A Disturbance In The Force

To paraphrase Darth Vader, “I detect a disturbance in the gun blogger force.”

That disturbance in the force is because Frank W. James – Farmer Frank – of Corn, Beans, Spent Brass, An Empty Page and A Deadline has decided to hang it up after four years. The frustrations he felt with the constraints of Blogger and some of their new “features” was too much for him. He made the announcement on Tuesday in his final post.

I’ve never made a dime off this blog, so by my father’s estimation it has had zero commercial value and my time was wasted……UNLESS I enjoyed it.

And I did for a long time, for over 4 years in fact, but due to the changes being made in the software that Blogger is now putting forth, I no longer enjoy it. In fact, this damn thing has become work.

Work that has zero value because Dad was right, I’m not getting paid anything for it, so it has had no value.

The alternatives in my view are worse because in just about all the acceptable (to me in terms of usage rules) cases I will have to spend money to do this nonsense which means by Dad’s reasoning my ‘work’ would have less than ‘zero’ value. It would have a negative value solely for ‘vanity’ purposes. That’s pretty lame and it’s not going to happen.

So, after approximately 480,000 visits and 626,000 page views over just 4 years of duration, this blog experiment has come to an end.

I’m glad I got to meet Frank at the recent NRA Annual Meeting. I know I will miss his blog. He promises to do guest blogging in the future for movie and book reviews. I plan to take him up on that offer as I am sure will a number of other bloggers.

It is a damn shame that in the effort to make things “better”, technology companies often ruin a decent product. I still can do more with MS Word 2003 than their 2007 version, I’m still not enamored with the Facebook timeline, and, like Frank, I don’t really care for the “new” version of Blogger. As my grandma used to muse, “Such as life.”