Tag Archives: Wordpress

2019 … a year of surprises

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Greetings! I hope your 2019 is drawing to a satisfactory close, with friends and family near.

I have been offline for about a month. I had a medical interruption in the normal flow of life, but also have been wrestling with the reality of the cyber world today. The short story is that I have had to wipe out much of my site membership. If you feel asif you’ve been excluded, please drop me a note at: jbr@johnbairdrogers.com

If anyone doubts that there is a massive effort to co-opt the cyber world we who blog and communicate via the internet live in, my story may remove some of those doubts.

I use WordPress for my blog. It is ancient by cyber world standards, having first been released in 2003. The standard install assumes that a website owner like me wants as many subscribers as possible.

About a year ago, I began to get a trickle of new users I didn’t recognize. This became a freshet, then a cascade. When I tried to track back these new users, I ran into dead ends. As of yesterday, I had just shy of 4.000 bots as members.  I have had to delete them all and make new users (subscribers) ask to join.

I will restart regular posts shortly.

Overhead

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Overhead:  That concept they lay on you at the auto dealership when you wonder why it costs $70 per hour to fix your car.

Overhead:  A life concept I too often ignore.

mechanic bill

I digress today from writing about writing per se to talk about the real-world business of writing. Specifically, is this new age better? Or just different?

Surely, we have resources we never had before. Google maps, Wikipedia, thousands … nay millions … of specialized websites. I said in the last post that I was able to scope out and define a little town in Austria right from my comfortable chair in Minnesota.

Wonderful, but …

  • Arriving home from a trip abroad, my good old HP printer doesn’t print. Turns out Apple’s latest update of its OS is probably the problem. That cost three hours and led to a new printer.
  • WordPress.com explains that my podcast hasn’t passed through to iTunes, depriving it of 80% of its listeners. Nobody knows quite why. I’m looking into a separate website. Several hours squandered there.
  • Audible/ACX, the Amazon audiobook service, hasn’t responded after having told me there’s “electrical noise” in my audition file. Serializing the first novel as a podcast is on hold.

Overhead!

I don’t know about you, but I realize I should allow for all this overhead when I set my expectations about what this wonderful world of technology promises.