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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Saturday's State of the Blog

There's enough meta-blog stuff to talk about today to make the State of the Blog it's own post instead of attaching it to the Potpourri.  Don't worry, that's coming too.

Well, by a staggering margin the smoking jacket will remain my icon.  I believe the final tally was about 18 to 1.  You have spoken.  So say you all.  One of these days, I might have to find a better picture, but I sort of find that a goofy ass satirical picture kind of goes well with the general level of irreverence around here. And can I just say it was wild how many page views I got that day.  Sometimes on Tuesday, if I don't post by 10am, I get something like thirteen views.  It's not exactly grand central station at W.A.W.  But that day I got 78.  I should post crazy picture polls more often.  Now if only I could find a way to justify my page-view whoring with a paper thin rationalization that it's totally about writing....

I have a bit of a touchy subject to bring up.   According to Google tracking systems about 80% of my visitors use Chrome or Firefox, so I'm pretty sure you have Adblock and can't see my ads.  I don't like ads much either. I don't solicit clicks (and I would get into a lot of trouble with Adsense if I did), but I tell people if they want to support this blog and my efforts to take a look if they DO see something they might be interested in (and only if--seriously I can get my Adsense account cancelled if they think I'm just soliciting meaningless clicks).  My site is big enough now that it doesn't get weird readings when it's crawled because I wrote "back when I was Muslim" in an entry and suddenly all the ads become Muslim singles services. (Yeah, that really happened.) Most of the ads are relevant to reading and writing. Heck, I'm often annoyed that I'm not supposed to click my own ads because they actually look like something I'd be into, or at least want to know more about.  However, most of you can't see them, and you wouldn't click on them if you could, and that's okay.  There IS an option to just turn off adblock for a single page, but that's up to you.  I don't want to come off as a used car salesman or one of those sleazy aggressive marketing through social media types. But JUST so you know, I recently added a Paypal donation button.  I'm not begging, I'm not even asking, but I think once every month or two, I might just point out that it's there.  If you're interested in supporting what I do here and you want to encourage me to keep it up, a direct contribution might be more to your taste than dealing with ads.  And if you're NOT interested in contributing that's totally cool because money is not why I'm doing this.  (Though I will admit that it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling that makes facing the not-so-awesome days a LOT easier.)

Guest Blogging!  Yep, it's about time to start expanding things a bit, and that's where you come in...if you want to.  Do you have something you want to say about writing but you don't want to start your own blog because you don't have THAT much to say--or you're worried I'll cry?  Want to affirm, respond to, or even rebut something I've said here?  Have experience I lack, and want to share it in a place a little more visible than a reply comment?  Shoot me an e-mail and we'll work out a day that you can guest blog here. Even if you disagree with me about everything, and you want to put up a guest blog called "Prescriptive Grammar Rules, Speculative Fiction Can't Match the Emotional Urgency of Realism, And Chris is the 1998 Valedictorian of the Douchecanoe Academy," that's totally fine.  I just...you know...might write a rebuttal.

I'm rereading Stephen King's On Writing (for the 3rd time) so I can do a good review of it next week.  One of the Reliquary lists that is still looking pretty sad is the Resources list, so there might be a slew of product reviews in the next few months.

We hit 2000 views this week.  I know about 700 of them are spam hits from pharmacies in The Ukraine but it's still pretty cool.  Not too long ago I was getting a little verklempt over hitting one thousand.  Now we've already doubled that.

Thanks for reading!

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