August10th
How I spent my summer vacation. My aunt, Betsy, rented a house in Stonington and had room for me. Also there were her son, Nathan, and his son, Nic, and daughter, Lydia.
Comment by Betsy — August 11, 2010 @ 9:22 am
Oh my! What a beautiful family I have. But only one photo of Lulu? The photos are really great and a wonderful reminder of when you were with us.
June2nd
I went sailing last weekend. Pretty nice!
Comment by Al from Alabama — June 3, 2010 @ 1:34 pm
Jim, first comment I have submitted on your blog, but I would like to thank you for the great pictures you share. The first one, showing the breakfast layout, made me absolutely hungry. It appears, if this picture is any indication, the reputation of the finest fare in the fleet will be carried on in great style. Thanks again, and I intend to make visits to your site a daily ritual. Hope to see you this summer.
Comment by Dotsie Millbrandt — June 11, 2010 @ 1:47 pm
Your photography is awesome, Jim! Makes me want to quit work and move to Maine. Hope to meet you someday, maybe when I’m up there for the Wooden Boat course.
Comment by Mary Carver-Stiehler — July 4, 2010 @ 8:11 am
Thanks Jim for the wonderful slide show Friday Night!! Also thank you for the kind words on my humble photos. Have been working at it since I was 16 when I started in a dark room, back in the Dark Ages 
You are a Master at you craft!
Mary
May10th
The Camden Harbormaster posted on Facebook:
Daily Def: “SLUSH FUND”-slush was the unpromising name for fat scraped off the top of the barrels of meat. The crew found it perfect for greasing masts to make sail hoisting easier and for preserving leather fittings. The cook, unhappy about this, would secret it in his ‘slush fund’. It was a prerequisite so far as he was concerned. He sold it ashore, mostly to candle makers and people in the fish and chip trade.
Who knew? Well, I did, sorta. The schooner Mary Day gets her masts slushed a couple times a year. Usually, it’s the youngest (lightest) member of the crew who gets outfitted head to toe in disposable gear, then strapped into a boatswain’s chair (boson’s chair, really just a board strung between some rope). Then this person is hoisted to the top of the mast with a bucket full of slush. These days, slush is not meat grease but Vaseline petroleum jelly. They start at the top, smearing Vaseline all over the mast. When a section is finished, they yell to the deck, where someone standing by lowers them a few feet.
Here’s Madeline slushing the mast:
Madeline slushing the mast of the Mary Day.
Comment by Chuck Green — May 12, 2010 @ 9:48 pm
I love this shot Jim. You do great work. Your shoreline images remind me of my experience with Outward Bound in Rockland many years ago–if you’ve never been to Maine you might not have an appreciation for the beauty of the Maine coast–it is a destination everyone should see in their lifetime. I found it to be far more intimate than any other coastline I have seen. There are thousands of islands, unpredictable weather, and natural beauty beyond description.
Thanks for sharing.
May5th
How the crew of the Mary Day and other windjammers spend their evenings before the season starts.
Comment by Barry — May 6, 2010 @ 5:19 am
Thank You Jim for the great detective work. I will bet the crew did not know that you were spying on my behalf. I always wondered what they meant when the crew told me they were working late… again. Too bad the light was so golden. That almost make the “work” look like fun. Let the crew know that I was still working at home fixing blocks, gluing up the last layer of my top secret project and over hauling the riding mower… until 9 o’clock last nite! Thank goodness for headlights… they draw the mosquitoes away. Thank goodness I am not a jealous man.
Your mst humble and ob’d'nt servant,
The Captain
April1st
I continue to stand by all I said in a previous post on the field of “Search Engine Optimization” and I have a few posts to link to that back up what I said:
This rambles on for 40 minutes and much of it will only be relevant to web designers who understand what he’s talking about. And the links below are from his post but with some comments from me.
