© Copyright 2010 Tink *~*~*

http://MyMobileAdventures.com

Next Friday after work, I’ll head over to Orlando to meet up with some friends for dinner. We’re going to cheer some other friends who are running in Disney’s Princess Half-Marathon, and take in the Flower and Garden Festival at EPCOT.

Be sure to check in over the weekend (Saturday March 6th and Sunday March 7th)for some mobile blogging fun – I hear we’re going to hit the tequila bar in Mexico

In the meantime, enjoy these topiary critters from last year’s Festival.

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I was walking in the Oasis, a quiet, lushly green and tranquil section just inside the gates of Disney’s Animal Kingdom park. It’s a soothing place where you’ll find twisting paths, a rope bridge, a joyously tumbling waterfall and all manner of exotic animals and birds. The day was hot, and the air was heavy and still. The silence was broken only by barely discernible ambient music and the gurgling of a stream. I rounded a corner and came upon a beautiful glade that surrounded a pool. And there he stood, on a rock – a Great Egret.

I became excited when I realized that he was in full breeding plumage. My heart started to beat faster; it was so loud in my ears, I was sure he would hear it, become frightened and take flight. I think I might have even been holding my breath. I crept forward to get a closer look, reaching into my bag for the camera.

The closer I got, the more convinced I became that he very well knew that he had company and didn’t mind in the least.. He seemed to straighten a bit and puff out his chest. I took this as a good sign in terms of getting some photographs, and I was no longer afraid of making the slightest sound. The mechanical whir of the camera’s lens opening and extending broke the reverie, contrasting sharply against the backdrop of rushing water and the far-off exclamations of other types of birds who lived at the Oasis. The Great Egret stood his ground, unperturbed. I fired off several shots of him just standing there on the rock, playing with distance and focus. He started to fuss a little, and I stopped shooting, holding my breath again, finger hovering in mide-air over the button.

Happy Critturday!

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Now playing: Madonna – Vogue

© Copyright 2008 Tink *~*~*

http://MyMobileAdventures.com

Walt Disney World is in the quasi-tropical climate of Orlando, Florida. The flora is so well-maintained and lush, it can support any number of critters that love the warmth and humidity. Encounters with local wildlife (in other words, not placed there by Disney) are not only very satisfying, but can also be frequent if you keep your eyes open and pay attention to your surroundings. Today we’re going to look at some “things with wings” – butterflies I’ve met at Walt Disney World.

Found and photographed near “stroller hell” aka the former sky ride in Fantasyland, Magic Kingdom – November, 2004

Not sure if this is a butterfly or a moth. Found in EPCOT, and I believe I was over by Universe of Energy. April, 2005

Last one – this beauty was found quite near a gorilla at Disney’s Animal Kingdom – it was like “beauty and the beast” in there that day October, 2006

Happy Critturday, everyone!

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Click photos to see if there’s a larger version to view in Flickr

In honor of the upcoming Chinese New Year, which falls on Valentine’s Day this year, I’ve decided to continue covering the Chinese zodiac, as photographed at EPCOT during the International Flower and Garden Festival one year. To see the original post in this series, click here and read “Red for luck and love at Disney”.

First up today is the dragon. According to ChineseZodiac.com, the dragon is the “mightiest” of all the Chinese zodiac signs. Dragons are dominant, ambitious and prefer to lead. If you are a dragon, you’ve got passion and courage and a wee bit of a temper You also love your independence, but you are not impervious to falling in love provided you find someone engaging enough for you – and once in love, you tend to stay there. Dragons are best paired with Monkeys and Rats, but will not do well with the Ox or the Goat. Hey, Rat – that’s ME! Hmmm, I wonder if I actually know any dragons….

