Sorry about that...

The following won't mean anything to those of you who stop by the blog to read posts, or follow Facebook/Twitter links to get here. For you, yesterday's post -- whether you liked it or not -- was business as usual. But as everybody who signed up to receive new posts via e-mail* now knows, Sundays post arrived in a thoroughly unreadable form -- the photo of Orson Welles was there at the top, as were the many orange-lettered links... but the text of the post wasn't there.

Details.

I signed up for the e-mail delivery a few weeks ago just to make sure the promised deliveries actually happen every week -- which they do -- so you can imagine my surprise at finding yesterday's mysteriously blank post rather than something readable. As it turns out, clicking the blue-link title of the e-mailed post takes you right to a readable post on the blogsite… but you shouldn't have to do that.  Indeed, the whole point of the e-mail delivery service is to make it easier for the readers, not create extra click-work for everybody.

Everything in this digital era seems to be an eternal work in progress, and Blogger.com -- an imperfect entity in the best of times -- is no exception. I typically write each post off-line in a word-processing program, then cut-and-paste it into Blogger, where any links can be added and the prose polished. This usually works fine, but occasionally (and for reasons I'll never understand), something gets lost in the digital translation -- namely, the written text of the post. Actually, it's there, but in black text that disappears against the black background... and the only way I've found to fix it is to switch the text color in "draft mode" to white. But that makes re-writing (which must be done in draft mode) a real pain in the ass, because the background in "draft" is also white -- and white text is just as invisible against a white background as black-on-black.

That's what happened with yesterday's post. I struggled mightily to get it right -- and readable on the actual blog page, where it looked fine -- but I didn't realize that the "follow by e-mail" feature sends out a post formatted in the draft mode... which means the text is there, but in a white-on-white format that renders it invisible.

D'oh!

Now I know.  Live and learn.

Ah well, shit happens in this world, and sometimes we step in it.  I'll endeavor to make sure that this particular brand of digital shit doesn't happen again -- and if that means writing each post on-line (as this one was), so be it. I won't like that, but there a lot of things I don't like in life. So it goes.

Onward…


* Using the "follow by e-mail" link in that little white box directly under the photo of the gloves, on the right side...