Since then I’ve been tracking these websites of interest to AIDS dissidents and updating an Excel spreadsheet every few months.  Not that I don’t have too much time on my hands, but it isn’t that difficult or time-consuming to do if you find that sort of thing entertaining.

Here is how Alexa describes what their rank means:

The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to resistanceisfruitful.com and pageviews on resistanceisfruitful.com over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1.

In other words, Google’s Alexa rank is 1; Facebook’s is 2 and so on.  Another way to think about this is that there are 6,000 websites with more traffic than the site with an Alexa rank of 6,001.

So, The New York Times’ Alexa rank is 91.  The Weather Channel is 113.  The website rank for the city of Kansas City is 279,211, while that of my home town of  Colby, Kansas is 9,156,448.

Get it?

All of these are global rankings, which means they are based on total Internet traffic data collected from a variety of sources.  Alexa also breaks down the data for some sites according to country.

Below is a list of Dissident and Dogmatist sites, sorted according to the latest global rankings from Alexa (Dogmatist sites highlighted in yellow).  I am more than just puzzled that resistance is fruitful is currently the second highest ranked AIDS dissident website, and I’ll discuss why below.

It doesn’t take much Googling to find a lot of criticism about the validity of Alexa’s ranking, as well as some black hatters wanting to sell their supposed “secrets” for gaming Alexa’s system.  Alexa, which is owned by amazon.com, defends its methods, which they update periodically to stay ahead of the bad guys.

For the record, I have never contemplated, let alone implemented any illicit code or unethical strategies to artificially inflate my blog’s rank.  I have installed the Alexa toolbar in my Firefox browser; I include a link in my signature when I comment on the web; and I promote this blog to about 150 facebook “friends”, and as a bloglet on OpenSalon, where I started posting a year and a half ago.  The last thing on my mind then was being popular.  I was coming out of a pharma-induced haze and struggling through the consequences of dealing with more than a decade of severe medical and health problems.  I just wanted to tell my story.  Blogging was therapy.  If I’d only known then what I know now!

So, what is one to think of these rankings?

First of all, take them with a grain of salt.  Lists of rankings, like the one above, can be flawed and have some weaknesses.  I don’t trust Alexa’s algorithms to know with certainty that Site A is really more popular than Site B, for example.

Systems like Alexa are more valuable for comparing a site with itself over time.  If Alexa says Site A’s traffic increased 15% last month, while Site B’s traffic declined by 55%, I think that is valid and useful information.

That is the kind of data analysis I do in an Excel spreadsheet.  With it I can sort data gathered over a period of time and see almost immediately, for example, that Heal London is growing quickly in popularity, moving up the list 28 places since last December, when House of Numbers was in the #1 position (currently #4).  The former AIDS Myth Exposed also used to rank near the top of the list until the forums there were moved to a new site called  Questioning AIDS (which I am also involved with).  QA quickly moved to the top of list of Dissident websites while AME fell like a rock off a cliff, and Treatment Information Group saw a significant bump in traffic from a domain redirect for AME.

Isn’t that all fascinating?

There is other data, some of it available at Alexa, that bloggers and webmasters should consider more important than number of clicks, or “hits”.  How many pages does a visitor read, for example.  How long does a reader spend on my site?  What percentage of hits are new visitors, versus returning guests?  I’d rather have 12 visitors a day who read several pages and spend 15 minutes here, than have 100 “hits” that take a quick glance and “bounce” off to another blog or website.

On the other hand, a site with an Alexa rank larger than a few thousand (remember, higher numbers = lower rank) is not likely to change the world, either.  And a blog toddling along at say… 6 million or so, is probably being read by friends and family.  That’s OK.  I doubt that more than a few casual bloggers do so to become famous or important, though some may try.  Most of us just want to get something off of our chests, or want to tell our personal story, or maybe share family news and photos.

