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Loyal readers have probably noticed that there have been some changes here at www.innerswine.com. While I tried very hard to maintain the garish, eyestrain-inducing color scheme and layout of the site—long cherished, I don't doubt, by one and all—I have adopted a nifty open-source PHP script called Text Rider to be the secret engine behind the scenes. Prior to this that engine was me, running like a trained hamster inside the HTML wheel. Text Rider lets me automate a few things and make maintaining this site a little easier. Since Text Rider was originally designed to be used on a Blog site, it also allows me to have a Comments feature. Yes—look closely at all the entries on this site and you'll see the “Comments” link under each headline. Click it and you'll be transported to the magical realm of Comments, where you—yes, you, Plebian!—can communicate with the lofty, all-powerful webmaster here—that is, me. In theory, this is great. Whereas before you had to fire up your email program and send me a potentially-traceable SMTP bomb in order to tell me how much I suck, now all you do is click one link and bam! The joy of anonymous tirades is all yours. You and I can expand our experience and understand each other better as we discuss The Inner Swine and its Sinister Web Presence in detail—excruciating detail! We can talk about my tendency towards run-on sentences, my misuse of Em Dashes, my sadly limited personal experience—why, all sorts of things! Or you could just hurl anonymous insults at me from across the digital divide and see how far you have to push my buttons before I simply delete all your comments. All of these possibilities are better than the other option: That no one bothers to leave comments. Ever. The one thing you never want to do with your web site is suggest that you have less than multitudes clamoring to view it. Most people with their own web sites will be, at a minimum, kind of cagey about the actual visitor stats, using the time-tested techniques of either deliberate ignorance of the difference between overall hits and unique IPs. Say you got two unique hits over the past six months, and you suspect one of those is you, obsessively clicking on your own URL. When someone asks you how many hits you get, do you cheerfully admit probably one, and possibly none? No. You perform some magical calculations in the darkness of your mind and announce that something like eleventy billion people have visited your site—accuracy being impossible with such large numbers. The illusion of popularity is a longstanding tradition here at The Inner Swine, where there has never been any true popularity, even when I was a child. The “Comments” feature could become a cold wind blowing through Camp Levon, friends. If every day I glance at the web page and discover exactly zero people were moved to leave a comment, I'll start assuming no one is reading this web site, and that'll have some unwanted consequences believe me. There are really only two possible reactions to zero comments that I'm capable of, depending on how liquored up I am: 1. Uncontrolled weeping, and boozy drunk-dialing to random people on my mailing list, demanding in a breathy voice to know why no one loves me or 2. Begin a stealth campaign to simply fake comments, using various names and implied regional accents, to the extent of writing brief biographies of my “fans” and getting them involved in mean-spirited arguments with each other. 3. Removal of the offending comments links in a fit of childish pique. Those of you who know me best know that neither is more likely than the other, because the most likely possibility is the shadowy option 4, which is a delightful combination of reactions 1 and 3, probably all conducted in a breathy Capote-esque voice that slowly loses its consonant sounds as the bourbon bottle gets shorter, until eventually I am just hooting and wailing like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. Still, I'll leave the comments active for a while just to see what happens. I'll be loading my own web page approximately five hundred times a day here at work for the foreseeable future, praying for that tiny number next to the word COMMENTS to change, and feigning complete indifference if it doesn't and then slinking off to the bathroom to nip out of my hip flask and mutter, which will in turn get building security called on me which will in turn land me in my boss' office again for a lecture about Not Scaring the Other Employees and Please For God's Sake Put on Some Pants yada yada yada. Some of the unkind amongst you might wonder if I'll be so welcoming of comments once you get done leaving terrible insults and meanspirited jibes there. The answer is: Yes. I'd rather have people calling me names than have no proof of my corporeal existence at all. Besides, this is The Inner Swine, me hardys. If I didn't have meanspirited jibes from people, I wouldn't have anything. Until next time, then, for god's sake, have pity on a soul and leave me some comments.
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November 6, 2005