This blog now comes with post titles

"A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way." - John Tudor

***

In a bid to mitigate the effects of Blogger's Auto Pagination (which means you can no longer see my last 4 days of posts if I have posted too much), I have inserted a "Latest Posts" widgit above.

(That said, Blogger has happily may have become less anal about Auto Pagination - at one point [IIRC] only one [admittedly long] post was visible on the main page of my blog [or under the travelogue label], but now when I set Blogger to return a maximum of 999 days' posts I see the same post together with many others. Then again, it might've been this other post, which refuses to be displayed with any others) [Ed: I checked, and they still seem as anal as ever]

To get it to work, I had to (finally) think of titles for each post. Besides achieving my intended purpose, it will also delight the 100-150 of you on the RSS feed who will no longer have to see 10 new posts on this blog, each titled "(no subject)", when you open your RSS readers.

It also ensures I no longer see useless statistics like:


"Aggregate Item Use:
(no title) - 31 views, 2 clicks
(no title) - 28 views, 3 clicks
(no title) - 25 views, 2 clicks
..."

(you can tell I never really used this part of Feedburner's services)

In the process, I have also discovered that Feedburner is still screwed up - I thought I had FINALLY enabled AdSense for Feeds, but my feed keeps reverting from the jazzed-up version (which includes the ads):



To a vanilla one:



Having already spent some time on the issues mentioned above, and having tried fruitlessly to solve Feedburner (and Google) issues in the past, though, I am not inclined to tackle this problem today.

As someone commented about Google (in response to an inexplicable YouTube ban that came out of the blue):

"One of the things I can’t stand about Google (who I rely heavily on and like their services for the most part) is how difficult it is to get in touch with anyone there. Finding an email is nearly impossible."


Another part of my Auto Pagination mitigation plan involves experimenting with switching from monthly to weekly archives (I haven't used the latter in ages); a recent halving in traffic from 500-600+ visitors a day to 250-300+ visitors a day seems to be connected to Auto Pagination screwing up my monthly archives.


Clarification:

A reader emailed me:

"Haha, SALUTE! You must have like a billion pages. Good luck with the renaming."

My response:

"I'm not going to add titles to ALL my blog posts - only the latest ones on the feed and new ones.

Hell, I haven't even finished labeling everything (stuck at August 2005), or restoring all my Slavery posts (stuck at November 2002)."


Addendum:

I tried posting a message about my Feed problem in the FeedBurner Help Group Google Group.

I got an error message reading:

"We were unable to post your message

If you believe this is an error, please contact Google Support."

Meanwhile, Google Support refused to provide email support, and directed me to...

The Google Groups Help Forum Google Group

I tried to post about the error above and... got the same error.

Woo hoo! How Kafka-esque.