Did I Mention My YouTube Channel?

This post is not an advertisement. I am trying to put a positive spin on news I received from Blogger, the Google host for this blog. I received an email recently announcing that they will be taking down certain videos from blog posts, including a whopping twenty-one (21) of mine. This will render about twelve of my blog posts essentially useless, until I can reload the videos in a different manner. If I can figure out how to do that. This is the latest in a long series of joy-sucking events affecting this blog.

The affected posts are old, especially by evolving digital standards, and I suspect that the Blogger platform simply stopped supporting the video format I was using, and/or created a way to load videos separate from images. I’m going to try and insert a video here from my YouTube channel, to see if that works.

This video plays for me, hopefully for you, too. A flower fly, genus Eristalis, grooming itself.

Ideally, I want to update the affected blog posts, but, failing that, I will take them down. Turns out the internet is more ephemeral than we think it is anyway. Many websites come and go, on the whims of their creators, as a result in changes in technology, and for other reasons.

That reminds me of another evolutionary episode in my writing career. Several years ago, I was paid to write educational and topical posts for the Insectlopedia web page, an online service for After Bite® products from Tender Corporation. Tender Corp was subsequently bought out by Adventure Ready Brands in June, 2020, and all communication ceased. Emails went unanswered, and eventually they removed all the posts I had written, or most of them.

My articles for Insectlopedia still exist on the “Wayback Machine” of Internet Archive, but they are difficult to search out and link to.

If you go to the “More” tab at the top of my blog page, you will find non-functioning links to those old Insectlopedia posts. I will eventually get around to removing those, too, but may recycle some of them in the context of this blog. Apologies for the current inconvenience.

To all followers who are also struggling bloggers, I see you, and empathize with you. Well-intentioned people will say to you “Does anybody even read blogs anymore?,” and otherwise offer bits of discouraging wisdom. I can tell you that yes, people do read blogs. They want genuine, reliable, accurate content, especially now with the contamination of commercial sources by Artificial Intelligence (AI). They want perspectives not dictated by the vagaries of Wall Street and corporate agendas. Carry on, you are a soldier for good things.