Summertime, and the “Weblogging” Ain’t Easy

Ah, it’s summertime. Or, as resident(s) of Buffalo, NY know it, the Great Thaw. Everyone dons their seersucker pants, clutches their mint juleps, and sits on their rocking chairs, watching the day pass into night. Either that or they sweat to death.

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” must admit that, in our humble experience, “weblogging” in the summer isn’t the bucket of roses you might think it to be. In fact, we’ve routinely found the summer months the sleepiest, least interesting time in the “weblogging” year.

For one, in the dog days of summer our “hits” tend to get lower than Courtney Love. Apparently, people are off sunning and funning. If they’re going to spend time on the beach, it’s much easier to clutch the obligatory copy of The Da Vinci Code than your laptop. After all, it’s really tough to get Coppertone out of your keyboard. A week at a Nerd Resort may teach you nothing else, but it’ll teach you that.

Now, to be sure, our comparatively light e-traffic can also be attributed to the sorry state of our “trackback” apparatus. It seems as if our “trackbacks” work about as much as the average Frenchman—that is to say, seldom, and often with griping. As such, if you desire to “trackback” to one of our humble animadversions, you’ll have about as much fun “sharing the hate” as you would “sharing the love” at a NAMBLA rally. Which is to say, we hope, not much at all.

Still, this technical difficulty with “trackbacks” appears to be a recurring plague for our Official Technical Difficulty Department, and thus we can’t blame it for our summer lag. But we’d like to: After a few years on Al Gore’s Internet, we feel we have the requisite experience to shudder at our lowly status in the (admittedly unreliable) Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem.

We mean, come on: This was previously the land of the “Marauding Marsupial”! How far have the mighty fallen! It was bad enough when we had to read the ungrammatical tag “I’m a Adorable Rodent” at the bottom of our “webpage.” But now? We’d kill be a rat, for crying out loud.

Perhaps there’s an upside to our June through August unpopularity. Maybe this means that our humble “weblog” attracts the academic crowd, which is busy during its summers avoiding the work it doesn’t do during the year.

Did we say that this was an upside?