I tell my students that if they want a successful blog, they must write often and openly, they must be authentic and share their lives as well as their work. In fact, my life has become my work. I’ve written 25,890 posts since I started this blog on Memorial Day, 2007.

I don’t know how many photos, I didn’t start posting them for a couple of years.

Eleven years, and many of you sacred souls have stayed with me from the beginning.

Many have also stormed off in protest and outrage at my ideas. Some have called me a mean-spirited bully or worse for tangling with intrusive or nasty e-mailers or people who give me unwanted advise or try to tell me what to write.

I’ve worked on my own anger issues and anti-social tendencies. Maria has helped.

I’ve promised the good Jon Katz and the bad Jon Katz, but always the real Jon Katz and I think I have been true to that pledge.  I have shed all of my secrets and have none left to reveal.

That is quite liberating, and I thank you for reading and supporting my blog, it is the focus of my creative life.

We are having a tech trouble week here on the bedlamfarmjournal, but I think it’s mostly over now.

People were not getting the daily feed from the old program so we switched, and the new program forget to bring everybody along. They call it a “migration.” That stirred quite a storm.

So we switched from Feedburner, a free Google site that hasn’t been updated in a long time, to a new site that isn’t free. This moves and migrations are supposed to be seamless, but I know they aren’t, and this one wasn’t. The subscribers weren’t migrated. Many more complaints, it was fixed quickly, which is also what usually happens.

So it went this way, first the blog stopped feeding to its thousands of mail subscribers, a program that has grown steadily. Then the migration was delayed for 24 hours because they didn’t realize I’d bought the better program.

I think most of them e-mailed me instantly, which is I believe, a compliment to my blog, and I thank you, mostly. And some were in quite a huff.

Then the older posts button disappeared out of necessity from the bottom of the Farm Journal Page in the migration from one feed program to another. It was only gone for a few hours.

This was instantly fixed, but you have to refresh your browser to get it back.

I see that lots of people have never done this before, it’s quite easy, there is a “refresh” button or emblem on the top of every browser page, just click on it. I am also hearing from many of them, this is landmark tech support message week for me. It is important for people to get the blog delivered to them, and it is equally important for people who want to look back on older posts.

I was happily surprised by how much this blog means to people, an affirming thing. I was also surprised by how many people really didn’t know that they can access the blog in other ways during those inevitable times of tech chaos and confusion.

They can bookmark my page, or Google it – I have great search engine recognition by now or simply go to bedlmfarm.com. I got a lot of messages from women in their 80’s who said they’ve been Googling me for years without trouble. “What is wrong with these young people?,” one asked.

Any of those methods takes seconds, I was startled to read so many messages from people who believed I had targeted them personally or cut them off for some reason. People don’t like change.

I should say that I do not do my own tech support. Mannix Marketing, my long-time Web designer and partner in the blog, does that. I don’t ever cut anyone off or cancel them, you are the only ones who can do that, for your own protection. In the 11 years of publication, the blog has blocked only one person, a particularly vicious stalker who is pre-naturally obsessed with me. And even she can access the blog if she wants to.

It was surprising to me to see how many people took this mishap very seriously, often personally. This kind of frustration is like a viral disease, it is going around. That’s what life is like in the Corporate Nation, where it’s all about never speaking with anyone unless it can’t possibly be avoided.

If people don’t talk to a human, they don’t believe they are being heard. Mostly, they are right.

We are all frustrated, I think, by the arrogance of the Corporate Nation, these bloated and greedy companies make it easy for us to give them money but very difficult to talk with them (Apple and AT&T, and Amazon are notable exceptions, in my experience) if there is a problem. It is astounding to me that neither Google, Facebook or Twitter offer any rational ways to communicate with them unless you are a police officer investigating a murder or an FBI agent looking for terrorists.

I am no  techie, I know nothing about how my blog really works, but I am accountable to people who take the trouble to read and support my blog Mostly, I have to refer these problems to Mannix, they do respond. The tricky stuff comes when the problem is not on this side, but the other side.

And I don’t have time to do a lot of tech support, even if I could.

A lot of people posted messages ON my blog demanding to know where the blog was. They didn’t know that they were already  on it.

Much of the time it isn’t a problem with my blog at all.

Sometimes computers and phones are outdated, sometimes browsers are clogged or too old to keep up with new graphics or photos, sometimes they are out of memory, or just shot. A lot of e-mail programs take mailed blogs as spam and throw them in the trash (that is the most common problem.) And people who are used to reading the blog in the morning with their coffee – I see a lot of people do that – are understandably agitated when this habit is disrupted.

Lots of smart phone people were having trouble reading the blog so I Maria and I spent $4,000 each to change and update the format. A lot of those complaints have quieted.

I want to tell you that you can always access my blog until it has been shut down for some reason, even if it’s sent to your folder or the feed is down for technical reasons. If the blog goes down, a message will be posted on the Farm Journal Page. We sometimes have short interruptions, but the blog was shut down for a whole day only once in all these years.

I don’t mind paying for a free blog feed, but I am sorry to get nasty messages from people who feel entitled to free things without any kind of adjustments or problems. I can’t offer a problem free experience, but the blog has come close.

I noticed this week another curious phenomenon. Some people love and trust my blog, but not always me so much. They assume that if the blog isn’t mailed regularly I have somehow “singled them out,” or “cut them off” because they haven’t sent money or for some other reason. Like most of us, they feel they need to come out swinging to get anybody to pay attention to them at all.

Messages like those are a sad thing to read. And they are unfair.

The blog is free (not to me) and the mail service is free (not to me) and nobody has been or ever will be cut off or thrown out because of money. The donations and voluntary payments are just that – voluntary – and they make the blog possible, it is too expensive to maintain without this support.

This week will be an expensive one for me. You can help support it here. I am not ashamed to ask, but there are no repercussions for ignoring me.

The blog is free and will always  be free and donations and payments are not in any way connected to contributions of any kind. I don’t check to see who has donated and who hasn’t. I have no idea unless I need to go and look.

I know some familiar names, but I would never boot anybody off of the blog for not sending money. Lots of people have stood with me from the beginning, and I will never walk away from them.

So the blog feed program is working – I got nearly 300 messages about the feed Thursday and Friday – and none today. My world seems to be returning to normal. I am getting messages about the older posts still. This post might help.

There are lots of you and only one of me, so I cannot be as communicative or responsive as many would like. But I am responsible for this blog and takes its maintenance and smooth operation very seriously – the poor techs at Mannix can testify to that.

I am very grateful to you for caring, and I will continue to work hard to make this blog thoughtful, useful, relevant, and hopefully, an antidote to the poison and anger pouring out from what we call the news.