EEEK, it’s a SNAKE! Well that’s what I would say if I found one in my garage or on my lanai… notice I do not say “in my house”, as I have no wish to tempt the gods Snakes are very intelligent and analytical; this makes them good at plotting and scheming. They are also very materialistic and enjoy luxury surroundings, so I’m guessing that part of all that plotting and scheming is to obtain the fine things they want. At work, they are creative and diligent but can become easily bored and therefore tend to job-hop. In relationships, the Snake is characterized as an attractive and expert seducer – why am I not surprised, given the Biblical story about the snake in the garden! They are a bit possessive and jealous of their mates. Don’t make the Snake cross, as they are big lovers of revenge. Snakes get on well with the Rooster and the Ox, but with Pigs and Monkeys – not so much!

Last one for today – it’s the Horse, and I actually like this particular statue best because of the awesome detailing that went into making the saddle. The Horse possesses many attributes that please – he’s energetic, outgoing, humorous and loves to be the center of attention and have a good time. Athletic and intelligent, they are also a little bit on the “ADD” side, starting many projects at once but not necessarily finishing before pursuing the next thing. The Horse enjoys interaction, and does well in careers where they deal with people on a regular basis. Horses are spontaneous in relationships, throwing themselves completely in, often leaving a little chunk of themselves behind when it ends. That must be completely exhausting! Horses can successfully partner with Dogs and Tigers but should not try it with a Monkey or a Rat.

Wow, no wonder why it never works with the “fun” guys :p

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Now that 2010 is almost upon us, it’s time to do a 2009 “Best Of” post. I get a kick out of “fun facts”, so this year I’m taking a statistical point of view. Let’s see what 2009 held!

My Mobile Adventures *~*~* Top 20 Posts of 2009

Posts are ranked according to how many visits they received during the 12-month period ranging from 12/29/2008 – 12/29/2009. Data gathered and presented by the Wordpress Stats plugin.

1. Lego Sculpture at Downtown Disney: The Dragon
2. Colorful birds from Orlando, Florida
3. Disney’s Ladies in RED
4. My Top 5 FUNky Facts About Pelicans
5. “The Rocks”, Sanibel Island
6. More Disney Characters in RED
7. 7 Things To Do In Walt Disney World On Halloween (except THAT!)
8. “There once was a man from Nantucket…”
9. Yet More Disney Characters Who Wear RED
10. My “favorite” Disney red-head
11. A Disney Dance of the Hours
12. Of Mice and Mutts
13. Lighthouse at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort
14. The Empress Lilly, Downtown Disney
15. Critters on the Castle: Kaa
16. Sanibel Island beach birds
17. Frog metamorphosis at Disney
18. About
19. Dancing mushrooms from Disney’s Fantasia
20. Mickey Mouse Chillaxin’ In Paradise

IN WITH THE OLD

Among my Top 20 Posts of 2009 are four posts which were originally published during 2008.

• 100% of these posts contain Disney-related content
• 50% of these posts were created for the Ruby Tuesday meme, and deal with the topic of Disney characters who wear the color red.
• Dark horse: my “About” page somehow squeaked into the Top 20. Who knew, huh?

SPEAKING OF MEMES…

• The Ruby Tuesday meme, created and managed by Mary The Teach, is responsible for prompting 35% of my Top 20 posts.  The runners up are:
  • Camera Critters (Saturdays, 23%)
  • The Wednesday Trifecta (22%)

  – of the three memes in which I’ve participated in on Wednesdays, Site Meter indicates that it is Outdoor Wednesday, created and managed by Susan @ A Southern Daydreamer, that brings the most visitors.

  • The Monday Trifecta at 9%

  – Well, it’s actually a bi-fecta now, one of the memes having fallen prey to blogger burnout. None of them stands out as bringing in more traffic than the others.

  THE MORAL OF THE STORY: since I’ve been cutting back on meme participation – it was starting to feel like a “gotta” instead of a “wanna” – I should probably concentrate on my Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday memes, if I want to maintain decent levels of traffic.

  SPEAKING OF SITE METER…

  Lots of interesting information about your audience and how they get to your blog each day can be had from Site Meter.

