Click images for desktop size: "Forest Grove, OR Sidewalk Chalk Art Festival" by Anonymous In a week I have to decide wether or not to keep this web site up.
It's a decision.
Part of its about money. I'd have to borrow to pay for it for a year, including the domain registration. If I don't pay for it the whole site will just vanish. There'll be no trace left of it at all.
I've got to admit I like that. Vanished without trace. Gone with just the memory of blackness broken up by scattered colored lights, like a good pop tune.
Not too bad a metaphor for me.
Click images for desktop size: "Mina Suvari"
They tell me that this site has cash value. That's a surprise. The domain name is worth about twelve hundred bucks, or I guess it would have that value if anybody had ever made an offer to buy it from me. They base this silly figure on the fact that some of those sites that track this stuff say I could make about $300 a month if I used "proper advertising".
That's not going to happen, not paid ads, not adsense in particular, not reviews written for cash with plenty of links back to the product that pays me to review it. I don't disapprove of advertising but its not what I want.
I also note that a few people have pointed out that the name warchild13 sounds more like a biker domain that a place for rambley memories from an ex-almost-everything.
During its busy times this site gets a whopping 200 "unique visitors" a day. My puppy's little site gets about 1,500 a day.
I have robot.txt set up that stops most of the site indexing tools from searching her site. Her hits come from our own mini-network a friend helped me set up. Its mainly hospitals, schools and special needs schools. I don't promote it via other "dog blogs" or even offer up links to some of them, many of which I actively peruse and enjoy. The site is for kids. And my puppy wouldn't much
Click images for desktop size: "The Orphans" by The Fozz like acknowledging that there are any other dogs in the world, especially if she can't play fight with them. She gets about 50 emails a day from the kids. She's not endorsing any products except "no littering" and don't be mean, being mean is her job.
About 10 hits a day come via search engines, my all time fave search is still for "shelby the dog who doesn't speak good english", followed by "shelby the happy great dog." This site gets about 30% of its hits from search engines, about 90% of that 30% are searching for images by artists I like. I feel good that there's a place where people can find some of this stuff.
Out of the 140 visitors left I figure I don't know about half of them, never met them, never heard from them. About 10 times a year I hear from someone who just wanted to know that I'm okay, that I still exist. I'm glad to hear from them too for the same reasons. Four or five times I've heard from someone whom I'd nearly forgotten. They had one important thing to say to me and were pleased to find a chance to say it. I value that too.
Then there are my friends who care enough about me, whom I amuse who come by once in a while to see how I'm doing, like a letter from a dear friend that you can chose to receive at their leisure. That's pretty cool too.
And my friends who come by every day to see what trouble I've gotten myself into. There's always plenty of that!
There are some people who come by everyday whom I don't know. Someone once wrote to me that I was creating a "work of art" here! That was never my intention, nor my talent.
Sometimes those people
Click images for desktop size: "Dreaming" by Haxxybecome friends, at least once a special friend, more often than not I can't be what they want me to be and all I can do is disappoint them. There's some small value in that too, I guess, for both of us.
There's been grief too.
I've been doing this since WordPress 1.2 and Moveable Type 2.1. Lot of versions ago. Rah. You'd think I'd know about the vagaries of the net and that I'm old enough and know enough about people to understand their vindictiveness, their anger, their rage. Usually I'm just surprised as to why we all can't relax a bit more.
It fits in with my lack of intelligence. I'm still the guy who thinks that most of the violence in the world could be stopped if we all just played a little ball, if we all got to hear some really good music and see a great movie.
Actually, no one's proved me wrong on that score yet. Maybe its because its too ridiculous a plan to ever further implement. Of course one of my best friends. A guy who's as terse as I'd liked to be and he's rich too believed in my stupid plans. It worked too.
He's one of those guys who comes by here when he has time to think about me and he'd get mad if he ever got a compliment so I'll stop.
The other nasty negative is the spam. For a while bestiality porno ads on my puppy's site where causing me a lot of grief. It took me a long time and a lot of work to figure out how to end them.
