I'm going on a 'holiday'. Or to use another euphemism, I'm going to spend some time at 'self-improvement camp', which means I will not be personally able to update the compost heap for the next 30 days. I won't lie, this problem has bugged me. It has probably bugged me a lot more than it should (in my skewed worldview the blog is one of my main priorities when, really, there are other far more important things). 30 days is a long time in blogging. I've never let this site lie fallow for an entire month. It's scary. If I close my eyes, I can see my followers leaving in droves (ok, maybe a 'drove' - we're talking double digits here, in fairness), lured by snazzily laid out content farms that keep their promises and finish every list they start.
30 days.
In blogging that's equivalent to the time-span between the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras, which is apt because my ancient templates (not to mention my clumsy attempts to sync with Facebook) make the 'heap is a bit of a scaly devolved specimen of its type anyway. By the time I get back from band camp Google might have changed the locks or, worse, all my posts will be converted to Chinese text, ads for strange pharmaceuticals, work from home opportunities, and these things ððððððððð.
Look! It's only all the baddies out of Megaman. For no real reason, like.
So what to do?
Sorry, I meant to say so what to do? Option A is to stick it out in the wilderness and hope that I still have readers when I come back. Wishful thinking - it will never work. Not because the blog might shed followers, but because I will go zany animal cracker mental to the point of distraction while fretting about it not updating for a month. It will be like an itch I can't scratch. It will drive me proper nuts. Like eyball-rolling, mouth-foaming, underpants-around-my-ankles-while-pooping-on-the-floor-near-where-the-kinder-eggs-are-in-tesco nuts.
Which is why I've come up with an option B. I'm going to queue up a few short posts to publish as if by magic at regular intervals in my absence, thereby creating the illusion that everything is whirring away as it should, whereas (and this can be our little secret regular readers who haven't just clicked through from the hype machine - oh hype machine, I love and hate your faceless churn of MP3 grabbing lurkers in equal measure) the truth is that for November this will really be a ghostly parody of Asleep on the Compost Heap, mechanistically updating itself because its absent owner is too neurotic to give it a break. Think of it as being a bit like Celia Ahern's epoch-defining chick lit novel P.S. I Love You where the woman continues to get soppy letters from her lover after he snuffs it. Except even better (he never sent her MP3s, did he now?).
Last night I went to bed after formulating option B and quickly sank into what I thought was the sleep of our Lord's own blessed blogger. Like fuck it was. I woke up in a crippled sweat. What about comment moderation? If I leave my blog to update itself like a craftily constructed Turing machine, then it stands to reason that people who comment will expect to see their comments published and to receive responses (hi Tad! hi Lucewoman! hi other interchangeable bonus commenter I get every couple of weeks), especially if they see new posts appear after said comments are submitted. I can't leave my comments unmoderated because they will turn into a chinese pharmaceutical bunga bunga party, yet I can't leave comments unpublished because people will think I'm a creep. It took a half hour of breathing exercises and a post-midnight peanut butter bap before the answer hit me. Storkboy! All I have to do is make him an administrator and he can moderate the comments. He can even respond to them if he feels like it. He just might post the odd thing himself too (don't hold your breath though, he's had this privilege since 2007).
And that's pretty much the plan. In the true spirit of the compost heap, the posts that will mysteriously appear in my absence will be linked together by a gimmick. This gimmick, of course, will be a list. At the time of writing the list remains unfinished, and unfortunately I cannot guarantee its completion. It's another one of those 30 day memes - 30 days of drawings, or to give it a less misleading title, 30 days of hasty doodles in biro. Each drawing will come with an MP3 and a few words. The MP3 and words will of course have nothing to do with the drawing. That would be hard work. Just like any attempt to link the MP3 below with the text above would be hard work too.
MP3: The Tough Alliance-
Neo Violence
See yis on the flipside of November.