The larger question I’ve been pondering is: what does it say about a community—a so-called “movement”—to be represented by a list of bloggers and websites with rankings like those above?

There are obviously a lot of people affected by AIDS in ways that can only be labeled as “questioning”, or “rethinking”, or what I am calling “dissident”.  After all, they are the bulk of the more than 70 such sites on my links page!  Still, most of these blogs barely show up on Alexa’s radar.  And the so-called “Dogmatists”, or as I prefer to call them, “anti-Dissidents”—those hardy, vocal souls who consider us a threat so grave that we should be silenced—rank pretty far down that list.

My ego would love to toot my horn and exclaim that I am significant, or at least a big fish in a small pond, but the realist in me knows better.  Others write better, are more knowledgeable and have more to say than I do.

This list tells me that AIDS dissidence, despite being around since the beginning of what has come to be called AIDS, has a very small following, but that doesn’t have to mean we are inconsequential.

Consider that arguably the largest mainstream AIDS website, The Body, with all the resources and financial backing of government grants and BigPharma advertising, manages to rank only 32,398, while similarly backed poz.com and aidsmeds.com are ranked 62,765 and 236,628 respectively.  Assuming the Alexa rankings reflect relevance in the Internet community, “AIDS” doesn’t rank that high in general, so why should I expect AIDS dissidence to be of great interest to very many people?

We are not a large community, and it is unlikely we ever will be, at least for the foreseeable future.  Basing our relevance and importance on numbers like Alexa rankings might be compared to trying to track one’s health using numbers from CD4 and so-called viral load test results—interesting, but of limited value.  There are better ways to gauge our health and there are surely better ways to judge our significance.

I choose to be content with the handful of new contacts I have made, as well as re-establishing a couple of old relationships  with others who are also simply not convinced that the AIDS mainstream has things figured out the way they’d like us to believe.

I learned a long time ago that I cannot save the world from injustice and unfairness, but that doesn’t mean there is no value in speaking out against both.  I did not get involved with AIDS Dissidence because I believe in Superman.  I do not think anyone can stop the runaway train called AIDS with their bare hands.  Nothing short of a wreck will stop it.

Some folks seem to be so deeply mired in the world of AIDS that they are unable to rise above their peer-reviewed journals and view the world as a big picture.  This tunnel vision allows them to overlook, if not protest, all of the contradictions that are ever more likely to show up in the online media.

Reports like this one from the Journal of Medical Case Reports, via Medscape.  A 28-year-old Polish woman presented at a hospital with respiratory problems, rash and ulcerations, among other things.  Doctors were ready to presumptively diagnose “Human immunodeficiency virus seroconversion syndrome complicated by Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia” until a PCR test result came back negative.

The actual disease?  Measles!  I didn’t write the headline:  Measles Mimicking HIV Seroconversion Syndrome: A Case Report, a peer reviewed journal editor determined that from reading the research.

In this case, the misdiagnosis was caught in a modern European hospital, but what would the outcome have been in a less developed part of the world, or even in a rural or community medical clinic with less capability?

Then there is this Reuters report about a supposedly deadly link between salmonella and HIV in Africa.  That’s right, the bacteria typically responsible for food poisoning and the lethal HI virus.  According to this report, researchers are puzzled to discover that HIV-positive people with salmonella did not have a suppressed immune system, but rather an excess of antibodies to salmonella.

“It’s quite a surprise and it suggests that what we are dealing with here is more of a consequence of an immune disregulation as opposed to an immune deficiency per se,” said lead researcher Cal MacLennan of the University of Birmingham.

MacLennan’s  comment is spot-on consistent with the views of Dr. Heinrich Kremer, author of The Silent Revolution in Cancer and AIDS Medicine.  Kremer is a qualified and outspoken opponent of the use of anti-retroviral drugs and a critic of the HIV theory of causation of AIDS.

