Posted 8:38 PM by Angie Schultz

A Note to My Readers

It has come to my attention that many of you -- if not most of you -- do not exist. I discovered this last week when I wrote my post about the book signing. This post required some fancy style sheet footwork (well, fancy for me, anyway), and I was having trouble getting it just right. So I used Niles's computer (which is almost always booted to Windows) to see if it looked any better in Explorer.

It looked horrible. I worked and worked to get the images in the right shape, to no avail. Then I discovered that it was not the images at all, it was the new blockquotes I was using. I had sweated and sweated to make the blog prettier (for YOU), which entailed setting the quote box width as a percentage of the screen width so the blockquotes would look nicer (for YOU) when the quotes were short.

But Explorer, apparently, doesn't think it needs to play nicely with all the CSS specifications, and sets the screen width to some ridiculous size (like a mile).

Now, I changed the style sheet (for YOU) on Sep. 1, so for two months the blog has been virtually unreadable to users of IE. And no one bothered to tell me.

Since approximately 97% of web surfers use IE[1], I conclude that the reason no one told me is because no one is reading the blog.[2] Well! That's gratitude for you!

Sure, sure, I realize that this blog is infrequently-posted drivel, but look at it this way: it could be frequently-posted drivel. I could post reviews of dreadful science fiction movies. Book reviews. Goldsteinian conversations with inanimate objects. Endless geeky descriptions of my various collections. You don't want that, do you? No. So pay attention, dammit! DON'T MAKE ME GET OUT THE FRUIT STICKERS.

NOTE: The Fleck y Breens[3] are exempted from this outrage, as I'm pretty sure they are devout Linux users.

[1]Remembering that 75% of all statistics are made up.
[2]Yes, I realize that I could find a sitemeter that would tell me exactly how many hits I'm not getting, but that a)often slows loading down to a frustrating extent and b) is for people who give a damn.
[3]Speaking of them, and their hot time in Vegas, I am tempted to post about the time that we went to Vegas for the sole purpose of seeing the "Star Trek Experience" at the Las Vegas Hilton (speaking of geeky). The thing is, I apparently didn't take my camera, so Niles's photos form our only record of the trip. And inside the actual "Experience," we---but I'll save that.