I’m starting to think there is a good chance blogging may be sending me insane. No really, I may need to pay money and go and talk to someone. But where the hell am I going to find a therapist conversant in wordpress.com vs wordpress.org/google page ranks/the merits of posting daily – or not/the possibility of earning an income from a blog/what design is the most attractive on your home page and so on and so on? Do you think therapy is going to have to start to develop a social media strain? You know a whole uni course on how to counsel people ravaged by the online world?
It seems blogging is roller coaster ride in which I am blindfolded and dipping UP and DOWN in a confused whirl of fumbling antics without any real idea of what I am doing. By the way I HATE rollercoasters.
Last week I was sad because I discovered Google Page Rank is some measure of blogging influence – mine was 0. This week I discover Google have updated their rankings and I have gone from 0 to 3. Yay me. I don’t know what I did to get that, I don’t know what it means, I don’t know why/if it is important but hey I got 3 out 10 for the exam, yay me! See rollercoaster DOWN and UP.
Ever since I moved from wordpress.com to a self-hosted site on wordpress.org I’ve been dealing with some psychological issues. You see on wp.com I had a special feature which counted ALL my followers – email subscribers/wp.com followers/Twitter/Facebook. There was this lovely number of 500 in my stats which made me feel like I was on the way. 500 people had clicked little buttons to say they LIKED me enough to FOLLOW me. I don’t know where I was leading to but they were FOLLOWING! I was almost popular (now is not the time to remind me that popular bloggers have thousands upon thousands of followers).
Once I moved I could no longer count my Twitter/Facebook followers in my stats which was sad but at least they were still there, over in Twitter following my mute tweets or at Facebook reading the links back to my blog so that was OK.
What really sent me into a downward spiral though was the 150 wp.com subscribers I lost. ‘Cause they were signed up under their wp.com accounts they couldn’t be transferred over. My absolutely wonderful, beautiful email followers were transferred and I am deeply grateful for those 129 sweet individuals who have been the only thing stopping me from completely losing my mind and ditching the blog into the big black hole of deserted blogs swirling around in the blogosphere, forlorn souls forever stuck in the time of the “last post”.
The “Happiness Engineer” who tried to deal with my grief over my lost subscribers cheerily informed me they would find me again, I had the old site redirected so they it wouldn’t take them long to reconnect. Poor dear, deluded lady she doesn’t understand the process. People are busy. One day a sentence or two amuses them in a post they have stumbled into by accident, they click a button to follow, then when the posts appear in their inbox they may read, they may not. If the posts stop appearing they don’t notice, unless they are really dedicated readers (love you Madhu at The Urge to Wander who jumped through extraordinary hoops to find and follow me again). Meanwhile the blogger pouring her heart and soul into her little bit of the internet, where it’s all a numbers game, loses just a little bit of her blogging mojo as she attempts to start over.
Sadly, I lost the details of who my subscribers were after the TRANSFER. They disappeared from my stats and I had no way of retrieving their details. Gone into the swirl of wp.com data processing.
For a a while wp.org made a deliberate attempt to really screw with my head by listing the old NUMBER of followers, while only letting me see the email subscribers. It felt they were so near, I could almost touch them, but I had no way of communicating, no way of knowing if they were missing me?
However, today an idea crossed my befuddled mind. It could be sheer genius. Or it could be a clear sign of insanity. The jury is still out on which it is, but here goes. I am a hoarder who never throws anything out (yes I know I worry I’ll end up a old lady living in one of those houses packed to the rafters with old newspapers, magazines and books too but I’m working on it). So my email account has 32,000 emails in it. Yes I know that is bad, I’ll get to it ok. However, that means I still have the emails wp.com when people signed up to the old blog.
So here’s my great plan. I’m going to list them all here. They will get a pingback to tell them someone had mentioned them (they can just delete it). Then they will rediscover the magnificence that is Shambolic Living and go “that’s what’s been missing in my life” and then what they will re-subscribe as an email follower right here on shambolicliving.com and then they will enjoy my posts again. Or they may decide they dodged a bullet when they were lost and are happy to remain unsubscribed and that’s OK. At least I’ll know I’ve done everything I can to reconnect.
So in a plaintive cry from a woman on the edge here’s my tribute list of the lost subscribers (or the 70 I could manage to find) in the hope they may like to follow via email (or twitter or RSS or Facebook). (PS Email subscribers with a blog don’t worry I’m working on a blogroll page specially for you that will list links to all of your blogs too).
