Friends wouldn't visit despite all the posting on FB, there's only so much cricket a non-fan can take. So the idea was to lure poor suckers to the site.
I had this great idea about using this scene from a movie I love, Dirty Harry.
I searched and I downloaded this image:
That wire in the background sure looks ugly. So I had to remove it. Thanks to my limited Photoshop skills, the building facade behind the wire which I would've had to patch up would've looked pretty bad as well. So the building had to go. I magnified the image till I could see warts and all, then went about selecting and erasing little corridors around Harry Callahan's frame. Select. Erase. Repeat. Ah, all cleared. Now just select a whole bunch of the building together and delete it.
Since there's no backdrop, I didn't see the need for the colour. Too gaudy that colour on a white background. Desaturate. Adjust contrast till it can pass off for stylish.
I put a nonsensical blog post together but couldn't work the immortal line into the body. The 'feel lucky, Punk?' question. So I added that to the image. And I added a 'Well... do ya?' for good measure to reinforce that question. In bold, stencil font. To look bad ass. Hey presto this image:
I searched a combination of related keywords, alternate versions of the dialogue, etc to find that no one had done this version of that Clint Eastwood image ever. My retelling was completely new, original. When you consider the size of the Internet and the amount of data present, putting something old in a way that's never been done before feels good.
Do you feel lucky punk is the name of the image I created and it's the same in the meta tags of the image. I got quite a lot of hits thanks to that image, very crucial to the ego at that fledgling stage that it brought visitors to the blog.
It did well for itself, it appeared on page one of Google Images for Do You Feel Lucky Punk, it was the first result on page one at a point, I'm not kidding. Then it spread. Other much more frequently updated blogs used the image, their greater frequency automatically rating the image they've used higher. And they didn't simply link to the image. They went to the trouble of saving a copy and re-uploading that to their own blog like any blogger would.
The same license I had to take an image from a movie and turn it into a new piece of content is the license bloggers have to use the image off my blog. To add to that, my domain mapping with WordPress expired sometime around June this year and due to a combination of events, I couldn't renew it.
The links for fckingblog.com all became invalid, now having been replaced by fckingblog.wordpress.com. The image whenever it showed up in Google Images would have led to a broken URL, leading to unfavourable ratings on the search ranking. But other images from around the same time Do You Feel Lucky was posted still kept bringing in visitors. I have no idea how to salvage this image in that situation. From then the race was lost, the clones took over. I searched images for do you feel lucky punk and this very image came up on three different blogs (cropped version in the third one), I'm on page four of the results but I'm yet to see a thumbnail with the link to my blog under it.
I've had other images bringing me in traffic and one relatively recently posted image is very close to overtaking Do You Feel Lucky on the all time list. I hope it does feel lucky because I thought it deserved to have it's story told.
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