Saturday, January 23, 2021

Dem ole cyber blues

As Vinny Jones said to Avi in Snatch: "That depends on all the elements in the equation."

Which is the same answer I had to give yesterday to my possible new host who, like Chuckles, can only really think in cyber terms and well done to both of them I say. But there still are many elements in this equation and they're not only cyber-logic, logical though cyber-logic is. There are various outside pressures to take into account.

And to the conclusion that I "should just do as I wish, the way I always have done", it's not a case of what any of us wish, it's choosing from the variants that are still available and trying to keep most users of a service reasonably [but sadly, not completely] happy. 

There's also the question of money. Anyone who works in the cyber world would laugh at the pittance I was paying and conclude that someone was being very kind to me, which was exactly what was happening. Conversely, anyone on the breadline as I now am would wonder how the hell I could be running two sites such as those we had until Jan 5. It's not just all the elements in the equation, it's also from which perspective one sees things.

Bottom line is how important is it, in the scheme of things, for these two sites to keep going?  

In terms of overall influence, probably SFA.  In terms of providing an occasional port for ships out on the political ocean - I'd say it still has its place, just as pubs do, and it does worry me to see the attrition rate in blogs, because Twitter and FB, Instagram etc. are just not the whole answer, as we're seeing.

Now there are two ways you can go in blogs - pay or free. Most go for free of course and let someone like Google take care of the details, including the permitted Woke ideology. No techie thinks that way, I'm about halfway and we've gone the pay way, which by-and-large was trouble free but it was almost completely manual, i.e. what you put in was what readers saw and used.  


Every platform has its premium version but my thinking has always been that what you should be buying the premium way, is not just prettier bells and whistles, better themes and freedom from having to think but rather journalistic independence. A good techie can always supplement and tweak a poor theme and that's just what ours did.

This was first brought home to me in 2008 when this very Blogger site you're now on was simply taken down by management without so much as a by-your-leave. 

On what grounds?  Because some p**** used the complaint system which always worked on 'guilty until proved innocent'.  Did that uncreative, feckless p**** suffer at all later for that outrage?  Don't make me laugh.

The kindness of techies [yes, there is such an animal] enabled [the new in 2009, the reboot in 2014, plus NOUK recently] N.O. and OoL [in 2011] to exist with almost complete journalistic freedom, almost unheard of today - it was not the guy administering the site [me] who created that. And they were doing that because they believed the fight was important.  They were the ones fending off the attacks and dealing with baddies, not me.

The quarterback can only launch his attack if the team's defence, which blocks constant attacks on him, are big, mean muvvers. [By the way, there's an uber-defender, the Head Honcho up Above, also watching the whole scene but let's not get into that right now.]

I'm dwelling on this because the layperson, used to just clicking on sites on his or her rounds, might not see all the elements in the equation, of which he/she is very much a vital one.  NO is nothing without the input, truly it's not, without the collaboration of like souls. 

And that's why I was so incensed last night about DR and others being stymied in commenting.  How dare effing Google cause that to happen?  You see, to a reader who drops by, my reaction seemed way OTT but for me, with 2008, 2011, 2014 and 2019 behind me, the reaction to censorious, scriptkiddy third parties trying to interfere is - you keep TF out of our lives, you lowlifes.

When a blogger goes free site, WP or Blogger, then he pays in other ways as we saw last night - not an issue for a one post a day, inoffensive blog but becomes proportionally more of a problem the more the blogger puts himself about.  And what's the point of political blogging and those techies supporting that unless that blogger does pursue his prime directive with maximum curmudgeonry?

What of the other lot, WordPress? The free site is c***.  While the comments system is vastly better than Blogger's, using first comment moderation for example, the rest of it is bollox ... or rather boobs:


Actually, it's not always boobs, is it, too often it's commercial Wokery in direct contrast to the message in the posts - I'm not putting up with that, no serious site allows that.

So those are some of the issues, chaps and chapesses, just to give a bit of perspective to the whole thing. Future?  I'm deciding on Easter Saturday, after viewing all the elements in the equation, so to speak.

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