Also from Chris, an older post but quite relevant
This is a real rant and may offend some (with language and/or anti-SEO arguments) but I agree with all of it. Most of all, I agree with his “one true way” to get good web traffic: “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.” That really is the key. People are looking for quality content. Deliver it and they will come to you and tell other people to go to you. Also worth reading (but perhaps more rant-like) are his follow-ups: here and here
There are some simple “best practices” for web designers to do to help the search engines rank a web site but the bottom line is that on the web, the three most important things are: CONTENT, CONTENT, and CONTENT.
January4th
A couple of almost-random thoughts about domain names (like jimdugan.com):
Here is my best advice on choosing domain names:
.com is best almost always (as opposed to .net, .info, .org, etc.) . People remember it, it is commercial (so not best for non profits). It’s the default.
Choose the shortest.
Choose the easiest to remember and SPELL. (Write your radio ad. Do you have to spell the domain name? Repeat it? If so, change the domain name.)
Maybe you have some cool foreign word you want to use? OK but it’s likely to be hard for your customers to spell. So it might be a liability in the domain name. Deal with it and don’t say I didn’t warn you. OK, there are exceptions (google, skype, etc.) but they succeed for their own reasons (short, catchy, lots of startup money).
Brainstorm on it and come up with a bunch of alternatives then ask friends. Go for ease of use, not cute or cool.
One odd thing you have to watch out for: There are many places on the internet to “check availability” of a domain name. Some of them are legitimate; some not so much. Some sites appear to capture the domain names being searched and either use them or sell them. How does this work? Let’s say today you search for “somedomain.com” and it’s available. If you grab it then, you’re fine. If you think on it for 24 hours, someone else has grabbed it. They’ll put some ads on it and sit on it for a while, checking to see if there’s traffic potential.
There’s an odd loophole in domain registration that makes this possible: when you register a name, you have a few days to undo the registration and get your money back. They’re taking advantage of this, grabbing a domain for a few days to see if it’s worth anything.
How to know if a site is doing this? Ask around for reputable hosting. I like dreamhost.com and it’s NOT one that I have heard mentioned as doing the above highjinks.
Some quick background basics here: To have a web site, you need at least two things: domain name and hosting. Hosting is the space on a computer where your site lives and is available to the internet 24/7 (we hope). Hosting companies have buildings full of computers (servers), most of them running many different web sites. The domain name on the other hand (jimdugan.com, google.com, etc.) needs to be registered. The company doing this may or may not be the same as the hosting company. Years ago, there was only one registrar: NetworkSolutions.com. That monopoly broke up but NS still does both registration and hosting. Bottom line: if you have a website, be sure you understand the difference between hosting and registration and keep both of them up-to-date.
Most domain registrations are renewed annually and a good hosting company will automate the process nicely for you, so you hardly have to think about it. But many things get in the way of this:
In fact, I’ve spent most of today dealing with a situation where all of the above were true. It’s been a nightmare.
My friend Pedro (not his real name) signed up for several years of registration all at once, to save a few bucks. By the time he needed to renew (Jan. 2, 2010) he had:
So he was in deep water. Luckily, after several calls to the registrar, a solution: fill out a form and send it with a scan of a government issued photo ID to this address. Wait three days.
We’ll see.
One other thing to be careful about is companies that register a domain but keep your name off the registration. This is less common these days but it used to be the norm for some outfits. I lost two domain names for just this reason. The company that I asked to register the names went out of business, with their email address as the only contact name attached to the domain.
Yes, no, maybe, probably. They’re doing a pretty good job but they can’t do much to parse odd words. Google probably doesn’t know whether jimdugan.com is about someone named “Jim Dugan” or “Ji Mdugan” but they would if it was jim-dugan.com. Likewise mainekayaking.com should probably be hyphenated if Google is your main concern. But personally, I’m not crazy about hyphenating a domain name. It always seems awkward to say “JimHyphenDuganDotCom.” Ick.
Your domain name is your brand, your address, the way for people to find you and find out everything they need to know about you. So make sure it’s not a struggle. Make it fun and memorable but this above all: make it easy.
