If you wonder why there is no support at WordPress.com now, it’s because the owner just kicked out almost 10% of the workers. He paid anyone who disagreed with him to leave. Awesome.
Where can I get some of that moulah? I’d leave wordpress for 30K in a heartbeat.
Oh, this was supposed to be a celebratory post? My bad. Let me switch the flip and go into happy mode.
Oh frabjous day, oh hurray, hurray. Everything is just perfect and wonderfully and happy. Yippee ki-yay, miserable frackers!
That’s what happens when I stay awake for 40hrs. It has taken me all week to get over that little episode.
Sadly, work was absolutely bonkers this week. Several of the project managers had big jobs coming due and they were panicking like chickens with their heads cutoff. On Tuesday we started out scheduled to stay at one job for the whole day. By the end of the day, we had gone to 4 different jobs, and because we’re so fething awesome, we finished them all! Of course, on Wednesday we got jerked around again, but accomplished almost nothing. That day I went home, ate a bowl of cold cereal and went to bed.
Thursday I had a “writer” encounter with a solicitation to review a book. Nobody gets to tell me how to review their book, period. Doesn’t matter if it’s as simple as “You have to be completely honest”. That is a “condition”, a boundary, a limiting of MY FREEDOM as a reader and reviewer. They weren’t necessarily bad conditions or even onerous, but NOBODY tells me how I review a book. I left devilreads (that wretched hive of scum and villainy) over that very issue. Thankfully, it ended up being ok, as I simply declined after the conditions were revealed and we each went our separate ways. No harm, no foul. But I really could have done without that bit of straw on this camel’s back.
This whole week I have wanted to go to bed and not bother getting up. Just 9 more hours to go…
Normally, I get between 40-60 visitors a day and between 50-100 views. That is quite a variance I know, but that’s how the blogging game goes. However, in the last week or so, the numbers have been really weird. I get these spikes in numbers of views. You can see the first one, on May 27th. That was just over 200 views. Then on the 30th I got another spike up to 300. Things seemed to settle down and then BAAAAAAM, on the 5th I got 650 views, the largest amount I’ve ever gotten in my entire blogging time here at wordpress. I figured that was that but then the 6th happened and as you can see, by 4pm I was up to over 300 again.
My first thought was “bots”, but while I complain, quite legitimately, about some of the shenanigans WP.com pulls, they have been really good about not recording bot visits and cleaning up spam comments. I also noticed that a lot of the views were from my Bookstooge in 100 Books page. Then yesterday a lot of of the views were posts with books that I had DNF’d.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy to get these huge boosts, but I just wish I understood them. Have any of you had any weird spikes in your stats over the last 2 weeks?
Last month I reached 60,000 Comments. I obviously blogged about it 😉 Not ONLY because I’m vain and egotistical and love attention, but because celebrating blogging milestones is a good way to keep the joy of blogging going. Seven years ago I celebrated the original Milestone. And today, despite my best efforts at pruning and cutting off spam accounts and business accounts and general no-good-scumbag accounts, I still reached 500.
I want to apologize to you all for this egregious error on my part. I tried really hard to prevent this from happening, I really did. I was rude to people in the comments. I wrote complete and utter nonsensical posts that didn’t even make sense to me. I posted “book reviews” for a solid month with nothing but the data about the book itself. I even proselytize on Christmas and Resurrection Sunday. And despite that all, 501 of you are stupid enough to keep on following me. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you all. Well, we all have our crosses to bear and I guess this is mine. But don’t think I’m going to like it or bear it gracefully.
On a serious note, I mentioned finding joy in blogging. That is deliberate on my part. WordPress.com has sucked the joy from blogging and to combat that, I have to look for the good in blogging. It doesn’t happen naturally, easily or miraculously. I know I focus on a lot of bad things that WP does, but I also want to try to focus on the good things of blogging. I want to encourage you to look for those little things too. Don’t get bogged down in the bad and quit. Anybody can quit. Gritting your teeth and soldiering on will only take you so far before the burden crushes you beneath its weight. So find the joy. Find the happiness in blogging. Be deliberately thankful for what you do have and don’t focus on what you don’t.
