An insidious discovery: the pernicious effects on the writer and reader of blogging.

photo by Victoria Borodinova courtesy of pixabay.com

This post is a request for feedback from readers of this blog.  I would like to know two things: first, do you see ads ever when you look at my blog posts?  I’m guessing that I have too few readers to bother with anyone placing ads here, but I need to know from you because the ads (if they are there) are invisible to me, except for a placeholder which says, “from time to time you may see ads here.”  That’s not enough for me, because one of the rules I live by is, “7.  See those things which cannot be seen [i.e. are invisible]”.  (See my post about the rules for living by Miyamoto Musashi, a world-famous medieval swordsman and author of “Five Rings”… or will I have to post the rules again?  They begin with “1. Do not think dishonestly [i.e. be honest with yourself]”.)  I have asked this question before, but never heard back from any readers, so I don’t know the answer yet.

Second, have you ever been forced to “register” with WordPress in order to read any portion of my blog posts?  This just came up when I requested a naive reader (someone who doesn’t use a computer much and never looked at my blog before) to look at one of my most recent blog posts.  They were asked to “register” with WordPress and then asked which domain name they wanted to use.  This struck me as very odd and I suspect that WordPress is trying to corral people in order to increase their advertising revenue.

I can tolerate ads (after all, that’s what “free” is, as in “ad-supported” like the Weekly Reader) but I don’t like the idea of innocent readers being forced to register with WordPress when it’s supposed to be a freely available (anonymous) web hosting portal, or whatever you want to call it.

Please tell me if you have been asked to register, and if you see any ads.

Yes, I know, it’s not as bad as smoking cigarettes or Facebook, but it’s still a time-sucker, and we have so little time left.  Tempus fugit (Time flies).