Comment by Carolyn — January 25, 2010 @ 9:46 am
Great ideas, I hate the hyphen too, I always forget to insert it, even when someone tells me, they are a mental block waiting to happen.
Love to hear some chatter about how you choose your images for web sites. Obviously your images are fabulous, and really MAKE a site stand out. How do you choose which images to use, and how should a new or small business proceed with this?
November24th
I prefer Acadia in the off season. From October to about May, it can feel like I have it all to myself. Wandering that magical mile from Otter Cliffs to Thunder Hole with almost nobody else around is a real privilege, thrilling and relaxing at the same time.
Comment by Debbie Mirenda — November 24, 2009 @ 11:21 pm
You have captured the essence of the beautiful land.
Comment by Carolyn — December 6, 2009 @ 8:52 pm
Wow, who knew rocks were that beautiful!
Comment by Dorothy Maguire — June 22, 2010 @ 2:13 pm
I find rocks magical and your photos shout that out loud!
The landscape is so much like the west of Ireland, there just has to be a geological connection.
November15th
November2nd
September17th
Ran into a friend at the supermarket last night. He was headed out and I was headed in.
“Do you still do web sites?” he asked. We talked for a bit and he gave me a business card. I promised to email with some advice and we may get together to talk but it occurred to me that the email I sent him is general information, applicable to everyone. So I include it here. The names have been changed to keep it generic:
As you plan your web site, here’s some basic info to consider (some of which you may already have done):
I started to write this at the end of the email but it occurs to me it’s important and basic enough to move it to the top: What is the mission of the site? And very much related: How will you judge success or failure of the site? What do you offer that’s unique? How will you get the word out to drive traffic to your site?
This might seem obvious (mission: to make money; success judged on whether it makes money) but there’s usually more to it. Lots of business sites succeed based more on customer experience and full service than just the quality of the product. Think of amazon.com’s ability to know pretty well what each customer wants. Think of zappos.com’s way of letting you try on shoes with no risk.
So planning:
Make an outline. It doesn’t need to be fancy and it will not be complete (web sites are always changing and if they aren’t changing, they’re dying). But figure out what your basic pages will be to start and what features you’ll want to have. And as you do this, you will naturally get the pieces together:
Start gathering the parts of the site: text, logo, graphics, photos. In digital form, so you can email it to me or send on disk.
Start planning for commerce: Products, sales tax, shipping, etc. Will each product have its own page or put a few products on a page? Shipping charges are one of the most difficult things to figure out so start early. Paypal is a good way to test the waters of ecommerce and for some is a complete solution. Research Paypal and sign up for a merchant account.
Who is your audience and how will you get them to your site?
Right from the start, you need to plan how to get people to your web site. Here’s some basic advice on that: basics of search-engine optimization.
But you can’t depend entirely on Google or other search engines. So:
Your URL (universal resource locator: yourbusiness.com) is the most important thing to tell people. Just as I told you yesterday: JimDugan.com is how to get hold of me, find out about me, see my work, etc. My phone number, email, etc., is all there. Your URL should be as prominent as you can bear to make it on your packaging, business card, bumper stickers, whatever. Get it out there that this is your address. Call it branding if you want. There are people who see me on the street and say, “Jim Dugan Dot Com” as if it’s my name. Perfect.
Plan for keeping your site current. A site that doesn’t change regularly fails for a few reasons but most simply put: both Google and human beings like sites that are fresh and new, not static and stale. For organizations that have weekly staff meetings, I recommend that a standing agenda item be: What should we add/change on our web site this week? For individuals, I recommend a clipboard with pen on your fridge with the heading: Changes to Web Site.
Design ideas: I ask every new client to come to me with some sites he/she likes and/or would like to emulate. I do not copy other sites but I do like to have some idea what the client’s expectations are. Do you have logos, color schemes, etc. that are already starting to define corporate identity?
Not a complete list but a start.
