Blogkeeping

For the first time in a while, I've done some tweaking around here:

•The toolbar has been adjusted to match the color scheme as well as possible within the absurdly limited range of possibilities provided by the template.

•The title of the blog has been shortened from "My Fickle Ears Dig It" to simply "Fickle Ears," and the information immediately below has gone from alliterative to merely authorial. Let's face it, we're all sick and tired of the standard issue blogospheric shtick, and no one more than me, a point I continue to belabor here. Even so, it is surprisingly difficult to avoid slipping back into common-practice blogging, so in a fleeting lucid moment, I've opted to up the austerity factor yet another notch. If anyone was genuinely curious about the original title, it's something I blurted out once in a band rehearsal after the first complete run-through of a difficult new tune I'd brought in. As with most such statements, we thought it much funnier at the time than it really is, and it only took me five years to realize that the shortened version is a better title for a blog.

•Similarly, I'm now strictly an anonymous "follower" of the few blogs to which I've subscribed through Blogger's built-in reader. I quit Facebook in a moment of clarity and pretty soon I've started creating another social network without even noticing? What the fuck? I prefer to follow blogs through good old-fashioned browser bookmarks which I capture while reading comment threads and clicking on the profiles of contributors who seem to have something timely to add to the conversation. I'll still be keeping my Blogger subscriptions simply for old time's sake as I can't imagine a drawback to doing so anonymously, though I'm sure to think of one soon. Anyway, if you are one of those authors and just saw me disappear from your followers list, (a) get a life, and (b) I promise I'm still reading you, even though you don't have a life.

•I've just discovered (probably years late as usual) that Blogger has a built-in stats page. As the kids say, LOL!!! I can't seem to get it to stop counting my own activity towards page views and the like, even though there's an option to disable this, so who knows about some of the numbers. The most perplexing? Supposedly, 81% of my pageviews (One word? Further LOL...) are on Windows and only 14% on Mac. I find that pretty hard to believe. Spambots?...REPUBLICANS?