Thought for the Week

WordPress is a large, genteel society built on the principal of mutual sociability:

1. Create a blog (“New tea shoppe now open for business!”)
2. Write posts with suitable tag words (“Hallo, care for a cuppa me-tea?”)
3. Your posts will show up in the WordPress Reader (“Tea is served!”)
4. Other bloggers will see and visit you (“Hallo, heard you were serving tea.”)
5. Many of them will “Like” your tea and possibly “Comment” on it (“Lovely, do please visit my tea shoppe, as well”). Some may even “Follow” you (“Ta! I’ll be back!”)
6. You will then visit their shoppe, Like and possibly Comment on their tea, er, um, blog posts, and maybe even Follow them back (“I say, let’s make a regular thing of this!”)

Lovely. Only last week my shoppe hit a wall. Or at least a very thick mass of jungle growth (highly uncivilized for a tea shoppe). And so I had to find a digital machete to cut my way back to my beloved fellow tea lovers!

What happened? My email notifications caught a bad case of the stupids. “Like” announcements now tell me that “Cecil” or “Felicia” liked my post, but offer no links to their shoppe! And until two days ago, “Please Moderate” emails showed up completely blank (“We’ve blocked someone from entering your shoppe, hah-hah, but aren’t going to tell you who it is—jolly good fun, eh?”) Fortunately, the latter has been restored, but Like notifications are still being worked on by the good people at WordPress.

For those who’ve noticed my lack of etiquette in not visiting their shoppes of late, what can I say but that I am utterly beside myself with embarrassment! I have, however, decided not to sack my entire staff as they, well, own the shoppe, you see.

But I shall find a way! Currently, I’m using the WordPress “Bell” (notifications) menu to visit those who’ve Commented, Followed, and Liked my posts. This is an imperfect method in that it only tells me about some Likes, unlike email notifications, which until now informed me of all Likes. One other snag: the Bell menu sends me not directly to the blogger in question, but to our neighborhood bobby (Gravatar). But unfortunately, many shoppe owners have failed to update Constable Gravatar on their current location.

Nevertheless, I shall continue to be resilient (from the Latin resilīre, to “spring back”) and resourceful (from the Old French resourdre, “to rise again”)! And finally, to paraphrase Sir Winston, “I shall never give up!” I shall find my way back to you, dear friends…

Just in time for tea!