our 100,000th hit, I decided to revamp the website. I've added videos, photos, a new banner, and a new back end to the blog. Hope you all like it.



I'd really appreciate to know if you experience any problems and what browser you use. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know.

Got a Bunch Done Today

1. Today, I signed up for a new blog at blogger.com.
2. Then, I registered my new blog with feedburner.com.
3. Then, I activated BuzzBoost, which republishes my blog's burned feed content.
4. After configuring my BuzzBoost settings, I was given a block of code that I pasted into a blank Dreamweaver template. I renamed the template file "blog.html."
5. I opened up FileZilla (the FTP software I use) and published the new html file.
6. Then, I updated my website with links to the new blog. Ta Dah!

Of course, having never done this before, it took me almost 4 hours to research and execute. But, I'm pretty darn happy!

Made a link image

Want to put one of our links on your website? Click here.