I approach scientific research as a layperson.  My interest is in taking the pulse of the current state of science, as presented in the media, including, but not limited to peer-reviewed journals.  My area of interest is obviously AIDS, which I have been intimately involved with since it was called GRID.

It doesn’t take a lot of research to find these reports.  Contradiction after contradiction parade across my screen these days, courtesy of Google Reader.  Inconsistent information about AIDS was also the norm in the 1980s and 90s, when the current mainstream theory was being manufactured by the virologists.

I simple share some of the more obvious contradictions here occasionally, as well as at QuestioningAIDS and then leave it to others to draw whatever conclusions they can from this litany of inconsistencies, particularly as it pertains to AIDS.

What is almost amusing is how some of the more rabid AIDS apologists protest my posts about these questions.  It’s kind of flattering to imagine they feel threatened, but I just don’t understand why anyone would think science is immune to contradictions. Historically, contradiction has been one of the essential engines for scientific advances.

Seth Kalichman, someone named Lisa and J Todd Deshong huddle at “The Harvard Symposium”, an anti-AIDS dissident forum hastily organized last October in an attempt to counter the RethinkingAIDS 2009 Conference.
(photo from dissidents4dumbees.blogspot.com)

Is it ethical to withhold comments from rude and obnoxious haters?

Yes, I’m talking about my most active critic, Baylor Health Care System’s online AIDS diagnostician, and recently revealed Internet sleuth, J Todd Deshong.

In the comment thread for an article at a another website, Todd recently accused me of—among other things—not posting comments he has made to my blog.  I replied that I have not seen any comments from him for months.

It turns out that we are both right, and I need to provide some background to explain.

A couple of months ago, Todd posted content from my blog on his anti-AIDS dissident blog, dissidents4dumbees.  Problem is, he failed to properly attribute the source of that content by providing a link to it, despite my request that he do so.  In fact, he has never posted a link to resistanceisfruitful, though he has mentioned me fairly frequently lately.

It should be obvious to anyone who has followed my blog that there is no love lost between Todd and me.  Todd has posted numerous nasty unflattering and dishonest comments and posts about me and other AIDS dissidents on his blog.  It would be fair to say I am one of a handful of AIDS dissidents that he is fixated on, and I am guilty of having taken him to task here a couple of times too.

As if having his own blog is not enough, Todd has also abused the comments feature of my blog by trying to make off-topic and inflammatory remarks—a trademark of his blog.  Unlike Todd, I have had some journalism and editorial experience and I understand why it is acceptable to have standards for publication.

His failure to be a good netizen by properly attributing source material on his blog (another source on that subject here), particularly when requested to do so, irked me so much that I marked one of Todd’s off-topic comments here as spam, rather than just deleting it.  My automated spam service then took the initiative to send all subsequent comments from him to the spam folder, which I rarely look at.

From my perspective there is a certain poetic justice in this.  There are consequences to our conduct, and Todd has found that out.  I did not realize what happened until Todd brought the matter to my attention today, and in hindsight I should have known better than to think Todd just “went away”.  That is definitely not his style.

Unlike Todd, I have always provided links to his blog when writing about him.  It’s the right thing to do and there’s no reason to deny my readers that information.  They are smart enough to decide what to think for themselves.

Personally, I think he does the cause of AIDS dissidence more good than harm.  He is so bombastic that it almost hurts to read his posts.  The catty, dishy queen in him may or may not be a learned stereotype, but it does remind me of some other bitter gay men I have known.

I also get a bit of a kick out of seeing his website ranking (more on that below) jump whenever I blog about him, though it doesn’t always last.

I have been thinking about whether or not to approve Todd’s “comments” but my own bitchy side feels more like tit for tat right now.  Hey, I’m only human too.  Showing some good faith would go a long way with me, but I’m not holding my breath, especially since Todd just posted yet another fabricated tale about me working for the IRS and threatening him with an audit!

