Today is a Good Day to Die
I recently upgraded my WordPress blogs. Thinking it was time to pick up the loose threads of a fraying online experience I was conscious that not only had my writing suffered for not writing but my blog had suffered for not blogging too.
To save you from my miserable experience farting around with incompatible plugins, suffice it to say that I disabled every one of them in order to get this site back up. In so doing I came to a remarkable realization…
Until it ruptures with life-threatening and gut-wrenching pain a benign appendix goes quite unnoticed. As one of many useless parts of the human anatomy which have atrophied with evolution I realized that most of the plugins I had installed were, or had become, similarly vestigial.
With surgical precision I started whipping out the offending plugins to find that not only did my blog now work but that I rather liked the idea that stripping the blog down was “inline” with how I my want “online” experience to be…minimalist, intensely personal, um, useful even.
I never had much of a readership here. The one or two occasional visitors were more likely perverts looking for filipino hot babes or wannabe sperm donors than the industry blogebrities whose attention I once craved.
That said, I was alarmed — I don’t know why, what else did I expect? — to find that the faint signs of life that affirmed my blog’s existence for the last however-long had completely disappeared. Instead, Google Analytics showed a flat line. My blog is dead. I mean, like, no signs of life. Flat-line dead. Even three days after reactivating the analytics plugin, nothing. I mean, three days, for the love of God!
But hold on a sec…is that brain activity I detect or is this an out-of-blog experience? There’s got to be more to this experiment than Recruitomatic’s gone bye-bye. Surely, there must be more.
Well, I guess “today is a good day to die” after all.
5 Comments, Comment or Ping
Steven Rothberg CollegeRecruiter.com
Good to see you back in the game, Ami. I hope to see you in Chicago in 1.5 weeks for the OnRec / Kennedy Information recruiting conference. I’m on a panel about using cell phone text messaging and other mobile marketing tools for recruiting and CollegeRecruiter.com as an exhibit hall booth so I should be easy to find. See you there?
Oct 24th, 2009
Simon Meth
Hi Ami,
Bottom line, blogging is just plain weird. Some folks want the exposure and notoriety. Some folks fill my inboxes with constant reminders about who they are and what they do. And then, some folks like you actually write interesting, thoughtful, stuff that is worth a damn. If your voice isn’t heard here I’m sure it will be heard elsewhere. I’ll keep your RSS feed in Google Reader.
Cheers!
Simon
Oct 24th, 2009
Amitai Givertz
@Steve, thanks for stopping by to pay your last respects
Unfortunately, I won’t see you in Chicago. But let’s sync up soon. I’d like that very much.
@Simon, thanks for stopping by and staying tuned in.
To weird — [or did you misspell wired?] — I suspect that we’ll see more people circling back to mainstream blogging. I’ve come to the conclusion that being an island-blog is better than drifting on choppy waters chummed with tweets and link bait.
Oct 25th, 2009
Jeff Hunter
“minimalist, intensely personal, um, useful even”
Anyone who has spent even a minute with you knows that you are far too erudite to utter “um”, especially in your always wonderful writing. In keeping with your profound style and rapier wit, you should channel Buckley and replace that guttural “um” with a more genteel “ah”.
Otherwise, a perfectly wonderful piece, as always.
Oct 27th, 2009
Amitai Givertz
@Jeff Huh?
Oct 27th, 2009
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