#84 Restructuring the Rat (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Another half year has gone by and I've written damn little in this journal.  It's not that I haven't had lots of ideas and tons of material.  It's an election year and I'm part-time employed.  Those two activities alone are enough to start me ranting endlessly.  But I managed to create a monster, a maintenance monster, with the structure of the Rat's Eye View webpage and finally it killed off my desire to write these things.  In a fit of inspiration, I completely restructured the website into my version of a blog journal.  No more "This Week's Rant" page.  Everything gets dumped into the current year's list of babble.  No more snazzy index that allows readers and website search engines to find a particular rant about a specific subject.  Every damn thing I've written is going to be dumped into annual files.  The newest stuff is on the top of the page, the old crap is at the bottom.  If I had a readership, I'd be concerned that I've managed to lose their historical interest.  I don't, so I'm just doing this make life easy for myself.  And, after all, that's what really matters, isn't it?

My hope Is that I'll write a lot more because of this easier, less accessible structure.  I've thrown readership counters on each of the annual pages, which will give me some idea if any of you are out there reading what I write . 

I write a column for local motorcycle magazine, called "Geezer with a grudge." the idea behind that column is that I write something that pisses off the magazine's readers, they write a nasty letter to the editor , if they write often enough, the editor has evidence that there are a lot of readers out there in magazine land, and he can justify his ad rates.  The page counters are doing the same job for me.  I'm not writing this drivel for my health.  At least, I'm not posting it to a webpage for that purpose .  I created these web pages in the hopes that either attract a readership.  So far, that experiment has been a dismal failure, but I've written about one million bytes of text in the effort.  As a writing experiment, I can't call it worthless.  As a self-promotion experiment, it hasn't been worth much, though. 

June 2004