Search engines love links and sites that use them.  Search engines and the people who use them seek out sites with content, integrity and credibility… words that Todd also likes to throw around, but doesn’t really understand very well.  Failing to link sources speaks volumes about his own insecurity, and how little he trusts his readers to read the source material he is pontificating about for themselves.

Posting links is not only the right thing to do, it might just be good for his blog.

For example, global Internet reach the past 3 months for our two blogs, per the web information company Alexa as of today (in this case, smaller numbers are better):

dissidents4dumbees – 4,312,123 (more than 4 million websites get more hits than d4d)

resistanceisfruitful -      421,018 (less than 1/2 million websites get more hits than rif)

I’m a geek and I track stuff like this, so I just happen to know that I am one of the best things to happen to Todd, whether he knows it or not.  His rank improves every time I write about him.  You would think he would be more grateful for all I’ve done to promote his provocative, if not intellectually dishonest blog.

Speaking of numbers, during the same three month period, my readers viewed nearly 8 pages per visit, compared to Todd’s 2.2.  Visitors to resistanceisfruitful spent an average of 17.9 minutes on my site, compared to 4.9 minutes at Todd’s.

Just sayin’.

UPDATE May 14, 2010

After a good night’s sleep, I’ve decided to post most of Todd’s comments, though I reserve the right to moderate my own personal space in the future.  I don’t mind criticism, but if Todd cannot make his point in two or three comments, it’s time for him to utilize his own blog, which I have provided generous and abundant links to.

I did have to delete two of Todd’s comments because they were completely off-topic and/or libelous.  I have a responsibility as a publisher to exercise some judgment.

UPDATE II May 31, 2010

While I was out of town visiting my mum this past week, Todd spammed my blog with seven new comments in three days, and he has written a new defamatory post dedicated to me on his own blog.

True to form, most of his comments were off-topic, or personal attacks and name-calling, along with a good measure of flat-out untruthfulness.  For example, Todd asserts that I work for the IRS and am stalking him from government computers there.  This outrageous and unfounded statement reeks of clinical paranoia (not that I’m qualified to make that diagnosis, but according to wikipedia….).

Since Todd has his own blog space which I have generously linked to above, there is no good reason to post his bile and venom here on my blog.

However, in an effort to be as fair as possible, I am posting many of those comments, despite the fact that they violate my personal sense of propriety and good taste.  The name-calling is particularly unnecessary and onerous.

Some blogs thrive on lengthy back-and-forth arguments in the comments sections.  This is not one of them.  Most people lose interest pretty quickly and the debate ultimately devolves to personalities, rather than substance.  I do expect that I will ultimately ban J Todd Deshong, but I will publish enough of his comments to help the average reader understand why I eventually lose patience with him.

While surfing the poz.com website this morning, I clicked on a link to their sister site, aidsmeds.com and got this warning from my computer’s anti-virus program:

uh oh... a computer virus from aidsmed.com?!

For the record:  I do believe it is a good idea to practice safer-surfing practices and to always use protection online.

That is exactly what happened this weekend though.

There is a page on my blog called “the graveyard”, a list of dead friends that I published as a response to those who claimed that every time an AIDS dissident died it was because they chose to not take the so-called “AIDS cocktail” of drugs.

The graveyard includes this photo montage I created of eight close friends who died while faithfully taking their ARVs.

As you can see, I’ve superimposed a skull-and-crossbone image over their faces to make a statement about the lethal effects of the drugs they took.

Provocative?  I hope so.  Shocking?  Maybe to some.  Disrespectful?  Never.  This is a graphic illustration intended to make a point.  I admit I was nervous when I first posted it and have even taken it offline for brief periods.  I have living friends who also knew these friends.  What would they think?  So far, not a single one of them has protested to me about the imagery, even though I’m sure some of them disagree with me.

A couple of days ago J Todd DeShong, a blogger apparently supported by Baylor Health Care System of Dallas, decided to repost this image out of its original context to attack me.  DeShong’s blogspot blog has a notorious reputation for posting some of the most vile and malicious commentary about publicly identified AIDS dissidents to be found on the web.

