Sold three semesters' worth of books back for $59.00, pfffft. I paid $180 for them so you can see what a scam, I mean investment, textbooks are. I couldn't unload my Anthropology book because they're buying a new edition next term but at least I only lost $35 on that one and who knows, I may want to refer to it sometime. It did have some interesting information that I might be able to work into cocktail conversation. "But of course you're familiar with the Nuer woman-woman ghost marriage...?"
Two weeks ago I stopped paying eXTReMe Tracking to track visits to my web page. Visits had been pretty steady and I'd lost interest in find out whether someone was linking to me. For the last two years the daily average was about 200, and I have long since recognised that I don't want to grow much bigger. I like the intimacy possible with that audience size. It's about the same circulation as any of my fanzines. So I ceased giving out my URL, stopped responding to requests for interviews, terminated my associations with all web rings, and just wrote for the faithful and the random strangers who wandered in from Internet byways. I recently acknowledged I didn't want to pay $5 a month just to see who came from where, so I closed my eXTReMe account. That's another chapter gone in the diary's evolution.
I can still access the data, though. Looking through all the referrer logs made me nostalgic. Remember Steve Amaya? Diane Patterson? Nigel Richardson? Oh wait, Nigel's still writing, but he's gone to a web log format. The only one I read, by the way, chiefly because I can't bear the cutesy diminution of "blog" and I'm not generally entranced by what's on the Internet. I can count on Nigel to distill it for me and my peculiar sense of humor.
Incidentally, I gave up on my forum a few months ago except for the garden parts. I rarely have the urge to chat on forums. While I always enjoyed getting reader responses to diary-related subjects I really don't want to wade through everyone yakking about every topic under the sun, and that's what you've got to encourage if you want your forum to rock the planet. I'm chalking it up as an interesting experiment.
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