The Real Peeps Of The Haps With Herb And I Ain’t Talkin’ Marshmallow Chickens

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22243 – 773:

Here’s the haps:

This is one of the posts I had started but it sat languishing in my drafts folder. Until now.

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I have some of the smartest and sharpest followers on the Internet. It’s kind of humbling really, to know that well-educated, even highly-educated people come here and read my offerings. It makes me feel like I want to do the best I can and make each post a quality offering. This was one of the reasons I quit trying to maintain a streak of posting something every day. I didn’t think three lines of me apologizing for not doing a better post because I was out of time for that day was really worth anybody reading. Maybe once in a while but as my schedule grew and changed constantly I realized I needed to change.

I have, as regular readers will know, at times, been pretty vocal in my criticism of WordPress and the WordPress Reader but I have to say there is a feature they have that I think is really cool. Depending on your settings, you can get an e-mail saying, “So and So liked your post [insert post name here] and thought it was pretty awesome. You should go and see what they’re up to.” Then it links to a couple of random posts by your “Liker.” Well, there are a number of blogs I read that I just like. I don’t have a comment to leave very often for various reasons but I read the post and liked it just the same. Well, when a couple of people get that message they actually do click on the link and are taken to a random post and they click “like” to show that they read it. Some of the pieces are 15 years old and I don’t always remember them myself which causes me to have to go back and re-read them. Some of it’s the merest of drivel and kind of embarrassing to look at now but some of it is surprisingly good. My younger sister (if you will remember, she’s the classy one in our tribe) has gone back to the very beginning and read every post. And she’s not the only one. But they don’t always click “like” or leave a comment so I wouldn’t really know they’ve been there.

I’ve written before about the whole “like” thing on WordPress, which you’d kind of have to be on the platform to really understand, but of the “likes” and “followers” I think it’s a small percentage, maybe up to 25%, of my internet followers who are actually real people. And I appreciate the exchange of ideas as well as the outpourings of support. I really do like comments from real people and the interactions. There are real people in cyberland who follow my blog and I appreciate you and you know who you are.

I also know real-live, physical people have been here because they come up and talk to me about things I write sometimes. And while I do like comments left on the blog, (I really, really do), there’s something special about it when someone comes up to you and says, “I was reading your blog last night and…?” Or when one of the teachers at the Church school my grandkids go to had forgotten to flip a switch so her screen was still up where the kids could see it and my grandson said, “Hey! You read my grandpa’s blog? Cool!” The other day my friend at church came up to me and said, “I was telling my wife about your blog the other night. We were driving along and listening to that very same radio station you wrote about and I was telling her about that song and just as I started saying the name of it, it came on the radio!” Made me laugh. Those are just a few examples of my real, real peeps.

I appreciate you all. Even the vitamin and real estate people with the fake blogs.