Those readers of ours who have followed us for years (since 2009 for some) are well aware that our frequency of posting in recent years has fallen way off. There was a time when we were good for two, three, maybe even five or six posts per week, depending on what was going on and what sparked our fevered literary synapses. What ever the hell that means.
As we've told you before, we never posted out of any sense of having to do so regularly. We simply generated posts when ever the spirit filled our mind with thoughts we could only expunge by writing them down in what we hoped would be a useful manner. At times we were writing away for hours every day.
Eventually this took it's toll; we sort of tired of it. At the same time, life interrupted and we found ourselves interested in other pursuits. Before you knew it, we had lost our habit and had gotten out of shape for reacting quickly.
Well here we are wanting to publish a number of items, only to find the digital domain in which blogs operate is not as friendly and intuitive to us as it used to be.
For the first several years of Other Side's existence, we composed our commentaries on Microsoft Live Writer, which was a convenient and intuitively obvious no-cost authoring application. Several years ago, Microsoft more or less abandoned it to the "open source" universe of computer applications. There were some hiccups in the transition, but some motivated digit-heads took up its care and feeding.
It sufficed for some time, albeit with little glitches that eventually surfaced. You should know that the actual blog is published via Blogger, owned by Google, and they own the domain of blogger.com and blogspot.com where our blog is published.
At this point, the Open Source Live Writer application seems to have been more or less abandoned by those who adopted it, and is of little real use to us in what we do. This is unsettling; it's like suddenly having to do our thing in a different world. Things we counted on and editing techniques we used as second nature are lost to us.
The blogger.com site has it's own "authoring" component, but it was never as easy to use as Live Writer. Once you composed on Live Writer, you simply sent the result to blogger for publishing on our blog web site (http://othersideofbrunswick.blogspot.com/).
Blogger is also the site that controls the various appearance components of the blog...the layout if you will, along with various bells and whistles like gadgets, lists, etc. What most consider "the look and feel."
Well, now that we've decided we'd like to write and publish a number of items for your consumption, we've learned that things in the blogger domain have gone awry. The authoring component on blogger still seems to work as it did, but the layout feature, where we set up the various features appearing on the blog site, and their look and feel and design, seems to have lost much if not most of its functionality. We feel as if we've lost control of our own blog. Some would say that's what google wants, we suppose.
Even worse, the "feed" mechanism that we used to notify readers who had signed up on the web page when a new post had been published also seems to have shut down, and we haven't been able to find out how we can remedy this situation.
This leaves us to believe that the handful of new posts we've published in recent months have not made it to your inbox. You'd only know they were there if you jogged on over to our blog site as a matter of daily routine, and given we've more or less gone dormant as to publishing rate, we can hardly be surprised if you gave up on doing so.
So for the time being, what we will do is send you a personal email letting you know that a new post has been published. In the mean time, we'll research how we can get the automated feed mechanism working again.
Sorry for the difficulties. They are disconcerting to us after all these years. We'll do our best to resolve them as best we can, and in the best interests of our loyal readers. Please bare with us as we do, and we hope you will check in on your own from time to time to see if we've been busy.
Best regards to you all. If you have friends and acquaintances who would likely be unknown to me but whom you believe follow Other Side, please contact them to let them know of the recent posts, and of our intent to resume a more active publishing routine.
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