Message In a Bottle

I didn't know about the rest of you, but so far my life experience strongly suggests that almost nothing that's ever happened in and around my life is unique to me. There is, again, no doubt that there have been studies done and papers written on how that comes home to people, and what effect, positive or negative, it may have on them. For example, I suppose for the vast majority of those who feel they may have a Big Message, it must be a bit of a burden to recognize that their Message has been expressed really well by a LOT of other people in all kinds of places and cultures before it came to them. For those dealing with something difficult or unpleasant, a challenge they're not sure they can meet, there's probably some comfort in the knowledge that they're not the only one this has ever happened to.

Today, I'm in the latter camp on a trivial issue: it's some comfort to me to be certain that at some point, lots and lots of other people who more or less randomly one day thought "I know, I'll write a blog!" have come to grapple with the fact that how blogs kind of mechanically work is something they don't understand well enough. They've had to send a note to whomever they think might actually be looking at whatever they're pushing out into the ether that's neither illuminating nor entertaining, kind of like this one. In my case today, it's about subscribing...and have no fear, I'm sure there will be others just as mundane in the future, especially if this one unexpectedly becomes a big fat hit.

People probably write blogs for all kinds of different reasons, like unmet attention needs, runaway narcissism, dreams of untold riches, nascent megalomania, or staggering boredom...lots of reasons. Whatever the reason, though, I'm pretty sure most people who write blogs hope that someone is reading them, kind of like the marooned sailor who puts a message in a bottle. The statistics on how many times a given blog or post within it has been viewed are, to a blogger, pretty much the index on likelihood of rescue to the marooned sailor. Therefore anything that distorts the stats is not good.

When this blog started, it used a subscription method that allowed you (okay, pretty much begged you) to put in your email address and have every subsequent post emailed to you. That's great except now anyone who gets the thing by mail doesn't record as a view of the blog, and I don't get my aspirations to plague you with ads and thus make tons of money met. So I changed the subscription thing so that hopefully it sends you a link to the page every time there's a new one.  Unfortunately it doesn't unsubscribe anyone receiving it by email.  Since there only about 5 of you looking at this thing (I'm not going to count whatever is going on in Taiwan, Germany, India, and Venezuela as actual people reading posts), the stats can drop to zero pretty quickly.

So do me a solid: if you're getting the posts by email, please unsubscribe and see if you can sign up to get them as a link, or just hit the page to see what's happening.

Thanks!

PS ...and if you've read some way more entertaining way some other blogger has gone through this kind of thing, let me know so I can flatter that person to death by copying it...