So for the past month or so, I have been trying to make my blog a little more tech savvy, by which I mean, adding hit counters just to see how many people actually read this piece of sh*t that I post on every once in a while, and putting it in Google's search results. I began trying to do the first when I started to wonder how many people visit this thing and if my periodical "I'm sorry for not posting and I have no good reason, but things will change and I'll post more often."
Then I don't. I continue to post sporadically and you're lucky if you get one or two posts out of me in a month, if that. That's not right.
Now, before I go on, let me tell you that this is not going to be one of the type of posts that I hate to write, and that I vowed to write no longer in this post. Having said that . . .
I have spent the entire morning, and some of the afternoon trying to get Google to verify my URL. I went through the entire Blogger menu until I found an area where there was HTML. Then I pasted the META tag into the code after <head>and before <body> in about ten different places fifteen different times, and saved, and kept clicking verify at least twenty times, and it wasn't until the sixteenth saving that I realized that every time I saved, Blogger's thing, whatever it's called, kept rearranging the META tag, and deleting bits so that instead of <meta name="verify-v1" content="/vhyFkWM72jhoxokObT3sZezIXN/a51Ag0+GZGbh9iA=" /> saving, it saves as <meta content='/vhyFkWM72jhoxokObT3sZezIXN/a51Ag0+GZGbh9iA=' name='verify-v1'/>, which doesn't look that different, but it is.
I realize that the previous paragraph must have been a little incomprehensible to those of you who are not tech savvy, but hang with me here and just accept the fact that this is very annoying. Think of it as . . . you're writing something in Word and an idea strikes you, so you open up the Find thing and search for the place you wanted to edit. But you can't find the place with find, so you scroll through and it turns out that in the place of the phrase that you wrote, "the woman put on the shirt," the computer replaced it with, "the lady put on the shirt." Grammatically identical, but not the phrase you put in, and not what you were looking for, and you didn't change it. Annoying, isn't it? No? Well, I don't care, it is to me.
So, once I saw this, I stopped trolling through the Blogger template code (which is way too long) and went back to the Google URL register page and clicked the other option, Upload an HTML file. Then I stopped for a moment and thought.
Hmmmm, thought I. The way I usually post, I do everything through Blogger's website. I can't upload an HTML file to my blog. (Because an HMTL file is the internet's equivalent to a text file and Blogger only allows you to upload video and picture). But then I remembered that my computer is a Vista, and if I click the option to start a new Word document, the computer gives me a choice between starting a plain Word document and starting a new blog post. And coincidentally, (well, not really, but whatever) a few months ago, I had set up this option so that, were I to start a blog post with Word, once I finished, I would just have to save it and the computer would upload it to Blogger for me!
Whatever, I'm writing this thing and you're reading, so it is cool.
I went to Blogger help and did a hit counter search and found a few good results. I clicked on the first one, which was – guess what? – Google. Google Analytics, to be precise. I clicked on that one, registered, and once again, guess what? They wanted me to add more stuff to my HTML code. So, because this was pretty early in the morning, not far along my journey to get Google to verify that I did in fact own my URL, I added it as well. But, unfortunately, they also refused to acknowledge that I had posted anything in the template code, so I got off that site, and registered with another one, that gave me actual instructions on how to add their code to my page! I mean, it was as if Google believes that if two guys can start a world spanning, globally recognized company with a ridiculously high stock price in their f*cking garage, the least someone like me, who has written HTML code exactly once, in a long episode two or three years ago, who can barely remember any of it, should be able to hack Blogger's servers (for that is what it seems is necessary to alter my blog's HTML code in the way that I want), which, let me mention, are also owned by Google, and add their f*cking hit count style code to my blog.
So, the resolution of the hit count episode was a happy one, but the URL verification one goes on yet. It remains to be seen if this will have a happy ending, or a horrible one, where I rave and rant at my computer, but stop shy of actually damaging it, for then what would I do?
I don't know. Probably read Ian McEwan and Ayn Rand.
And the previous line would have been a great one to end this post at, but I am afraid to stop writing, should this scheme of mine not work, and Google continue to not verify my URL, which would piss me off immensely, not that you couldn't have garnered that from the previous one thousand, seventy six words, that I assume you read, instead of skipping down to this point.
Because that would be immensely irritating, as well as an indicator of poor upbringing, and would compel me to hunt you down through your IP address (which is also given to me by the hit counter that isn't Google) with a deer rifle, and perhaps kill you, perhaps, just wave it around and look frightening. Either way, I can assure you, you would not enjoy it.
And I am certain that you would never skip to the end again.
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