If it was disrespectful for me to create a photo montage of friends I had partied with and known intimately, what does one call the action of a person who did not even know them to repost this image as part of a slimy personal attack?

The first word that comes to mind is copyright infringement, something DeShong apparently has no regard for.  Even the lamest blogger knows that when one lifts an image from another site, it must be attributed with a link back to the original source so readers can view it in its original context.  Deshong has denied me that basic right, even though I’ve politely requested it.

That is the least of my concerns though.

J Todd DeShong: you can call me any name you’d like; you can continue to lie about my disability status and sources of income; you can continue to misrepresent my involvement in the creation of the Questioning AIDS website; you can claim I tried to cost you your job, even though it was you who violated your company’s policy.

But, by defiling the graves of people who have nothing to do with our disagreement, you have shown just how despicable and shameless you really are.

Anyone reading your blog, and the comments of your supporters will see you for the sad, miserable creature you are.  I don’t hate you, but I do pity you.

Many of my dissident friends will probably wish I had not made this post, and perhaps it is a mistake to do so, but my friends’ memories won’t permit me to remain silent.

DeShong really is a bit player in the AIDS dissident debate.  His blog barely shows up in any rankings, and my post will only help give him more attention, something he obviously craves.

On the other hand, DeShong is popular with some of the leaders of the anti-AIDS dissident movement, including “snout”, “poodlestomper”, and he is now best friends with Seth Kalichman and other AIDS cheerleaders who are single-mindedly devoted to discrediting and smearing anyone questioning AIDS dogma.  They love his style and support him with frequent comments.

Those who are following the AIDS dissidence issue from the sidelines would do well to read DeShong’s blog and even more importantly, the comments from his fellow “anti-denialists”.

While a debate should stand on its own merits, it never hurts to discern the personas behind the arguments as well.

I’ve written previously about my earliest experience with computers in the 1970s, while still in high school, where I advocated for the first computer programming course at Colby High School.  We ran our simple Basic programs from punch cards on a mainframe 100 miles away, and we had to drive there in a car to do so!  So much for digital efficiency.

Since then I’ve taken some classes to learn Visual Basic and C++, but quickly decided I didn’t want to spend a lot of my time writing code.  Still, it’s nice to have an idea of what is actually going on behind the screens. When I was started editing a regional gay newspaper in the 1980s and 90s we used Word for DOS, dial-up telephone modems (we had to upgrade the phone lines for a touch tone system), and bulletin boards (BBS) to transmit news reports across the state and eventually from around the country.

I barely remember now how complex and alien all of that seemed at the time:  bitrates and protocols and drivers, oh my!  Still, I learned what I needed to learn to bring information to people who were otherwise isolated or felt separated from their own community.

By 2000, my major foray into the corporate world resulted in the title of “database specialist”, though my job was in the Marketing Department.  I had the best (and worst) of the two most coveted departments in most companies:  IS and Marketing.  My job was to make the company look as good as possible without blatantly lying.  Exaggerating chart curves in Excel by changing the axis range, for example.

I also quickly picked up the arcane workings of GeoAccess, a program used to plot distances and map potential members in relationship to the plan’s providers. My job was secured when I could print impressively colored maps that in reality said very little about our company’s ability to provide medical services, if you ask me.

Lately, when I’m not playing with the puppies or helping friends, I’m blogging, tracking website growth in particular areas of interest or learning about some of the latest cool web development tools.

It was pretty easy to understand how numbers and codes can be stored in a database and “queried” to present reports, or to drive other projects.  We did that in our high school projects.

I also understand pretty well how the text for news reports were stored in data files and later placed graphically in a logical pattern on the pages of a newspaper. Photos and images are simply an arrangement of dots on a white space, so the transition to a digital format is a straightforward one.

