Friday, March 23, 2007

Time To Re-Tire

March 23, 2007

There used to be a print ad for old Firestone Tires, with a curly-haired child in a nightgown carrying a tire far to big for her over one shoulder and carrying a candle in a candleholder in the other hand. The tag line was a rather lame pun: "Time To Re-Tire." The child was about to go to bed, get it? She also apparently needed a new tire.

That's the kind of mind clutter you live with when you get close to being old.

As for me, I think it's time to retire my webpage. It gets few visitors, maybe 40 a month, and as far as I know it has not sold one book, which was my reason for putting it out there over a year ago. Maybe two people a month find the blog from it, but not all that many people are finding the blog either.

This is a place where my blog readers can actually help. Check out the webpage by clicking on Finding Fairhope in the "Links" section of the blog, think about it, and let me know whether or not you see any reason on earth that it should remain up. You can email me personally or comment on the blog.

So let's have it here, a first for Finding Fair Hope: Should I retire the webpage or keep it? Vote today!

13 comments:

L. said...

Even just 40 hits/month means that someone out there is getting enlightened your webpage....So, I vote: YES, YES, YES, keep it out there!

: )

Anonymous said...

I have often thought of getting rid of my own webpage, but then someone will ask whether I have one where they can see my work, or someone will say they went there... I say,keep it as long as it's not too expensive or keeping you up at night.

Anonymous said...

It's one of the two or three I visit regularly. You are never banal, always well-spoken, and frequently entertaining. I feel better, as an aspiring writer, knowing you have the pluck to post your occasional diatribes and dissertations. I like the mix of political savvy (where I think you have an uncommon ability to encapsulate large amounts of shite and rhetoric) and small-town musings, the potatoes-and-gravy mix that never lets me know exactly which is which.

Further, I think it is excellent discipline for you, and important work for you mentally even if no one read it. When I think about posting a blog myself, I never imagine that anyone will read it, but only that I have posted it and that it is there for the examining. Kind of like taking one's clothes off in front of a hotel window situated beside a freeway. Not that anyone's looking, but if they did...

And doesn't that beat watching another rerun of Oprah? Don't go, Fair Hope. Relax and see yourself as a bird of the season, part of the chorus that makes us glad we live in the south.

Anonymous said...

i second everything mellow drama said...kinda stole my thunder...but you've gotta do what you feel is right for you...just try to imagine life without the blog - a day, a week, without that chore, that responsibility, that joy...but as long as you have wonderful friends and activities to fill your life (with or without the blog) you'll be happy...the rest of us will just have to find something else to do!

Mary Lois said...

Let me try this again. I didn't say I was going to quit writing the BLOG, I said I'm thinking about taking down my WEBSITE. It's a different location designed to sell my book, but it hasn't really worked so far. It can be found by clicking on these blue letters if you don't know what I mean. The blog is still a pleasure. Sorry I wasn't clear!

Bert Bananas said...

You have a website? Hey! So do I !!

If you'll reach out and touch my URL, I'll touch your URL...

Just don't mess with this blog. See... I (gulp) need you.

There, I said it...

Anonymous said...

I might be able to find you without the blog, but to change is like a yard sale. Kinda makes me wonder or worry about clutter. Maybe other things are coming to a close also, eh. I am no blog hound, sniffing out any means to opine, but responses here have been fun. Keep it.
I have read the "Butterfly Tree", but have never visited the site.
Drop it or change it. Seems to me there's a stage play to be had from the idea of the book. Think of a beginning.....1937 .......
I'll have a look before the site is gone.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I must correct your title. It should be "Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree".

Anonymous said...

Webpage? Not blog?

Oh. Nevermind.

Sorry to you and to sinjap for over reacting. I thought a genuine crisis of reason was brewing. Rather it's just marketing. Not a dilemma of the mind, but a dilemma of the money.

And to hear you write of it, it's rather like the little girl running the lemonade stand, wondering whether or not changing her sign to blue ink would draw more customers. Go ahead and go blue, if it makes you feel better.

The blog site is just there to add legitimacy to your effort. To make your book feel more tangible in an internet world. To give the doubter an actual link when they hit on the

I say "leave it"–
Change the ink, sweet heart, add more ice, and keep smiling.

Anonymous said...

...and do what? Without knowing that I vote "No, do not stop"...and I imagine knowing "what" I may vote no as well. OK, now I see that you are talking about the website and not the blog...OK, whew. Can't remember how I originally found the website...oh wait, I found the blog first with a google blog search, I think, and not the website if that helps.

Mary Lois said...

I can see this is muddying the waters more than it is clearing everything up!

It seems most of my blog readers are not even aware of my website, and even fewer understand the reason behind either the site OR the blog. And does it matter? I guess not.

In fact, I started the blog at about the same time as I put up a website to sell Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, the book I wrote in 2001 and reprinted on my own dime a couple of years after it went out of print. The website was designed as, as "mellow drama" noted, a marketing tool for the book, and the blog was intended as a way of enhancing sales of MMABT and creating a climate of interest in a second book with a slightly less Chamber of Commerce slant on Fairhope.

After a year of blogging, I see it hasn't worked out the way I intended, but the blog became an end in itself -- a way of expressing myself through my life in Fairhope -- rather than a means to the end of selling myself as a writer. It may have achieved both. At any rate, the blog has taken on a life of its own, and rest easy, banana-man, it's here to stay.

My blog readers haven't supported the website, and many have not read MMATBT. Readers of the Finding Fairhope web page aren't buying the book.

The comments here have clearly served the ball back to my court, which is where it always belonged. If I decide to dismantle the website, it will hardly cause a blip any anybody's universe, even mine.

Unknown said...

Yhat was FISK tires slogan, fyi.

Mary Lois said...

Thanks for the correction, Hal. I had forgotten about Fisk Tires but I guess the first two letters remained in my mind.