Twitterthoughts: How Much Do Youall Miss the Animal Pictures?

(Status update: It's a chilly morning with a snowstorm blowing our way. For the third week in a row weather's discouraged me from setting up in the Friday Market. Instead I've spent the morning processing another book deal: good news for any writer. But only a $300 e-book deal, not a big fat hardcover book with a big name on the back cover: bad news for any writer's aging mother. Writers' mothers want to get into geriatric poor-mouthing games with lines like "I'm still trying to finish my daughter's book, but it's a heavy one..." Writers' mothers say things to writers like "Such 'books' you're writing! All of them fit into one three-ring binder." You still need to support this web site; with snow on the way, I'm wary of steering you to online writing sites that are not set up to recognize a difference between writers in places where one patch of black ice somewhere shuts down the whole town, and writers who get drunk every time they sell a book. The Roberts Family Bakery Cafe is the ground floor of some family members' house, so doesn't shut down every time schools and libraries do--but the family do take well-earned vacations in midwinter.)

This web site's readership just took a sharp drop. Was it something I said? No; although I stuck my neck out last week--Candidate Moore's the one I've been following, but what really pushed me over the edge with that post was the hate people were dumping on Congressman Conyers in the hospital, people, get a grip already--U.S. readership has been steady. What this web site lost was two foreign countries where, although we've welcomed legitimate readers if any, a lot of hacking activity has been going on. We had thousands of readers in those countries; this week we have none. Well, who misses would-be hackers?

Earlier this year my Twitter "following/followers" numbers crashed. I'd been following a few hundred people, followed by a few thousands. Thousands of Twitter followers just totally disappeared, overnight. My actual Twitter experience did not change. Those thousands of followers who suddenly popped up and as suddenly blinked out hadn't been contributing any actual tweets to my Twitter stream. I never even knew most of their names.

What was going on at Twitter was that I'd picked up a few thousand "bot" followers. People build these automatic "robot" widgets, pure strings of code unconnected to any living human, and give them little names and accounts on Twitter, Facebook, other social media sites where follower-ship may count. Some bots are designed to spy on people, or annoy them--I remember one bot whose reason for existing was to correct the way people spelled a celebrity's name. Many are designed just to pump up people's page view or follower counts. Because there are people who judge a new e-friend by numbers, who assume a blog is good if lots of "people" seem to be "reading" it and a product may even be good if lots of "people" seem to be "visiting" the company web site, there is actually a brisk(ish) trade in bots. At that Seoclerks.com site where I hang out, people are constantly offering payment to anybody who can program a few hundred bots to retweet their tweets on Twitter. And for several months I had the "benefit" of all those bots free of charge.

The bots made me look good, as a writer, but I'm not planning to pay anybody to send them back. There is just something ineffably meretricious about a bot. However, I will say that most bots do at least have cute avatars. Bot builders usually gank images of beautiful models, adorable animals, or funny cartoons...

Back when Associated Content was a viable site that promoted the articles it purchased, I had a following of several hundred daily readers around the English-speaking world, with occasional peaks over a thousand. That's flattering to me, and good enough for the itsy-bitsy publishers, but the big-name publishers that really make a book pay off look for bigger numbers. Oh, they're realistic--they understand that writing about books, knitting, food, frugality, or even cute and clever cats, is not going to sell the way get-rich-quick books and celebrity memoirs sell. They also understand that one real blog reader who posts even lame "I wuz ere" comments is likely to mean more book sales than a hundred bots--or hackers. But they want thousands of daily views, not hundreds. So far, this web site as a "we" venture where I've done most of the work, and the Twitter account as a "me alone" venture, have frequently had thousands, but the thousands seem to have been mostly bots and would-be hackers.

As a writer I'm not happy about this, but it's only fair to note that this site attracted a few more real readers, along with those battalions of bots, when we were sharing images of adoptable animals from Petfinder.

I enjoyed finding those animal pictures; picking out the cutest picture of almost any type of animal you can imagine is like picking your favorite flavor (before glyphosate pollution) of Ben & Jerry's. Since I posted from the computer center during Heather's long months of loneliness, earlier this year, Heather actually saw very few of "her e-friends," but I saw them. I was delighted to read that people were rescuing them from shelters! It's impossible to tell, online, what the shelter experience has done to an animal or why it was taken to a shelter in the first place. (Shelter staff get ugly about those "irresponsible pet owners" who tick boxes on a form indicating that they can't keep the animal any more...in reality the animal may, like "our" horrible Barnie, be unfit for keeping because it's hurt other pets or even a child. I've wondered whether beautiful Jade, the green-eyed tortie in Atlanta whose coat reminded me of Heather's, languished in a shelter because there really is a mean tortoiseshell cat somewhere and she's it.) It's always nice, though, to know that an animal has received a chance to live.

Grandma Bonnie Peters really doesn't like cookies. She tolerates Amazon and Google cookies, warily, since they work well together, but her preference would be that this web site never link to any other site that uses any cookies. She didn't like that I set up a Blogjob account. She periodically prods me to make sure that at least the cookies this site has picked up are the legitimate kind that crumble quickly. "I installed a cookie cleaner on that computer! Use it!"

"It cleans only this computer. It does nothing for readers, at all."

"At least, if the cookies you pick up give you problems, you can remove the links and warn the readers."

Petfinder.com gave this web site due notice that it was going to be using more cookies. I ran the cookie cleaner. Three Petfinder cookies failed the crumble test. So this web site no longer does Petfinder animal pictures.

Then there was Zazzle. I enjoyed Zazzle. Some of you, especially those of you who've put your cute pet pictures on coffee mugs and gift tags, enjoyed those Zazzle links too. Google does not like Zazzle. Getting Zazzle photo links onto this site was often complicated by cookie conflicts. So this web site no longer does Zazzle animal pictures either.

Readers said they loved the Petfinder and Zazzle links--but they were causing some sites' spam and cookie filters to classify this site as spam, which is disgusting. I don't use an e-mailing widget or service. You practically have to send me an e-mail to get me to send one back, and every e-mail that legitimately goes out under my name, or from my address, is individually hand-typed by me. I don't spam, but I have no control over whatever those Petfinder or Zazzle links may have allowed hackers to do.

So now animal posts have to depend on existing photos of resident cats, past or present, and one unflattering snapshot I took of a friend's dog, for eye appeal.

How bad is that, Gentle Readers? Do you want the cute photo links back here?

Should they go in a separate Blogspot blog--one that wouldn't link to my comments or e-mails, so other people's computers wouldn't tell them that I was to be blamed if they get spam?

Should they go on Twitter only, since Twitter has its own automatic relinking system just for the purpose of keeping yucky cookies or viruses from being spread when people unthinkingly share links?

Would you rather just send me some extra Tracfone minutes--it takes at least 5 minutes to upload a picture, and Tracfone minutes are obscenely overpriced if you buy fewer than 200--so I could at least post new blurry pictures of Heather, Samantha, Sydney, and other animals that are not up for adoption but are still cute? (Tracfone minutes can be purchased for cash at big-chain supermarkets, Wal-Marts, and convenience stores everywhere, on cards, and mailed to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. A Gopro camera would also be appreciated, if you get a chance to mention it to Santa Claus.)