At seventeen: another Whirled blogaversary

Janis Ian learned the truth at seventeen. Abba's dancing queen was young and sweet, only seventeen. When Frank Sinatra was seventeen, it was a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights and apparently all kinds of hanky-panky that required hiding away from city lights. The girl whom John Lennon saw standing there, who made his heart go boom and caused him to vow never to dance with another, was just seventeen, you know what I mean. Lady Godiva, according to Peter & Gordon, was seventeen when she made a ride that caused a scene. And that barely scratches the surface of songs about being seventeen years old.

Those, of course, are all songs about people being seventeen years old. But blogs can have birthdays too, and today happens to be the seventeenth birthday of Whirled Musings, which was launched on July 27, 2006.

Seventeen trips around the sun is a long, long time in Internet years. That I continue, month after month, year after year, to post new content to a blog that almost nobody reads is, if nothing else and (as I may have mentioned a few times), a tribute to my own obsessiveness.

Nevertheless I've marked the birthday/anniversary/blogaversary every year here, sometimes with a brief mention and other times offering a more extended rumination about the history and purpose of this endeavor. Regarding said history and purpose, I have said pretty much everything that I think needs to be said, and don't feel compelled to say it all again, but for anyone who's curious, this page tells it all.

In my rare moments of introspection specifically about Whirled Musings, and the wisdom or lack thereof of continuing to indulge in this hobby, I inevitably return to the years-old debate about whether people even still read blogs at all. (Apparently they do. Just not this one, if my blog stats are any indication.)

Some of the debate about the relevance of blogs and blogging focuses on Blogger, aka blogspot, of which this blog is but one of zillions. For years, various people urged me to ditch Blogger and go to Wordpress. And these days, it seems, everyone is hanging out on Substack. But I'm just going to stay here for now, coasting along in perpetual obscurity.

Which means that I'll continue to write my posts, even though both Blogger's owner Google and Google's closest rival, Bing, ignore my content for the most part.

I'll also continue creating tawdry graphics for most of my posts, even though image search has become an exercise in frustration for me, where this blog is concerned. F'rinstance, type in "Trump is the New Moses" in either Google or Bing images and even if you add Whirled Musings to the search field, you won't get this graphic, which I created for my July 22 post about Sound Of Freedom star and Q true believer Jim Caviezel shamelessly kissing up to the Cantaloupe Caligula. This despite the fact that the title of that graphic is Trump-is-the-New-Moses.jpg.

Clearly, my prodigious lack of SEO skills cannot keep up with changing algorithms.

And there's no doubt that those algorithms have indeed changed, which is to be expected. For a few years running, I would mark the Whirled blogaversary with a graphic created from a screen shot of Google image search results for Whirled Musings. But the last time that worked was two years ago, when the Whirled turned fifteen. Now an image search doesn't present a panoply of images that I labored diligently to create, and that I posted to Whirled Musings. Most of the images are completely irrelevant or at best only marginally relevant to this blog, no matter how I tweak the search parameters.

If I sound a bit whiny, there's a good reason for that: I am whining. Over the years I've snarked plenty about whiners, both in Scamworld and in politix, but in all of that time I've never claimed not to be a whiner myself. Takes one to know one.

In any case, I want to thank my three or four, or possibly even five, regular readers for your continued reading over the years, even when I got redundant and obsessive and boring, which, as I noted on my last two anniversary posts, is probably more often than even I am willing to admit. I especially want to thank everyone who posted comments over the years, even the ones blasting me for various offenses.

And as always, I am very grateful to those of you who have made monetary donations to this blog. They're always appreciated, even more so now. If you'd like to help Whirled Musings celebrate its seventeenth birthday, here's a handy link to do just that. There's also a "Donate" graphic/link on the upper right-hand column of the Web version of this blog. Whether you donate or not, thank you for visiting.