I Love Bots

Bertie knew that Barkley needed only a hard reset to be restored to his normal, loving, playful self. But there his troubles began. He found himself situated without a paper clip and Barkley had, earlier in the evening in what, with hindsight, seems to have taken on a much less mischievous cast, eaten his phone.

I love the bots, who or whatever they are, who occasionally flock to this blog in the hundreds for a day or two, usually from some obscure part of the world. I don't really know what's going on with them, or why they visit this site, but it is nice to look in to see that it has had hundreds of visitors every so often. Of course I know those numbers are completely meaningless. I can't imagine why they show up. But, well, they're my best customers.

In the last 8 plus years this site has had some 85,000 visitors. The vast, vast, majority of these visitors have been these bots, hackers, or whatever. These days, I might get two or three authentic visitors in a day, and occasionally maybe a dozen. I want to be clear; I'm just fine with that. I make no effort to attract viewers, rarely adding tags that search engines can use to direct traffic to this site. I'm not really blogging to attract readers. I'm blogging these days just to write things. Things like this fluff piece on bots, simply because I love to write. Go figure.

I began this blog when I first started publishing my own books, almost nine years ago. At the time, it was common wisdom that authors needed a website and/or a blog to promote their books. Web sites cost money, and I really don't see any purpose in paying for a website, so I went with this free, simple blog in order to communicate with any of my readers who might look in. Because I hate maps in ebooks, finding them annoying, and usually useless as they are too small, I posted the maps to my books on this site, to make it somewhat useful, with a link to the maps and info in my ebooks on this site. Or at least a mention of my blog, since links may have been beyond me at the time. 

Blogs, however, are out of fashion these days - and so are websites it seems, since just about every author website I've ever looked in on hasn't been updated in years. These days, all the cool kid authors communicate with their fans on short form social media; Like X, ex-Twitter, Facebook, Tic Tok or Instagram, none of which I use. For me, it's this blog or nothing. 

However, the lack of a large readership means that not only can I post whatever I (desperately) come up with to write each week, (like this post) but I can also post honest book reviews, safe in the knowledge that they'll make no difference. Making no difference is not exactly a lofty goal, but as I said, I love to write, and I must confess I like being a critic as well, so this blog gives me not only the chance to write things a inconsequential as this post, but the chance to say what I think about books, without having to bite my tongue and be nice. And it keeps me writing. 

Speaking of writing, I'm hoping to be in a position to post an update to my long form writing next week. Stay tuned.