  • Even though I do get a lot of traffic from the photo meme sites themselves, the vast majority of my traffic comes from Google searches. The memes just seem to provide an excellent prompt for what people are searching for.
  • I seem to have hit the nail on the head with several of my post titles in the Top 20. There are many, MANY searches for phrases like “facts about pelicans” and “Disney red characters”.
  • I get a chuckle every time I see that someone has searched on “there once was a man from Nantucket…”
  • Site Meter tells me that I get a lot more visits on the days I mobile blog than I do when I create meme-related posts that are not mobile blogged. This is especially true when I mobile blog from Disney. Visits on mobile blogging days tend to be from fewer unique visitors, yet those unique visitors show up multiple times throughout the day to check for updates. Each post has fewer visitors but collectively they add up for the day to be many more visits than on a regular blogging day.

  THE MORAL OF THE STORY: Services such as Site Meter can provide valuable insight into who your audience is, where they come from, why they’re visiting and why they return. Add to this a little intelligent SEO in post titles and repeat traffic ensues.

  EFFORT COUNTS… sort of!

  It was a difficult year in my day job. I was thrust into something completely new and different and it was a tough row to hoe, for a while there. As the year wore on, my job became more and more carnivorous, devouring my life.

  

  Here we can see that as the year wore on, less and less posts were making it into the Top 20 for the year. 40% of the Top 20 were posted in the first quarter of the year; 30% in the 2nd quarter and 10% in the 3rd quarter. The 4th quarter is not represented at all.There are a couple of reasons for this:

  • That’s the way it goes when you’re in corporate finance; the last quarter of the fiscal year is challenging and doesn’t leave much time or frankly energy for other endeavors.
  • But to be fair, the posts from the previous quarters and even the previous year have been hanging around longer and had a longer time to rack up search engine traffic.
  • Had I been able to put more effort into blogging as the year wore on – posting every day, visiting other blogs – I might have been able to do better, but realistically, this sort of measurement over a finite period of time renders more recent posts chronologically challenged.

  Now here’s something weird. Despite the traffic appearing to slow down, the number of subscribers I have has been steadily increasing all year. Take a look at these numbers from Feedburner -

  

  Despite not having the personal bandwidth necessary to visit other bloggers as much as I’d like to, I was still able to do a few things to gain exposure:

  • TweetMeme – I put the retweet button on my posts, and occasionally, someone actually pushes it!
  • TwitterFeed – I signed up for this and now every post I make is automatically tweeted
  • PicATheme – “elite” group of photobloggers/meme participants who posted to a group blog (group has since folded). While I was contributing there, I noticed some visitors who followed my link from there
  • WaltDisneyBoards.com – my feed automatically posts there to my very own forum. I get exposure, the owner gets Disney-related content. The fact that it is a forum means I can have conversations with the folks there; a busy thread will draw more and more people in, to see what the buzz is about, and many of them end up clicking through to the blog. If you are a Disney fan, I strongly suggest you check the place out. You will find a nice bunch of folks there to chat with about your favorite obsession.
  • Facebook – My Mobile Adventures *~*~* launched a fan page at the beginning of August. At this time, I’m not auto-posting there but I want to do that in the future. So far, I have about 70 fans; I have to assume there is some cross-over from my subscriber base, but a lot of them are real life friends and relatives who were not really aware that I blogged until I created the fan page and sent them an invite. So I gained a few subscribers there as well.

  MORAL OF THE STORY: Distribute your feed and mention your URL via multiple means. It all adds up to more exposure, more requests for the feed – more subscribers!

  CONCLUSION

  These are very modest numbers I’ve been describing. Had I not a day job, I would have the time and the energy to devote to creating more valuable content and publicizing the blog more widely, including those all-important fellow blogger connections. However, modest or not, I think the numbers show that taking action makes a positive impact.

  • There are many venues in which to take such actions – Twitter, Facebook, forums are all good places to promote what you’ve got to offer.
  • Use metrics tools like Site Meter and a stats plugin to observe and measure – what’s working, what’s not working, what’s standing still. The numbers tell a story!
  • Use SEO techniques to attract search engine traffic – name your photos and construct your post titles with SEO in mind.

  Even a blog that is “just for fun” can enjoy some success and steady improvement when a few simple actions are taken. I’m looking forward to more of the same in 2010, and I’m also looking forward to hearing about YOUR blogging insights.

