Changes

It has been a quiet Sunday.

We stayed in bed drinking coffee for ages, and then Mark cooked scrambled eggs for a household breakfast, which was ace. The children declined to join in, having had Pot Noodle and croissants for their breakfast, so there were four of us, and we sat telling taxi stories to Mrs. Number Two Daughter, who laughed politely at all of them, even though she has probably heard most of them already.

When we had finished I retreated upstairs.

This part of the day concerns you.

I am doing some modifications to these pages. This is a long process, because I am technologically inept, and it is not at all easy to follow the explanations of people who assume you know what CSS is, or how to insert a slider. I do not know any of these things, and despite having spent much of the day with my best glasses on, squinting at the screen, I am no wiser.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

Reasons for changes, I mean, not reasons for being no wiser. We all know that the reason am am not wiser than I am is that over the course of my lifetime  I have generally failed to pay sufficient attention to those older and wiser than myself. My parents and previous school teachers take note. You were right, I should have been listening, and as you correctly surmised at the time, I almost certainly wasn’t.

Ah well.

The first reason for change is simple.

As you are probably aware, lots of people read these pages via their Facebook news feed. Over the last few months, Facebook has been making changes to something called an Algorithm, which means that people do not see the same things as they used to in the olden days. Facebook has deliberately become more boring, in order that now people probably won’t be addicted to it.

This new algorithm has made a very big difference to my diaries.

Since the change was introduced, the readership has dwindled off massively. I have discovered that this is because lots of people do not see a link to the page any more.

The thing is that although I like writing them, I do not really write my diaries for pleasure. It is not easy to find hundreds of words to write every single day. Lots of times I write my diaries when I would rather be reading a book, or going to bed.

I write my diaries to entertain people.

I think that the Internet is a magnificent invention, and I get lots of brilliant things from it. It is full of handy explanations of everything that you could possibly want to know.

I don’t know anything handy that I could explain to people, but I can tell stories and make people laugh, and so I do this as my thing that I put into the world.

Mostly I do it to entertain my family and friends, but over the years it has been going, it has picked up a lot of other readers along the way, and I realised that the more people who are laughing, the nicer it is. This is not true if it is about a new haircut.

There is no point in writing something to entertain people if nobody reads it.

Hence I am looking at ways of enabling more people to see it. Just at the moment, unless you actually go on to Google and explain that you would like to find Windermere Diaries, written by a taxi driver, these pages are almost completely invisible.

I am going to try and make it more noticeable.

This is ridiculously difficult, and you need to know what a SEO is, and also a tagline and other unfamiliar things.

I am trying to learn these things now.

I am going to learn how to do technical things, and then I am going to improve this website. It is going to become streamlined and interesting, and contain much more than it does already.

When I have finished, and the end product is beautiful and desirable and fascinating, I am going to try and link it to other websites, and also to Google. Obviously it is linked to Google already, not that you would know, because I have not been very creative with my SEOs and SSRI and STD and CJD and all the rest of the things that you need to do.

Eventually, when it is lovely and technically advanced and perfect, I am going to add a Donation button, just like the one that we all ignore on the Guardian web page. This will help me meet the running costs, which even now are not inconsiderable, it is a big website. Also if a million people read it and give me a fiver then I will not need to bother any more at all and will wave to you from the window of my private jet instead.

I am explaining to you about the Donation button so that you can harden your souls in preparation. It will not be compulsory, so you can ignore it if you like, and I am setting it up so that I will not know who has donated, unless they actually send me an e-mail and tell me. This means that you can not donate anything safe in the happy knowledge that I will never know that it was you. It is not intended to raise cash from my current readership, but from the millions of new wealthy readers who are about to be attracted in by its streamlined glory.

I confess that if I were one of my own readers, I would almost certainly ignore it, so do not feel concerned.

Anyway, please take this as a bit of an advance warning. Over the next few weeks I will be adding bits and changing bits, so do not be alarmed. I had to take the whole lot offline this afternoon, so if anybody was trying to read it they would have been surprised halfway through when suddenly it wasn’t there any more.

Of course, if I can’t master the C3PO things then nothing will change at all, but I hope not.

Onwards and upwards.

Have a picture of the Library Gardens in the drought. I hope that nobody goes in there to smoke.