Even this blog is stored in a database “out there” somewhere and I keep backup files on a little disk on my desk in front of me (in case you’re a hacker).

Numbers, text and pictures.  I get that.

What is on my mind is something I’ve had to think about before.  How did irrational and emotional human beings like us ever develop and then fall so deeply in love with rational technology, especially computers?

This line of thinking has come to a head lately as I have also spent some time this  past year serving as a moderator at a discussion forum that can get pretty heated at times.  I have also been observing how individuals interact with an online community:  others who they have never met personally and are not likely to do so in their lifetime.  It’s not always pretty.

What struck me as I was responding to a member’s recent question about a significant move at the forum, was how nearly ten years of debate and conversations… anger and joy…  frustrations and resolutions… were stored as ones and zeros (data bits) that could be moved around the globe in a few heartbeats. I find the work of integrating the digital with the human psyche fascinating, rewarding, and on days like yesterday, just a bit frightening.

Online blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Blogger, and social networking sites like facebook have made blogging quite the simple task for many people.  Unless you are exceedingly lucky though, getting the attention you deserve may require some additional effort.

I’ve always had an interest in technology, particularly computers.  About 1970 or so, I recruited two other conspirators as freshmen to convince our math teacher, Mr. Perkins, to sponsor Colby High School’s first computer programming class.

We’d write our Basic programs and then drive 100 miles to Fort Hays State University to have them converted to punch cards and run on the only mainframe in Western Kansas.

More recently I’ve been satisfying my geek by playing with blogging and content management platforms, like Joomla and WordPress, and learning how one gets attention in this increasingly crowded space call the Internet.

No one seems to even know how many blogs actually exist. The best I could find in Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” series were estimates ranging from 22.6 to 26.4 million blogs started in the U.S. and an astounding 184 million worldwide.

Like many other people who blog for personal satisfaction, I am interested in knowing as much as possible about my readers, where they come from, how much time they spend reading my blog posts and which posts get the most “hits”. Most blogging platforms offer some form of statistical reporting, but there are even more options are available for self-hosted blogs.

One service that just about anyone can use to find out how their blog or website ranks on the www is called Alexa, which is owned by Amazon.com. Just type in your blog or website’s URL (address) and Alexa will tell you how they think you rank.  Alexa is not perfect in the way it ranks websites, but it is more accessible and easier to use than some of the other ranking services, which are also imperfect.  Besides, while I am curious about comparative rankings with other sites, I’m most interested in how my site compares to its previous history, or trending, which Alexa is pretty good at.

Note:  due to the way they are constructed, some blogging platforms, including OpenSalon, only return Alexa results for the entire platform (Alexa rank: 1,897), rather than the ranking for individual blogs.

When my blog was on wordpress.com last year, Alexa ranked it at 8 million plus. In the Alexa ranking system, the lower the number, the more traffic a site gets.  The busiest site on the web, for example, is google.com, so it gets the number 1, followed by facebook (I know, I can’t believe it either) at #2, and so on.  In December there were some 8 million websites with more traffic than my own.

Depressing, huh?

When I move my blog to a self-hosted server around the first of the year I expected a drop in traffic, but instead it almost immediately jumped to 3 million-something, and has been steadily climbing since then.

A self-hosted blog allows the use of add-ons, plugins and widgets that can enhance the attractiveness of one’s website for search engines.  This is known as SEO, which stands for search engine optimization.

Just a couple of weeks later my blog’s Alexa ranking is now up to 1,722,713 (ranking likely to change by the time this is read).

For perspective, the website for my home town of Colby, Kansas, with a population of about 5,000, is ranked at a lowly 15,671,140. The local Kansas City gay rag, Camp, ranks 2,022,851, and Alexa give the local alternative arts and news publication, the Pitch a pretty amazing rank of 54,614.

Needless to say, I am quite happy to see this kind of improvement in such a short period of time.