I have survived 5 or 6 platform changes since ’05 (Blogspot. Devilreads. Leafmarks, Booklikes. Librarything. WordPress). I have done that by being thankful for what I had at each platform at the time I was using it. I enjoyed the people I was with too. I’d love to be able to give you a checklist of Thankfulness, but that is going to differ from blogger to blogger because all of our needs are as different as we are. So figure out what your needs are and what you have to be thankful for.
I’d also like to say that sharing milestones isn’t egotistical. It gives other people encouragement and it gives them something to celebrate. Don’t take that away from others by hiding what you have accomplished under the guise of false humility. Be happy with that special post you just wrote, say you are happy about it and LET me be happy with you.
Ok, that’s enough of that. I’ll ruin my crusty curmudgeonly image if I say one more positive thing. So get off my blog lawn, you kids!
I was pretty proud, I must admit. Commenting is the GOAL of this blog. Not likes, not attention from big sponsors who want to exchange my spit for gold, not even knowing that I have stuck it to WordPress.com and made them suffer nigh-immortal torment. No, my goal is to have lots and lots and lots AND LOTS of fun comments with people. And so on I went, tripping merrily along my little way.
Until sometime in March when I needed to check a stat in the old “classic” view. And the number of comments popped up, the EXACT number, not the flipping rounded number that the new view uses. And whammo, bammo, I was over the 60,000 mark!!!!!!!! 25K of those are mine, but that means you all have blabbed here 35,000 times since the inception of the blog in 2013 (yes, I have backdated posts to 2000, but I have only been here since ’16). Which means you all are a big fat bunch of blabber mouths!
I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Your comments mean the world to me, no matter how silly, serious, confrontational or even plain spambot’y. I might write the posts (or post the art images) but you all are the ones that make posts pop. Thank you, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart. I know you don’t have to comment and I respect the choice of those of you who don’t, but I want those of you who do comment to know that you feed my soul every time you drop those words on my blog. I once heard a lady I respected very much say that Beauty Feeds the Soul. I don’t disagree, but would personalize it to Words Feed Bookstooge’s Soul.
Well ok, to be honest, it has some touchups that need to be done, but my Author Index project is essentially finished.
I started this Project back in October of ’22 and have been slowly working on it. I am now done the bulk of the work and just have to add all the “new” authors that I’ve read since I started. So I’ll have to comb over my Calibre library and play catch up. It also means that I need to do monthly maintenance and add new authors at the end of each month. That is MUCH easier than doing the 900+ from scratch. I can handle that easily.
What this means though? Between this and Hotel Bookstooge, it means I’ve put more work into Bookstooge.blog than I have into any other blog I’ve had over the years, to the point where I feel extremely possessive of this site and can only imagine one scenario where I would disappear it. Sadly, this does mean that I am tied down to WordPress.com for the quite foreseeable future. So expect me to rage and rattle my chains and then do nothing because the reality is that I’m here and I cannot abandon this much effort. It would kill me to do that.
What this means for you? Not much really, unless you use an index a lot. My experience has shown me that not a lot of people do and only the outliers tend to. But do be happy for me, because it’s another Blogging Project under my belt. I think I’m going to take a nice long break from such projects. Unless someone suggests something that catches my fancy, then all bets are off.
Recognize that monstrosity? You should. WordPress introduced it a couple of months ago and when they did, they made no provision to turn it off. I know, because I asked. The useless “engineers” assured me that when the option came to be able to turn it off, I’d be notified. What a bunch of liars.
Because I was poking around the guts of all my settings and came across a new option. One that turns that big monstrosity off. Here: https://wordpress.com/settings/newsletter
Click off the two options: “Enable popup subscriber” & “Display subscription suggestion after comment”. Then people who comment on your blog won’t be annoyed by that big fat monstrosity.
I hope this post has been informative and helpful.
If you use the Reader, you may have noticed that the “visit” button is no longer visible under the post in the reader. You can’t even click on the title to get to the post, that just takes you to the full post but still in the reader. I have found that you have to click on the ellipses in the upper right of the box and under there is an option to “visit post”.
Of course, it is RIGHT ABOVE the option to “block site”. Can’t see any problems with that setup, can you? Yeah, me neither.
This is one more incremental change that goes against good usage and good design. Hiding options behind other options seems to be how WP is operating these days however and I suspect we’ll be seeing more “simplification” while they cater to whoever they think they are catering to.
