I just produced a new video on how to make cinnamon bread. My object is to get more professional with them. I find that the best way to improve is to do. “Practice makes perfect” as they say.

All along with my videos I have not been happy with the sound quality. The audio of my narration always sounds scratchy and tinny. I have purchased two or three fairly good microphones in an effort to correct this problem.

On the Cinnamon bread video I asked my wife about the sound quality and she said it sounded okay. I asked, “What about the narration?” She said, “Oh, you always sound like that.”

Funny how we listen to ourselves talk day after day and do not really know what we sound like. Of course, I have heard myself on answering machines, and video tapes, but I always attribute the muffled tones and the gravel in my voice to the low quality mics and ambient noise.

Now that I have found out the problem is just me, I am going to have to work on training my voice. Alternatively, I could try talking in falsetto, a la Rudy Vallee!

Ugh. I get so frustrated sometimes with this internet business. I have worked very hard on the new look for InDepthInfo. My objective was to eventually shift all of the site over to the new look. However, the two folios that I have turned over to the new look have dropped in traffic by nearly a half. This does not augur well for the new look. Also, I can’t seem to figure out why it is happening.

The structure of the code in the new look is substantially the same as the old, although the look is somewhat different. I was very careful to keep the same titles, descriptions and keywords. I did update the text somewhat, but this is always going on at InDepthInfo and never has such a drastically negative effect. The only major differences I can pinpoint are the fact that I now use style sheets. Which I did not before. Also, I had a navigation bar at the bottom of the page as well as the top, and do not now.

All of this seems very minor. I can hardly believe the smack down in traffic as a result. My next experiment is going to be to add an additional navbar to the bottom of the page. I am not one of those people who obsesses over Search Engine O****zation. But when my websites take this kind of hit after a structural and user friendly improvement I have to be concerned.

If you have any suggestions, let me know.

I have been recently upgrading folios on InDepthInfo to the “new” format. Anything over nine years old has been getting a facelift. One of the folios that I have been working on is Weekdays, which describes the days of the week, telling how they came about and any holidays that are associated with them.

In order to make sure that the new format does not effect traffic, I have had occasion to monitor the folio pretty closely. What I found was that Saturday gets the least traffic of all the individual day pages. Believe it or not Wednesday is the most popular. Now, all things being relatively equal, why would this be?

This is my theory, Saturday is also the day of the week that InDepthInfo gets the least number of hits. It is the day that many people are busy mowing their yards, going on dates, eating BBQ, or relaxing with a good book. (Not me, of course. I am always working.) People are too busy on Saturdays to click a Saturday link. Also being the last day of the week, anyone doing research on the days of the week, will be most likely to give that day short shrift. Another strange thing about Saturday is that it was the only day of the week to retain its Roman name after the Barbarian invasions of England. Even the Norsemen paid less attention to it!

Finally, I think Saturday has a certain mystique about it that most people don’t want to destroy by having too much knowledge. But then again, in my mind you can never know too much!