I remember my mother sayng that to me almost every morning when I was a child. I am not a morning person. I hit the snooze button over and over and drag out of bed. It is usually just the pressing need to empty my bladder that forces me to finally climb out of bed. Staying up way too late blogging is surely not helping me want to get up in the morning either.
So, what is the first thing I do when I get up, other than what was mentioned previously? I check the blog: Who commented? Who linked any of my posts? How many visited while I slept? It is true! Then I go to TTLB's Ecosystem list to see where I rank, both in position by number of links and by daily visitation. I am pleased to see that I have again attained a position in the top 250 by number of links [Large Mammal] and have remained there for a new record of 4 days. I have also climbed into the top 200 blogs in daily visits. I profess that from the actual amount of time that I expend on this blog, I am quite pleased to see it has resulted in the development of some readership and popularity.
I still have a couple of problems which I think severely hamper my blogging success and hinder my climb higher in the evolutionary scheme of the greater Blogosphere. The first is, of course, my lack of any consistency in connectivity to the World Wide Web. The second is that the Blogroll system fails to ever show that my site has been updated.
I am unsure if I will ever get a better connection. Alternatives to dialup are few and cost prohibitive in this small town where I reside. Additionally, there are not any local ISPs so all connections from this area have to go through servers located in towns more than 20 miles away. The quality of lines going into and out of this town is piss poor to say the least. I am continually connected at rates of 31.2kps, 26.6kps, and, remarkably, was very pleased one day to get a 12.0kps connection that allowed me to access my email. I had connected time after time on that day to find that although I was connected, absolutely no data was being transmitted over the connection. Oh, how I hate dialup.
As to the blogroll problem, I have mentioned it time and again and have gotten all kinds of advice from my fellow bloggers regarding how to ping blogrolling. I have been successfully pinging blogrolling. I finally broke down yesterday and contacted blogrolling support and they replied with a message that they did not show the URL for my blog in their database. I responded with the URL from my preferences page to show them I had a blogroll and that my URL had been correctly emplaced thereon. I am hopeful there is a response to my response awaiting me when I finally check my hotmail following the publication of this post. I suspect my visitation numbers will escalate once that problem is solved.
There is also one other minor situation that displeases me. However, it is purely personal. I am too geek/0 when it comes to certain aspects of blog form and function. I would love to know more about css so that I could arrange this blog with a 3-column look and add a little pizzazz to my look! As it was, I finally had to just use table tags just to get that masthead to display correctly when adding my picture.
However, in the grand scheme of things, given that I had never even heard of blogging prior to April 1 of this year, I think I have come a long way into understanding the nature of the blogging world.
Posted by Tiger at August 3, 2003 09:24 AM | TrackBackGood Morning to you, sir! I thank God daily for dsl and a job that I would quit if it weren't paying for it....
Posted by: Susie at August 3, 2003 09:48 AMOur cable modem is one of the luxuries that would disappear if we ever needed to cut costs. It's the one I'd miss the most.
Posted by: Ted Phipps at August 3, 2003 09:55 AM