  Happy New Year!

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© Copyright 2009 Tink *~*~*
http://MyMobileAdventures.com

For a twisted take on Jiminy Cricket = conscience, take a look at this blog post at Disney Every Day. My Twitter friend @AmandaTinney has put together a clever post filled with humorous animal pictures, one of which I tweeted to her earlier this week. Enjoy!

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Of all the exotic creatures discovered by explorers when they first set foot on Captiva Island, there is none more respected and feared than the dread jackalope. Entire ships full of pirates and other scalawags were brought down by the resident herd, making it difficult to transform Captiva into a proper pirate hangout. This is why the jackalope was hunted nearly to extinction, and why in later years, a permit was necessary to hunt them. Here we see one of the last known specimens of the dread jackalope, stuffed and mounted, hanging over the bar at Captiva’s Mucky Duck restaurant.

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While touring the Naples Zoo in Southwest Florida last week, we came upon an enclosure full of cougars. No, not the Courtney Cox variety! These are the type found in the wilds of the western United States. Other words for cougar are panther, mountain lion, even puma – all are part of the same species of big cats.

I remember reading a few years back about genetic defects found in the Florida panther that scientists attempted to correct by introducing DNA from Texas mountain lions. They trapped a number of female mountain lions and transported them from Texas to Florida, releasing them into the Florida panther’s habitat. When the females gave birth, the genetic defects had been either reduced or eliminated from the offspring. All of the Texans were then returned to their home state.

At the zoo on this particular day, a pile of cougars lay sleeping on the ground in the shady enclosure, while a significantly larger one lounged on a wooden platform. I stood there silently wishing he’d get up and move about so I could get a good shot of him. Suddenly, as if my wish were his command, he roused himself and looked directly at me with sleepy, patient eyes – and then he stuck his tongue out at me!

Just call me “The Cougar Whisperer”

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Unsuspecting villagers practice yodeling outside the local pub while a giant bunny prepares to attack the village. RUN, UNSUSPECTING VILLAGERS – RUN!



(it’s really just the toy train village that’s set up outside the German pavilion at EPCOT)

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Ring-tailed lemurs can be found in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, pretty close to the entrance to It’s Tough To Be A Bug. I enjoy watching these guys. To me, they look like an odd mixture between a fox (pointy face), a raccoon (rings on the tail) and a spider monkey (general shape of body). I’ve done some reading about them and here are the FUNky facts I’ve discovered

1) Ring-tailed lemurs are in fact primates, so they are related to all sorts of monkeys as well as to humans. However, they are not of the simian order of primate; they are what’s known as Strepsirrhine primates, typically regarded as less intelligent than simians (although, that has recently been debated). There are several different kinds of lemur, and all of them hail from Madagascar.

2) Ring-tailed lemurs like to sunbathe, and are often found doing so sitting up in the Lotus position. The sunbathing is to warm themselves during the day, but at night they sleep all piled up with one another to share warmth. Such a sleeping pile is called a “lemur ball”. They are usually found moving about on all-fours (quadrupedal), but are also capable of standing on hind legs for short periods. Whenever I’ve seen one walking around, they’ve usually sort of stalked along, similar to a cat or a raccoon.

3) While most lemurs are nocturnal, the ring-tailed lemur is dirunal – like (most!) humans, they are awake during the day and asleep at night. They are very social and live together in troops of about 30. The most lemurs I’ve seen at Disney is two, and I often wonder if they miss living in a big troop, and what Disney does for them to help compensate for socializing with the troop. I hope to remember to ask around next time I’m there.

4) Ring-tailed lemur troops are female-dominant. This is true of all types of lemurs. The hierarchy of females in the troop is not inherited; you don’t get to be the top mama lemur just because your mother was.

5) Lemurs have scent glands that they use to mark territory, and sometimes they even have stink fights with other lemurs. They soak their tails in “stink” from their scent glands and wave them at the opponent. I have to admit that I giggled when I read this. In my head, I heard the voice of the French soldiers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “Hah, I stink in your general direction!”

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