While I’m not about to leave WP, or to abandon my Bookstooge.blog address, I am currently looking around at other options to host the site. Not very optimistic though.
No, this won’t be a rant this time, just more of an “by the way, X is happening, be aware”.
WordPress has steadily been messing with the reader that has caused other issues, but I’ve noticed in the last week or so that only the picture of my avatar has been showing up when my posts go to the reader. I did figure out that if I made the book cover a “featured image” that it would show the book cover instead of my avatar. I’m guessing the feeder now shows the biggest image unless there is a feature image? So one problem kind of solved. I can go through all my scheduled posts and give them a featured image.
That however has rippled into other problems. I use the (details)(/details) code to hide my synopsis because sometimes it is outrageously long and nobody needs to scroll through it all. So when I edit a post that is already scheduled that has the (detail) code, WP in its infinite wisdom, strips that code out. So not only do I have to add a “featured image” but I also have to wade through the guts of the post and add the correct code all over again.
Just wanted make you aware of this so if you see all of my posts for the rest of the month showing just my avatar, I didn’t want you to think I was being (completely) egotistical. I’ve started to add the featured image to my already long list of steps that I have to take just to bleeping post here on WP so starting in June it should become a non-issue for any viewers.
Beginning in April, WordPress began an experiment with adding 3-5 times as many ads as normal to the free sites. Ostensibly it was supposed be towards making them more self-sufficient, but I remain skeptical. Here is the link to the Help Forums where members began bringing this to the attention of the staff, and staff’s response.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the thread and it appears that what is happening is going to be the new normal for all free blogs. So not only are “new” free blogs being neutered but all free blogs are going to end up looking like clickbait hotels. There are screen shots within the thread above to verify that assertion.
Much like other changes that WordPress has made, they are doing all that they can to see what the outcry is and then walk it back until it subsides. But make no mistake, if you are on a free plan at wordpress, they now consider you excess baggage and will be using and treating you accordingly.
Adblockers on most browsers should help mitigate this, but with more and more people using their phones to view the internet, it’s not as simple as it used to be. Just be aware that this is happening. I recommend taking a look at your own site in incognito mode (or whatever the anonymous version is called in your browser of choice) to see if it has happened to you yet.
Back in November I began to work on my Author Index Project for the blog. I started out haphazardly but then decided to be a bit more organized about it. I started at Z and have been steadily working my way backwards. Once I finish I’ll go through and add all the new authors I’ve read since then and then try to update it on a monthly basis.
BUT!
I am finished with up to the M’s. What a chore! 79 authors with the last name starting with “M”. And only about half of them had their names as tags so I had a bleeding lot of work to do. The only other letter with more authors is “B” at 87. I am not looking forward to that already :-/
But rejoice with me. Things like this make me happy 😀
The year in general sailed along for both Mrs B and me. We both ended up working more than usual (I think our average weekly was 42 or 43 hrs). Those extra hours made a big difference. Student loans are finished! So now we’re using that money to pay down extra on our mortgage. I’m hoping we can shave off 5-6 years off the loan life. That’s my next big life goal, to get that mortgage out of the way.
We helped out each month with super church (sunday school) and live streaming (so 2 sunday’s a month) and I’m finding my tolerance for the kids is waning. There is one parent who pretty much brings her kids to be babysat and they’re not disciplined at home so they’re not model kids. Thankfully, after having used the “nuclear option” once, (take them out of class and march them up the middle of the aisle and drop them back off to their mom in the middle of the sermon) they’re learning I mean business. They’re not bad kids, just unruly and undisciplined. But it’s exhausting and those Sunday’s I come home and flop on the couch. Streaming is easier but mainly because I refuse to treat it like a show. I use 4 camera angles and that’s it. I don’t zoom around, I don’t focus on people playing special music, etc, etc.
This year was just a blur. Not that good things didn’t happen, or bad things, but overall it went so fast that it was over before I realized what was going on. Which is fine when you’re concerned about who is elected to political offices, but not so fine when it comes to paying bills. Actually had one bill go to a bill collector because I completely forgot to pay it. Sigh, life moving faster isn’t necessarily a good thing.
