ROW 80 DAY 15 FORM DOESN'T ALWAYS FUNCTION

After the rigors of the last several days, it seems as if I've been all too serious, or at least that is the overall, vague impression I have if I reminisce for a few seconds, deep thinker that I am. So, I figure it's high time for some good old fashioned slap-stick, with my patented confusion as usual imprimatur stamped on this here post. This is going to be one patched together mess of a post. Be warned. I seem to be doing that more often lately. Warning, I mean. I hope I am not developing sloppy habits. Yeah, snort. As if I ever had any other sorts of habits.

Anyway, I've been gradually developing some kind of reader base. Of what, and how many I am not certain, but enough folks on Twitter and my dear Facebook family are reading this blog and responding, sort of. So, I owe it to you, my dear readers to "change it up" once in a while. Balls. I am using you all as my guinea pigs; I am not earning a farthing and I bounce my half-baked ideas off your patient craniums. We have an "understanding," you and I. I blather endlessly and you all play clams. So, now that we all know where we stand, let's move ahead.

One of the things that I have discovered in my new life as a blogger, is that you have to have readers. Wow, what a shock! No, you have to track your readership and you have to try and figure out what they want to read and tailor your writing to them or tailor your readers to your writing or some shit. I don't know. It sounds like running for president to me. If you have to tailor your writing to your readership, everybody gets short shrift. The readers know you're a phony and you aren't going to be happy writing horse dukey.

So, to help us achieve this ephemeral goal of keeping track of our readers, we have an ever-changing batch of tools and by "ever-changing" I mean just that. I see ads for Hoot Suite, Google Metrics, Blogger, WordPress and I know I'm probably wrong about most of this stuff. There's RSS something or other, Reddit, which has a Spaceman. Today, I got the email about Triberr going Atomic. Triberr is an application where you connect with, or recruit, bloggers who share your interests and blog like you do, or something. At first, I kind of thought, "well, isn't this like Coke recruiting Pepsi?" but then; you know how you think you've seen and done it all and you're jaded to the world? Well, this experience has shown me that the complete opposite holds true. So I took a flyer. I went to sign up for Triberr. Maybe I could get in a Tribe or something, with bloggers who are kind of like me (yeah, that's happening.)

Anyway, I register and look around this website. Oh goody. I'm in a tribe and I have 100 bones! A tribe of one! What's a bone? Yup. This is the way to get myself out there and join up with others of my kind. So, because I never read anything instructional anyway, (seriously, I never opened a computer textbook) I proceed to poke around on the interface. I wind up at "Bonfires" which looks suspiciously like the old "Lonely Hearts" section in the printed Want Ads of the newspaper, with snappy messages and coy photographs attached. After I blundered around in here for a while and decided that, no, I did not want Techno-Geeky 12 year olds bloggy-blogging their way to fame and fortune with me riding uneasily on their shoulders while I wore a Princess Leia harem outfit. I hope and pray that this is only in the fevered imaginations of their cyber-minds. After what seemed like 40 pages of this, I decided I wasn't going to find "my peoples" going about it this way, so I backed out of Bonfire of the Inanities and went back to the home page. I studied the Tribe menu for a minute and chose some categories:

  

Oh my. I think I broke an algorithm.

After that little eye-opener, I decided to find my kind of writers the old-fashioned way. I'd backtrack to them. I rooted around until I found these guys: TheAnonBloggers. They're pretty anarchic and fun. They don't seem to take anything too seriously and they write a variety of stuff. Okay, that part of it fits, so I can hang with them for the fun parts.