I often look at the statistics provided by the site which show the number of views, rating and other things relating to my fiction. With 95 stories and novels which haven't been added to or amended for four years, it generally shows a steady interest in my fiction over the wide range of topics and styles it covers.
However, for the past year or so, I've been surprised by the relative popularity of Doubly Endowed (https://storiesonline.net/s/42031/doubly-endowed), a short story I submitted in 2004.
It's not a story I've myself promoted (at least not in the last couple of years), it's not really one of my most popular stories or even (in my opinion) one of my best, but each week there are consistently more readers of this story than any other.
My suspicion is that there is a website or Facebook page or some other place on the Internet where some kind person has promoted my story and this is sufficiently widely read for the link to my story to be followed by a steady trickle of discriminating readers.
Can anyone out there shed a light on this matter?
It has been brought to my attention that on certain browsers and certain operating systems, the page background on my homepage (https://storiesonline.net/a/Bradley_Stoke) obscures the text of the table.
It works fine on Edge, Chrome and Firefox, but I have seen the issue on Safari on the Apple Operating System.
So, if you want the optimum experience on browsing my homepage, please don't use Safari.
I believe the cause is simply the different ways each browser handles HTML, in particular the background to tables.
If you are aware of other browsers and operating systems where this is an issue, please alert me.
Also tell me if you know of a solution to this issue.
It's about two and a half years ago since I wrote my last blog on this site where I invited anyone who was interested that they should follow the link to http://bradleystokedotnet.wordpress.com.
However, I'm not sure that many readers in Stories On Line are especially interested in the kind of more wide-ranging blog I write at WordPress and I have the view that maybe what they really want is the kind of inward-looking self-promotion that dominates the blogs at Stories On Line. You know the sort of thing. Blogs that go on about some weird misapprehension of what the real world is like. Blogs that remind us that after God Knows how many years of silence the author still exists. Blogs that rant about scores when they're really only interested about their own. Basically: self-indulgent, boring and rather uninteresting blogs that serve the people who write them no favours at all.
But of course I also miss this world of bickering bloggers especially since my own SOL blog has fallen off the cliff and nothing much is left of it anymore as a result of not having contributed anything for whatever period it is when your blogs are deemed to have expired.
So, what should I write about?
Well, probably not what anyone's ever written to me in a private e-mail that was never intended for greater circulation. Possibly some sarcastic, satirical and insightful comments about practices in this self-referential world. Not likely to be anything of more general interest (i.e. not necessarily to do with SOL and sex fiction) as I've come to realise that this isn't the best forum for that. Navel-gazers resent having their eyes directed elsewhere.
So, what should I write about?
Should I rant about ratings, scores and feedback? Should I publicise fiction I've posted, thought about posting or decided not to post? Should I digress and confess stuff to generally apathetic readers about things I wouldn't dream of telling my parents?
What do you think?