One of the kids at church expressed interest in Magic earlier this year so I’ve been getting together with his Dad and him once or twice a month and turning him into a life long addict. Someone’s gotta do it, so it might as well be me 😀 Speaking of Magic, I began collecting the Mirage set from 1996. Along with 4th Edition, those cards are some of the iconic visual memories of my late teen years. Plus, collecting cards doesn’t take up nearly as much space as collecting books does, hahahahaa!
General Bookish Thoughts:
Looking at those numbers, man, did my book numbers go up! Part of that is because I was reading individual issues of comics all year (whereas I had only started doing that in July of 2021), but even that only accounts for about an extra 25, so I simply read MORE this year. The Pages and Words metric fully back that up. It didn’t “feel” like I had read more, but with not picking up any other new hobby, Reading picked up the slack.
The rating is down only a little bit from last year, but 2021’s rating was down from 2020’s, so I’m on a downward slide, albeit a very slight one. I think that is because I’m reading more. There are more crap books than fantastic books out there, so the more I read, the greater my chance of a getting a crap book. All it takes is ONE one star book in a month to drag the whole year down. And since I am so picky about handing out 5stars, well, it doesn’t surprise me. But as long as I stay above a 3star average, that means I’m enjoying the majority of what I read. I’ll try to be content with that.
With all of that being said, I only had FOUR 5star reads this year and all of them were re-reads. I had NINE 4.5star reads as well. On the other side, I only had TWO half star reads and NINE 1star reads. So I feel that I balanced everything out in the end.
With around 57 of the reads being re-reads (including ALL of the Bone comics), I’m still sticking around the 25% mark. I have a feeling that number is going to drop in ’23 as I am becoming more leery of re-reading my “old favorites” as I move into the phase of life (fully middle aged now) and all of my manga will be new to me as well. I am ok with this change.
Well, despite my issues with WP.com in 2021, I still came crawling back for more in 2022. To the point where I have a paid plan and Dotblog Site, sigh. Thankfully, I haven’t experienced some of the problems that I did last year, but I never count WP.com out of the problem fight. If they can’t make one problem get you, they’ll invent a whole new one, the wretches.
I have also realized that despite all of my complaining and grumbling, that I have nailed myself to WP.com. The finishing up of construction on The Hotel Bookstooge pretty much saw to that and the continued work on the Author Index is like putting up shutters on the windows. You only do that if you think you’re going to stay in the place for a while.
Between the paid plan’s upgrade to my storage, Dropbox and Caesium, space is not an issue for me.
The Churn continues apace with other bloggers slowing down, stopping or just moving on to other hobbies. I have also done my own share of unfollowing this year and finding new bloggers to follow. If I could have one blogging wish for 2023, I wish that things would stay stable in that regards. That’s a vain wish though, knowing how unstable the world in general is right now.
So the long and short? I’m here, I’m standing tall (well, kind of) and I’m not planning on leaving. But I’ll still be complaining.
Blogspot continues to be my review backup. Not in any meaningful way, as I didn’t do any work on the old reviews, so it’s as big a mess as my WordPress used to be. But it’s there for me when WP.com does something truly stupendously stupid (like they seem to do 3-4 times a year) and is a good safety valve so I don’t feel that WP.com is my only option.
Partway through the year (July to be particular) I stopped crossposting my reviews to Librarything. I had given up on the platform as a social site in 2021 and thus it was pretty inevitable that I stopped using them all together. Guess I’m more surprised it took me as long as it did than anything.
Calibre continues to putter along offline just fine. It is what I now use to check up on anything in particular. Now that it has full database searching abilities, I can look for almost anything and with enough patience, find it. I am currently using version 6.9 and will be updating as the creator puts up new updates.
Definitely Flashman. He lies, murders and rapes his way through the book and we’re supposed to find it amusing. I definitely did not.
PLANS FOR 2023:
Personal:
The Self-Study for my Level3 Certification didn’t work out at all in ’22. I think that really needs to be a top priority for this year. I’m just afraid that I’ll slack off again though and “do it next month” all year long.
The potential move to Georgia is now indefinitely put off. It’s going to take an emergency to get us down there and even then we’d have to think about it. It is going into a closet shelf in the very back of my mind for now.
Trying not to make many, if any, plans. Because situations are easier to handle when you don’t have expectations about them.
Drink a lot of Rockstar energy drinks. Because I can.
