After my bout of reading sickness, brought on by the gift shop-dispensed trip packet, I crawled back from the railing to the lounge chair and, pulling the blanket up to my chin, I lay down and closed my eyes. Time to review. I recalled all the instances when my virtual travels took me to the places this ship was going to visit, locations where I stuck around long enough to get a place of my own. I had addresses in almost all the ports - Website, Facebook, Blog and even Twitter. YouTube was the only areal where I stayed in a hotel, as I was only ever there as a visitor. Problem is, all my residences were either very small (since I hardly stayed there) or terribly out of date and in need of a complete rebuild.
I thought back to my first foray into Blog and how, being relatively new to this huge glogosphere...ah, sorry...Freudian typo….I mean blogosphere, I kept on checking the stats of my blog several times a day, pleased to see that the number of ‘views’ to my site was climbing with turtle-like jet speed.
Wanting to improve my ‘visibility’, I decided to find out what I needed to do so that my blog would land squarely in the middle of the virtual equivalent of Grand Central Station. I made my inquiries at the Google information booth which spat out, as usual, masses of instructions. Unfortunately, I found them less than helpful, as the overwhelming majority were written in Compish (for an explanation of the term, see my post entitled “It weren’t the waves what made me wretch...”) insidiously masquerading as English. Here is a good example:
“If you are using a PHP based CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla you might benefit from installing something like APC (Alternative PHP Cache) on your web-server that can help to speed up the actual PHP processing behind the scenes.”
“Oh sure of course! Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll just go and do this, this ‘whatsit’ right away but--”, I said sheepishly to no one in particular, “-- can I just ask a couple of questions first?”
No one replied in the affirmative.
“Thank you,” I acknowledged and went on, “So, ah, what are PHP, CMS and APC when they’re at home and, since I was blissfully unaware that I even had a web-server, how the hell am I supposed to know where the damned thing is? Forgive my ignorance but, really!? I am a writer for God’s sake, not a specialist in whatever field it would take to understand the above *&#%@ ‘tip’ in the first place!”, I rambled, red-faced.
No one said, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen!”
“Supercilious little bastard,” I thought to myself and then said, in the politest tone I could muster, “I’d love to, believe me, but--”, I suddenly felt the need to explain, “-- the publishing masters have told me, in no uncertain terms and six ways to Sunday, that I must not only be in the kitchen, I have to become something of a celebrity chef, if I want to be viewed as ‘the publishable sort’. So, knowing little more than how to boil water, I bravely decided to venture forth, starting, evidently(!), at the bottom of a learning curve whose arc, I fear, is probably so high up, I’ll need oxygen tanks to breathe up there.” I giggled nervously.
No one was not amused.
Undaunted, I continued, “Then there is the problem of my getting hopelessly lost. Most of the ‘how to’ articles have links so that terms which are deemed as needing further elucidation for the reader, if clicked, take one to yet another article explaining what the particular term means. Since I am entirely, as you know, clue-devoid, I am forced to click on everything (except ‘you’, ‘and’, ‘the’ and ‘for’), thereby detouring myself to another article which is just as incomprehensible as the first, but just as full of links on which I duly click, and so on and so forth….well, you get the picture. Having been made to digress so many times, I am soon at a loss to remember where I came from and, more importantly, what made me so delusional as to think that I might finally arrive on a page which is written in just plain English so that I can just maybe, have a snowballs’ chance in hell of understanding all the Compish I was made to wade through to get there! Oh dear, --”, I finished breathlessly, ‘if you had trouble following this sentence, think of how I feel!”
No one didn’t give a damn.
“Bite me!” I said disgusted, and walked away, as ignorant as ever.
Giving up my quest for the Holy Grail of Comprehension, I went back to the stats of my blog to see which one of my articles generated the most interest. Surprise, surprise! The “Why is sex so damned, uh, funny?” post took the top raking spot, outnumbering the next highest contender by 2 to 1! Not only that, it got there almost overnight! Clearly, it appeared that any text with the word SEX in it, anywhere and for any reason, attracted all those filthy-minded web crawlers, whose lecherous appetites could sniff out bawdy context from miles away.
This led me to the general conclusion that as long as my blog contained ample fodder for all those search bots to gorge on, it’ll do gangbusters!
“Yeah--”, I heard no one cackling behind me, “--as long as it also contains, among other things, meta tags, keywords, robots.txt.files, back links and site maps!”
Huh? Oh, f#*&%@ off!
A.J. Aston
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