Stand back, Columbus!  Settle down, John Glenn!  After weeks of failed attempts to log in to the back end of this web site I have at last discovered the key.  Which is hardly a secret since I only did what GoogleⓇ told me to do in the first place.  But I’m still taking some of the credit because as with any other fortuity the collision of time and place has proven once again to be essential to its evolution.  The truth be told, I only stumbled upon the way to do it. But isn’t that how so many of even the greatest discoveries unfold?

In this instance the putative simple solution to access the dashboard of my web site was to add some standard terminology to my URL (uniform resource locator).  But every time I asked for the login site to initiate the process (to access what I thought was the back door of this platform) I was taken to one which I knew from past experience did not match the correct one for this particular site (and indeed it turned out to be so). All was not futile however as the result of the perpetual impediment was that I ended opening another blog site and subsequently adding (http://duffystjames.blogspot.ca) to an existing one I had opened many years before. In doing so I widened my technological experience and apptitude, itself a plus in my books.

But it disturbed me no end that I couldn’t get where I wanted to go even though my web site and blogs are nothing more grand than electronic diaries.  So almost every day for several minutes each day I tried again, researching the internet for advice, trolling familiar sites for possible openings, repeating effectivey the same nonsense with the same disappointing results.  In vain I pretended to be unconcerned that I was somehow locked out of my “first personal web site” though it privately annoyed me.  When I was working for a living I had a “commercial web site” but it distinguished itself from my personal web site because the commercial site was static.  The commercial site was managed by a delegate with whom I had infrequent correspondence and I seldom had any compelling need to alter the site which was just a menu of my legal services and the usual contact information.

My personal web site was set up by a nerd family member of a former client. It was first designed as a platform for my run at election as a municipal counsellor immediately following my retirement from the practice of law.  When I soon thereafter came to my senses and withdrew the nomination, I decided to translate the site into a personal writing platform. Of necessity I made a point of learning how to modify it to reflect my content and formatting preferences.  For three years it worked fine. But in early July I bought a new iPhone and in the process of tweaking it I erased all of my Safari bookmarks including the one to connect to my personal web site.  This action rippled through all my other Apple devices (iPad and MacBook Pro on the latter of which I customary compose my codswallop).  I wouldn’t have thought I would have had any trouble recapturing the information but apparently I did (even though I had no problem at all restoring all the other bookmarks).  After I set up the new web site through WordPress (the same platform as the first), I began to think that the second site had trumped the first as though there were some built-in mechanism to prohibit the undue proliferation of web sites (which are basically free).  This theory garnered some cogency when I found out that the new WordPress web site was polluted with unsolicited advertisements which I interpreted as WordPress’ way of saying the free ride was over.  It was this commercial contamination which prompted me to revisit my first historic Google blog site where I opened a new one only to discover that it became a sub-category of my initial Google blog on BloggerⓇ.  Importantly each of the web sites had different characteristics and personalities, some of which I liked, others I did not.  It is partly for that reason that for the time being I intend to maintain all three sites and not attempt to import or export as the case may be.

As I now have the benefit of analyzing this erstwhile conundrum I have speculated that this site is free from advertisements because it has a paid and independent domain name (lgwilliamchapman.ca) as opposed to the other WordPress site whose name is attached to WordPress (https://lgwilliamchapman.wordpress.com).  I have yet to figure out why the new WordPress web site is only hit with advertisements on the iPad or my mobile device; my MacBook Pro is seemingly spared the indignity.

I excuse my affection for this web site by noting that to date it contains 638 posts, being 32 pages of max 20 posts each. Though it matters not, assuming each post has an average word count of 1,000 that’s about 700,000 words in total.

Novelist Jane Smiley suggests that length is an important quality of the novel. However, novels can vary tremendously in length; Smiley lists novels as typically being between 100,000 and 175,000 words, while National Novel Writing Month requires its novels to be at least 50,000 words. There are no firm rules: for example, the boundary between a novella and a novel is arbitrary and a literary work may be difficult to categorise. But while the length of a novel is to a large extent up to its writer, lengths may also vary by subgenre; many chapter books for children start at a length of about 16,000 words, and a typical mystery novel might be in the 60,000 to 80,000 word range while a thriller could be well over 100,000 words.

Though the side menu of this web site indicates that entries go back as far as 2009 that is really nothing more than the date of original composition.  Clearly this site did not begin until my one and only politcal campaign in the Spring of 2014.  Subsequently I collected stuff from my old Blogger site (http://wwwthetoybox.blogspot.ca) and pasted it here.  Even that site contains material expropriated from my first computer-based WordPerfect site (which I presume began not long after I got my first computer sometime around 1987 – though it could well have been years later before I had the luxury of a PC at my house where I would traditionally have composed my diaries).  Before computers I typed my stuff on looseleaf paper or wrote it longhand in any number of diaries, books, scribblers and folios (the typed and handwritten stuff has since been garbaged). One has to stagger at the thought of how much written stuff is floating about the internet.  At least it isn’t as vulgar as plastic water bottles!