Blog:
Continue working on my author index. Continue my Magic cards each Monday. So it’s going to be business as usual. I haven’t had a creative idea for some time about a long running series of blog posts, so I might end up not trying to do any. Which is too bad because long running series of posts is always easier to write and schedule than anything else.
I am going to try to do some more “arty” stuff but we’ll see how that pans out. I would like it to work but the logistics might be greater than anticipated.
Movies are still completely up in the air. There are so many movie reviewers out there. Besides, I don’t watch new stuff and even when I do watch stuff, I don’t really watch it that well. More like “listening to it” with glances up at the tv when there’s no dialogue to tell me what’s going on.
This might end up being a very sloggy blog year :-/
In yet another totally incomprehensible and bone headed move, WordPress.com, in all its wisdom, decided that we needed “writing prompts” whenever we started a new post. As far as I know, nobody asked for this. No blogger needs this. If they do, they should go to some other social media where being completely brain dead is the norm. I was so angry (surprise, surprise) that I immediately fired off a patent pending “Angry Bookstooge” email to support to find out just what in hecker freckers was going on. They replied with their usual pablum and non-reasoning and so I figured I was stuck with this abomination of stupidity.
Patent Pending “Angry Bookstooge” Email
I received an email follow up from WP.com late last week informing me of an “update” where I could opt out of this filthy, disgusting and utterly vile practice. Here’s the steps so you can opt out too if you so choose:
My Sites
Settings
Writing
Then you can toggle off the “show writing prompts”. Just make sure to save after doing that so your choice is saved.
I hope this has been helpful. As WP.com changes things, randomly, for no reason and against all good sense, expect more little posts like this as I navigate the minefields of trying to stay here while simultaneously wishing every person at WP.com was being worked over, and good, by Pinhead.
After finishing up The Hotel Bookstooge Project, it was evident that I needed another blogging project to keep me busy in the background. But something that wouldn’t disturb everyone quite so much. Bormgans gave a good suggestion that should help anyone searching the site, ie, an Author Index.
While I never use an index if a site has one (I always use the search bar), I’ve heard that other people DO use them, to good effect too. So instead of alienating these good folk of the internet and impeding their unquenchable thirst for all things Bookstooge, I have decided to begin work on an Author Index.
I’ve created a new page and posted the link to it at the top of my home page along with all of my other Important Things. It will slowly fill in over the upcoming year/s. If you are that kind of person, I hope this helps you out a lot. If you are not that kind of person, it will be going on completely in the background so you won’t be bothered or notice a thing. You’re welcome 😉
Two years ago I wrote a post (Part I) detailing how to utilize Dropbox as a picture hosting site so you didn’t have to eat into your free space here at WordPress. I’ve been using it on any picture over 100KB and it seems to work well for me. But just because something is working well doesn’t mean I am content to sit on my lees and let WordPress continue to work against me behind my back. It would be just like them at some point to disallow outside hosted pictures on free sites, so I decided to investigate what I could do for picture compression. Just in case you can’t tell, I have an extremely adversarial relationship with WP.com.
What I found was the Caesium Image Compressor. Here is the website and the download for various OS’s is part way down the page: Caesium Website.
I have been very pleased so far. Once I installed it, it took a while of playing around to get all the various options set up how I wanted. What I didn’t realize, and was very pleasantly surprised with, is that Caesium can also resize your photos along with compressing them. This is wonderful for me as I use the high quality pictures from my Calibre Library for my book reviews. Instead of having to use a separate resizer tool and then Caesium to compress that, I can do it all in one step. I even have it save the picture where I want so everything is conveniently stored for upload.
I use it on the little pictures for the book reviews (which are 194px wide) and I regularly get 30-60% compression. Going from 30KB down to 18KB isn’t a world breaking but if I want to continue blogging for years and years, every little bit adds up. I also use Caesium on any files I upload to Dropbox as well. Saving space any way I can means I don’t have to worry about hitting that 3gb limit (or 1gb if you’re a poor new user to WordPress. You newbs really have my sympathies in that regards!) It is another step in the blogging process however. So you have to decide if that is worth it to you or not. For me, it totally is. It is free, it is small and once you set it up to your taste, it is almost just 3 clicks of the mouse and you’re done.
I hope this post has been helpful even if just to inform you of options that you have. Because knowing is half the battle!
GI Bookstooge is the REAL American Hero, but we all knew that anyway
