New blog sidebar
After an early morning 4th-of-July bike ride (nice to get some exercise for a change!), I decided to update the sidebar of my blog. It’s been a mess ever since that strange experience in Nairobi where the hotel’s proxy server wouldn’t let me see my own posts, and I replaced the sidebar with some safari photos thinking that was the only way to share them.
Now, I know the officially sanctioned thing all of us monochromatic little bloggers are supposed to do with a sidebar: put links to other blogs, then they’ll put links to your blog, and we’ll all “drive traffic” and enjoy “network effects” and, hey, you make a salad and I’ll bring the hot dogs and we’ll have a party!
Yeah, right. I’ll be updating the sidebar of the work blog in the next few days and will probably follow protocol over there, but this blog is just an offshoot of Mahugh.com, and the mission statement for Mahugh.com hasn’t changed since 1996: to give Mom a place to keep track of what I’m up to.
She doesn’t need links to do that. Hell, she’d get lost if she had them. The first time I linked to a YouTube video, Mom was barely talking to me the next time I saw her. When I managed to get her to tell me what was wrong, it turned out she had clicked around YouTube a bit and found some girl shaking her bare butt and talking dirty. She was so disappointed that I had stuff like that on “my” site. (Megan and I did quite a bit of research, but we never did find the offending video.)
Given my targeted mission statement as mentioned above, links to external content are risky and can do more harm than good. So I’ve eliminated the concept altogether. If you don’t know how to get to Megan’s blog, you’ll never find out by hanging around here. (Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll link to Megan when there’s something there you should see, and the rest of the time you should probably avoid that place anyway.) ***
Instead, I’ve filled the sidebar with links to some favorite photos I’ve posted on the blog. Not to feed my own ego, of course. Oh no, that guy is plenty fat and happy already, believe me. These links are for Mom, so that she can enjoy my good taste and sharp eye whenever she’d like, even if my latest post is as lame as this one. Enjoy, Mom.
ADDED LATER:
*** Hmm, that was so funny when I wrote it. But based on early feedback from a major market segment, I have made a slight adjustment to my policy. There shall be one link on the sidebar, on the home page, post page, comments page, and every page everywhere on the blog. Sorry about that, Dear, I was just having a little fun!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 3:56 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on July 4, 2007 at 10:52 pm Megan wrote:
Thank you dear. I guess I can start reading your blog again.