As I said earlier, blogging is pretty easy to do nowadays… getting an audience takes more than just writing.

UPDATE 1/20/2010 1/24/2010 3/8/2010:  The blog ranking continues to improve and is currently 1,383,003 1,245,836 567,472!

As much as I love the tattoo on my shin (ouch!), it just never translated as well as I wanted for a graphic I could use online… until now. This new look incorporates the substance and intent of the original, while presenting a fresher, cleaner look than a morphed photo of my leg can offer.

It also gives me an opportunity to change the colors used on my blog to something other than purple.

Please check out Gordon’s line of bells here, and his personal blog here.

Thank you brother! This is a really nice improvement to the look and feel of this place!

It’s been a rough weekend for blogging.

My blog hosting service, ixwebhosting.com, moved my blog to an upgraded server, which is a good thing.  When this process is done it takes 48 to 72 hours to “propagate” across the web.  This is not so good.

What this means is that my blog has been inaccessible for a day or two.

Sorry ’bout that.  Hopefully everything is fixed now.

It is very interesting to observe how some of us have been changed by technology and the Internet, and not always for the better.

I started getting reports a couple of days ago from facebook users that they were receiving error messages or experiencing other weird browser behavior when clicking on my blog link there.  Some of these reports ended with the question: “am I doing something wrong?”

Apparently we are now conditioned to think if something doesn’t work it must be our fault.  In this case that simply wasn’t so.  The problem is no doubt in some setting I have made in the blog design, or perhaps on one of the servers that hosts my domain.  Even more likely there is something wrong with the way NetworkedBlogs, a facebook application, is messing with the links in an attempt to keep everyone at the facebook domain.

I know just enough technologically about what I’m doing here to be dangerous.  I have a pretty good “big picture” of the various involved processes, but admit I lack indepth knowledge about many of the finer details.  The way things are built online today a user doesn’t have to understand the bytes and bit to build a pretty cool website or blog.

Still, I know enough to be able to tell that some web applications work rationally and are user friendly:  WordPress, Joomla and google all come to mind.  Then there are those web processes that live on the other site of the track in a neighborhood called Irritation:  facebook has a corner lot there.

I have already removed the facebook badge from my blog once I discovered how badly it slowed things down.  I’m already running enough widgets and plugins as it is and pity any visitor who is still using a dial up connection (Hi Tom!)  I am unwilling to give up  on facebook, the Net’s second busiest address (google is #1) yet.  I get too much of my blog traffic from friends there.

Troubleshooting is difficult because I do not always see my site the same way my readers do.  I use Firefox, for example, but you may be using Chrome, or Safari or that other browser that I can’t bring myself to name publicly.  Every browser can display certain elements of web pages differently.

I have cookies enabled on my computer, and have passwords stored so I don’t have to remember them all.  I may be able to see protected content without even knowing it is being blocked to others.

All of these things make my life easier, but they also be work against me when it comes to troubleshooting.

What can you do about it?  Talk to me!  Report any problems via comments, please.  I really do appreciate it.

Is this site still is under construction?

YIKES!  I think and hope that I may have just redirected my blog from wordpress.com to my own domain.

If successful, this move will not affect any regular readers, but you should note the new URL, update your browsers’ favorites, bookmarks, or whatever you call them.

Secondly, hit one of the “subscribe” buttons in the frame on the right.  Even if you subscribed at the other site, do it again here, just in case.  You wouldn’t want to miss a post, right?

Check out the drop-down features and please tell me if the rotating “feature posts” are distracting, or make the place look “too busy”.  Also let me know what you think about any other aspect of the new digs.  I already know the color is rather “bright”.  It hasn’t been easy to color-coordinate with my “somos uno” logo/avatar.

This is exciting in a way only the geekier among you might understand.  I continue to learn and to grow in this technological world.  Should I call that exciting?  Or frightening?!

You tell me.  Comments are open (and yes, moderated).