Lonely Blog

If you'll allow me a personal digression and a note of explanation today....

So I was talking with my good friend Tim while we sipped on some coffee at a bookstore last week, and the conversation turned to my blog. I asked him if he'd read it lately, and he admitted that he had not, but raised the point that he did read my post every day, and isn't my blog just a mirror of my post?

The answer, for the most part, is "yes." I do that intentionally for several reasons: the first is the philosophical understanding that my post *is* my blog. A web log of my "travels through the World and the World Wide Web" as it says on my website. The second reason is to provide an easy place for you to find a post if your email client burps and you miss a day or two. The third reason is that it also gives me an outlet to be creative and perhaps a bit more personal with things now and again, mostly on the weekends.

The last reason is that eventually my subscriber base will grow to the point where it is no longer economically feasible for me to provide an email version of the post for free, and I won't ever charge for it or include ads. So at that point, I'll probably stop sending the post and just write the blog. Those of you truly interested in what I do can then come visit me here. Mirroring my daily post here now is my way of preparing for that move. But don't worry, going to a "blog-only" post is at least a year away, probably more.

But, to make a long story even longer, Tim did raise a good point. This blog contains an awful lot of material you may have already read just to get to the new posts that I put up on the weekends. So to make it easier to find that material, I went back through my 2008 "Mark's Musings" (when I began copying the email post into the blog), and added a "weekend" tag for things I posted on a Saturday or Sunday and never sent to you by email.

You'll have to scroll down a little to get there, but clicking on the "weekend" label over on the right will bring up just that new material. Anything published here before 2008 is *all* stuff you haven't seen before and is usually of a more personal nature.

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SIGNS NO ONE IS READING YOUR BLOG

Not even the "GoDaddy" girl can get people to visit your blog.

You've blogged about how to build a better mousetrap and the world is nowhere to be seen.

You posted, "Someone comment or I'll go on a hunger strike!" last Wednesday. You've lost twelve pounds already.

Every time you try to update your blog, your host server has a pop up box that asks, "Oh, what's the use?"

You have to wipe away cobwebs from all the corners of the blog before you can upload new material.

You've done everything but tell people how to build a nuclear bomb the size of a small suitcase and you STILL can't even get the government to eavesdrop on it.

All the tracking cookies have crumbled.

You can actually hear the echo as you type.

[Chris White's Top Five for the Internet with lots of additional material by Mark Raymond]

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WISDOM for YOUR WEEK: "You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody." (2 Corinthians 3:2)

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