{"id":7023,"date":"2011-08-04T11:28:09","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T18:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=7023"},"modified":"2011-08-04T11:28:09","modified_gmt":"2011-08-04T18:28:09","slug":"my-invisible-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=7023","title":{"rendered":"My Invisible Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"If you mouse over the blogroll links on the left sidebar of this blog, comments appear.\u00a0 Roll your mouse over the link to Bike Snob NYC<\/a>, for example, and you get this: \u201cA smug bicyclist makes fun of smug bicyclists.\u201d<\/p>\n

So anyway, I have a friend who reads my blog.\u00a0 I know this because he often tells me on Facebook he likes this entry or that entry.\u00a0 He\u2019s also a bicyclist; in fact it was he who first introduced me to Bike Snob NYC.\u00a0 I thought he’d get a chuckle over my sarcastic mouse-over comment, so I told him to check it out.<\/p>\n

He messaged me: \u201cWhere do I find it?\u201d At first I didn\u2019t know what he was talking about.\u00a0 \u201cFind what?\u201d, I messaged back. \u201cYour blog,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n

And the wind spilled right out of my sails. All this time he\u2019s been reading my blog and he doesn\u2019t know how to find it?\u00a0 He doesn’t have it bookmarked?\u00a0 Who else<\/em> doesn’t know?\u00a0 Does anyone<\/em> know?<\/p>\n

The fault, I realize, is mine.\u00a0 I post links to individual blog entries on Facebook.\u00a0 Many of my regular readers come here via those Facebook links.\u00a0 They click the link, read the entry, then hit the back arrow to return to Facebook.\u00a0 Nothing wrong with that, of course … except that they never see my entire blog and may not know what else is on it.<\/p>\n

I follow links to other peoples’ blog entries all the time.\u00a0 After reading the post at the link, if I decide I’d like to read more of what that blogger has to say, I know to click on the blog’s title at the top of the screen to see the entire blog.\u00a0 It\u2019s the same thing as clicking the \u201chome\u201d button on a regular website.\u00a0 If it\u2019s a worthy blog I bookmark it and come back to it again and again.<\/p>\n

I guess I assumed if I knew how to do that everyone else knew it too. But maybe they don\u2019t!\u00a0 I think I\u2019ll quit posting Facebook links that take readers directly to individual blog articles. Instead, I\u2019ll leave a one-sentence summary of the entry and just post the link to the blog itself.\u00a0 Don’t know if anyone will stick around or bother to bookmark it, but at least they’ll see the entire blog, not just a single entry.<\/p>\n

Last year there was a flurry of \u201cpeople don’t understand how to use the internet\u201d articles after a website protesting some new Facebook privacy policy somehow slipped into first place in the Google rankings for \u201cFacebook.\u201d Hundreds of people left outraged comments on the website, all on the order of \u201cWhy isn\u2019t this stupid fucking thing working, where is my Facebook?\u201d and \u201cWhat have you done to Facebook, this sucks.\u201d Except stupider, and with more misspellings. They’d been getting to Facebook through Google, apparently not knowing how to go straight there or how to bookmark it once they’d found it.<\/p>\n

We have an elderly friend who visits from time to time.\u00a0 When he wants to get his boarding pass for the Southwest flight home, he sits down at our computer, calls up Google, types “AOL” into the search bar, then gets to Southwest’s site through AOL.\u00a0 It’s all I can do to keep from beating him with a stick.<\/p>\n

I wonder if they’re teaching a unit on navigating the internet in middle school?\u00a0 If they aren’t, they should be.\u00a0 And then once our generation dies off, everyone who’s left will know all this stuff!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you mouse over the blogroll links on the left sidebar of this blog, comments appear.\u00a0 Roll your mouse over the link to Bike Snob NYC, for example, and you get this: \u201cA smug bicyclist makes fun of smug bicyclists.\u201d So anyway, I have a friend who reads my blog.\u00a0 I know this because he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-a-series-of-tubes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7023"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7039,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7023\/revisions\/7039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}