Monday, February 13, 2012

Where have all the flowers gone?

Or rather, where have all the readers gone?

Well, OK, according to my traffic-monitoring gizmos, numbers of visitors and time spent on the sites are much as they always are - even a little higher than average - but commenting seems to have STOPPED over the last 8 or 10 days.

JES we know about: he's very busy just now, only checks in for a marathon catch-up once or twice a month. Ditto Gary. Ditto Cedra.

But recent 'regulars' John and Carolyn have suddenly gone ominously silent again. And King Tubby (no relation), a frequent gadfly over on my booze & music blog lately, seems to have disappeared as well.


But for my old drinking bud The British Cowboy, rising Kraken-like from his long 'sleep' to school me in the matter of margarita recipes, things would have been utterly SILENT around here.


It's actually getting kind of creepy. What gives?


11 comments:

Froog said...

I should have titled this post Where have all the followers gone?, shouldn't I?

Missed a trick there!

John said...

I'm here now, making up for it!! No but seriously, I think Green Dam River Horse Crab or whatever it's called was blocking updates for a while. I checked twice last week but it seemed as though nothing had been posted since Wednesday. I check today (with some worry as to your health / safety / freedom) to suddenly find that Blogger has finally caught up. Now, I can't say for others and I use a non-standard DNS but that's my explanation anyway. Glad to see you're fine, apart from the exercise pain.

Froog said...

Ah, so that's it. I've never understood feed-readers.

However, I assume that feeds are routed out of the Blogger or Blogspot sites, which are hosted in the US, not China. I don't see how the 'point of origin' of the posts would be relevant (but again, nominally the US, because I'm using a VPN all the time: lately my IP address has mostly been in Cincinnatti!).

So, I think it's just a glitch with your reader - not nefarious interference by The Kafka Boys here in China.

John said...

No, I don't use a reader, I came direct to this site. Anyway, seems it's all back to normal now.
Thinking about it though, perhaps I should use a reader for convenience? Eh, I've never been a particularly efficient guy.

Froog said...

Ah, then I didn't understand the reference to 'updates'.

I suppose there might be a problem with your browser not refreshing as it should, if you leave a window permanently open at one or other of my blogs. But if you're dialling the page up fresh, how can it possibly NOT display the most recent version of the blog that all the rest of the world sees???

John said...

This is dragging this out somewhat, I apologise, but we haven't heard from anyone else as to whether they had problems too. Who knows, perhaps they're still not getting updates... but I doubt that!
This could simply be down to my alternative DNS I mentioned although it's supposed to be pretty good. Let's leave this to rest, I wouldn't dwell on it being a problem to worry about.

Froog said...

It's this "getting updates" terminology that throws me.

You don't "get updates" unless you subscribe to something that gives you updates.

Blogspot is continuously updated, and f you dial up a blog on the site, you see the whatever is the current version of it. There's no 'update' involved; it is what it is at that particular moment.

Blogspot publishes new posts within nanoseconds of my uploading them to Blogger.

How are you missing out on this?

John said...

Well I'm not now, assuming you haven't posted anything today yet that is (although I get the sneaking feeling that you have as you usually 'update' every day). Curiouser and curiouser. I'll try again later and I should probably change back to my original DNS as some point to rule that problem out. I'll keep you posted as you seem concerned. Perhaps they really are on to you... One too many complaints, causing an unpatriotic stir...

Froog said...

It's your logic I'm worried about, dear boy, more than your alleged difficulties in accessing my matchless prose.

You are in England. Blogger/Blogspot are in the US. Anything the nasty Chinese censor man gets up to here is not going to have any effect on your ability to access Blogger/Blogspot. (And only rarely, thank god, on my ability to access Blogger/Blogspot.)

John said...

I take your point but mine was that often these days server architecture is not always a simple case of geography. I haven't got around to doing any testing so let's put this matter aside; I'm getting all of your "updates" eventually but it's not the end of the world to me if some are a little late arriving. I'm still catching up on the comments from these older posts as it is!

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