Just a man, his dog and his truck
Susan Gardner – Drawing the Line – Memoir of a Passionate Life
Wuppenif – or what would happen if?
The Eternal Solitude of the Restless Mind
Living Life in Glorious Colour
Wow what an interesting exercise! There’s such a variety of blogs there, if you’ve got nothing to do today click on a few and take a look!
Hello! Where do I start? First I love this post because I’m right there with you. I can relate. I too have started self-hosting on WP, BUT I kept my WP.com site as well and manually linked them. So now I have two blogs.
SOOOOO… Even though it appears I am no longer subscribed to your posts via email, I’ve actually been getting regular email updates from you this entire time! That’s because I have two WP accounts now, my old .com and my new .org. which can both be accessed from the same hub.
That being said, I will resubscribe, because even though it might be duplicate, I completely understand how it feels to see those NUMBERS go UP!
Take care,
-Sarah
P.S. This site is BEAUTIFUL!
Wow, so you are still getting the updates! So maybe it doesn’t matter that I can’t see everybody any more because they can still see me. Oh God this just all makes my head hurt. But you really don’t have to get me in stereo. If you start getting two copies delete me in your wp.com reader and then you should just have the one from the email subscription (I think, probably, what do I know). Going over to subscribe to your blog now.
Thanks! Bloggers unite! Lol.
Hope all works out for you soon…just the way you want it all to.I love your posts as they are always varied and thought provoking.I never know what you are going to get me thinking about.
Keep up the great work and please dont be discouraged by numbers.They are not what counts.It is the poeple you touch,even if it is just one and the joy YOU get from writing that counts.
Big hugs of appreciation.Xx
You are so lovely and offer such a lot of support to bloggers, yes I’m never really sure what I’m going to write about from one day to the next! Not good at the whole niche thing – have a short attention span but at least that keeps it varied!
I still get your alerts and also Facebook and enjoy them still. Have been thinking of self hosting but not decided… 😉
Thank you Gerry. I’ll email you with some pros and cons I discovered in my move.
I keep trying to “like” your posts, but for some reason, it doesn’t work. It thinks about it for a while, but it never seems to register. I love reading your posts.
Thank you so much. the plug in mustn’t be working. One of the big downsides of moving was losing the wordpress.com like feature, which let me see who had visited and thought the post worthy of a like. Gerry has been liking the posts via Facebook which is nice it saves the time of having to comment but still let me identify who has stopped by.
I have to tell you, I’ve inadvertnetly walked away from HAJ, I’m not taking a break on purpose, I just have been doing other things, and I feel so free! I haven’t checked my stats. I haven’t worried about what I’m going to post about. I haven’t thought of everything that I’m doing in terms of “would this make a good post?” or “I’d better get my camera in case I want to make this project into a post!” I’ve actually cancelled a lot of projects because I realized that I had made up for the sole purpose of blogging about them… I feel better, so much so that I’m considering stopping entirely. It’s been occupying waaay too much of my thought space. I completely understand how it can become all-consuming! And how you can measure your success by the numbers… I’m deperately trying not to get back into that head-space again.
I will miss you if you stop altogether but I totally understand, it can take over your life. I still can’t decide if I want to monetize or not but I do know it is important for me to see the blog growing and that there are people reading, otherwise it seems a little silly to be putting so much time and effort into something that has no tangible benefit. Blogging in Australia is undergoing a lot of changes at the moment and more people are saying they want to earn an incomes it’s an interesting time. I hope I can find a way to balance it all without completely losing my mind!
I’m still getting emails when you blog and I really don’t think you need a therapist–unless, of course, there are other issues you haven’t mentioned.
This new site is beautiful. I’d like to make changes to mine, but my technical skills aren’t what they should be.
Keep on bloggin’ and don’t worry about the rest!
I got someone else to design mine. I will take your advice to just keep on bloggin’ and not worry about the rest.
We are still here…
Yayyy – I’m starting to feel better about this.
keep your mind! we need you to have it. good luck with your technical issues. don’t give up, n
I think blog conferences are supposed to be like our own weird support groups. Of course, they just send you into a whirling spiral of “what ifs” and “I could totally do thats”.
I know what you mean about being driven insane! I was reminded of this post when I figured out today that the latest version of Jetpack for WordPress did not include a “Follow” button if the blog was self hosted. So now all my followers have been deleted, grrr!
I’ll be optimistic and say that at least I’m learning a lot about programming!