An Open letter to MIE Readers +

Annamaria on Monday

If you subscribe to our blog, we are sure you noticed that functioning here on MIE went kaflooey for a while.  We are almost back to normal, but we want you to know what happened, and what you may need to do to manage your subscription.

I am not the resident techie here.  Stan is.  But at this moment, he is either on a plane, preparing to board a plane, or helping people my height get their baggage out of the overhead compartment  as they prepare to "deplane" (as flight attendants used to say).  So I am going to try to explain MIE's recent turmoil.

A few months ago, your faithful MIE bloggers noticed that we were having trouble commenting on the posts at all, but especially in responding to comments posted by one of you.  Sometimes, comments disappeared while we were typing them.  Sometimes, Blogger wouldn't let us write a comment at all.

Shortly thereafter, suddenly, subscribers (including us) no longer received notifications of new posts or comments.  Our lovely user-friendly atmosphere became frustrating in the extreme.

Not surprisingly, we noticed a drop in our readership.  And a severe drop in the number of comments from you.  We talked it over behind the scenes and started to investigate what had happened.

My theory is that Google's Blogger engineers were reprogramming the software to comply with the EU's new privacy regulations.  (Cranky aside:  there is no such thing as privacy on the Internet.  Attempts made supposedly to provide privacy are a smokescreen meant to quell the general public's outrage/fear/mild curiosity about the loss of privacy--something that faded with invention of credit cards, greatly diminished when CC records went on computers, and evaporated completely with the development of the Internet.)

A number of us MIE bloggers went on line to try to find out what was going on.

Google's Blogger site offered explanations, which unfortunately were written in a rare Tibetan dialect of Gobbledygook.  Using terms that looked strangely like English: G+ widget integrations, localization, Blogspot ccTLDS, and Third Party Gadgets.

I cleared my cookies (all but the chocolate chip ones) but that didn't help much at all.

Finally, Caro's significant other--Alan--came to our rescue.  No thanks to Google, he worked out that he had to re-enter the list of email addresses from our subscriber list.  Then--you may have noticed--we all bloggers and readers received confirmation emails allowing us to confirm our subscriptions.  We hope you said yes to that.  We did.

So now, we are almost back where we were in the good old days of 2017.

If you want notifications of new blog posts and are not getting them, up at the top here, to the right of the title there is box where you can put in your email address.  If you want to see the comments as they come along, in the column to the right, under "Followers" is a Blue "Follow" button.  Click on that and you can sign up for notifications of the commentary.

Here are some images to thank you for sticking with us through this rather bumpy transition.  We didn't do it to you on purpose, and we are grateful (ESPECIALLY to Alan) that it is over and you are still here.