And while so many have a hard time figuring out my site server email address the spammers seem to find them easily enough, even though they appear nowhere on the sites.
So the spammers and the people who probably have a good reason to hate me or at least be angry with me have forced me to not be as open as I'd like. Those who know me well know I either say what's on my mind or else I stay silent. The less kind, but possibly more accurate might describe my silence of sulky or surly silences.
Speaking my mind has made me enemies, some pretty powerful enemies. Enemies with political power, money and time to invest in their rage. And the calm vindictiveness to wait to see their rage deployed. So I've had to censor myself. I don't like that at all. Even when I can see the sense and the correctness of it I don't like it.
It damages me.
What's good though is that since starting out on free servers and all that I've gotten into a habit, its a good habit of cataloging my days, of looking backwards at the past day and seeing how it impacts today and the future.
That's a good thing. Its a self analysis that I need in my life. Self examination. Yeah.
Of course I could get the same thing from a paper journal or a scrapbook. Or I could just keep this site on my own computer and update it so only I could see it. I might be too public and egotistical to do that with the same persistence that I do now.
With my puppy's site my original intent was just to have a place to record my wonderful little dogs life so that I would never forget it, never lose a moment of our precious time together. That people involved in her life could see it too was also a huge part of the intent. That it became something
Click images for desktop size: "In Light" by Unknown more than I imagined is good and pleases me. She's done well by me in her arrogant puppy dog way.
That those 1,500 kids a day like to look at her and her bad jokes, well, I have a right to stop it, don't I? Of course I don't, but hasn't America become the place where we ignore our responsibilities for our own selfish wants? Why should I hold myself to a higher standard? As soon as I start justification stuff I know I'm defending being wrong.
I could just buy the domain name and then use my computer as a server. I've done that before and it was a drag on everything. Slows down the computer and hogs major bandwidth. Also you get to examine the mechanizations of the little trolls who try and hack the server. Amazingly 80% of them can't think beyond windows, 20% know its linux but no one ever tried to crack the Mac server functions. How short sighted and what a limited way to get into mischief.
I'd miss the warchild email addresses. Using that dynamic dns thing I've been able to get email servers running on the Mac in the past. It was a monster chore and I can't recollect how I did it, but I know I did so I should be able to do it again.
The site has generated a few decent movie trades, not many but a few. And having the catalog readily available is a real time saver when someone is offering something I want badly (like Season 3 of the TV series Kung Fu, yes I finally got it) but that could be worked around too.
Seems like an awful lot of workarounds.
So I've got to make the decision within a week or it gets made for me. Cool enough, I guess. I plan to download the entire site just in case. If I decide to keep the site it will at least provide an annual
Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Frank Brunner backup.

Looking forward to the four day weekend with my friend. For dinner its confirmed we're going to the Chinese Buffet! I hope they don't do a turkey thing. I hope they have bacon for the pups! I've figured out my outfit. I plan to look modestly stylish. My friend and I can't afford to go out much and we have pretty much everything we want here anyway.
So this time I'm going to look good except for the fleece with the two huge inner pockets. I've lined the pockets with plastic bags or easy depositing of things I won't eat but that puppies adore.
Its promising to be a great holiday.
The pain has modestly subsided. The antibiotics work for about 4 hours knocking the pain down from a 9 to a 5 (on the smiley pain chart). They bring it down to a level where ibuprofen can bring the pain down to tolerable levels. The healing is wearing me out and leaving me tired.
I'm hoping that by tomorrow the pain will be totally manageable.
My friend doesn't understand how I can feel the antibiotics wearing off. All I'm glad is that she's never had enough pain to understand. Its like a really bad toothache but you feel it in your bones, an electric red throbbing pain that stays constant until it suddenly decides to shock you into its own dimension of a silent scream. I only have that on my left side. Leukemia legacy stuff.
I slept for almost 5 hours last night, only waking up because of pain twice and I still managed to stay in bed and go back to sleep in pretty short order.
That's getting better, that is!