A BLOGGER’S PLEDGE

by Robert Lopresti

Starters

Welcome to my timeshare of this experiment in short mystery blogging. I am the author of thirty-plus short stories, mostly mysteries, and a novel. Tune It Or Die refers to the fact that I am also a singer-songwriter and a struggler with the many-stringed monster called the autoharp. My novel and some of my stories also take place in the strange and exotic world of folk music. (Well, strange at any rate.)

Interruption:

As I’m writing this a genuine mystery has developed. On my website I have a long page of links. Or at least I had one yesterday. This morning the last two thirds were missing. I uploaded a new copy from my computer and that increased it to two thirds showing. No other pages are affected. I generally prefer mysteries that can be solved without calling the Help Line, but maybe the techies are the P.I.s of our time.

Back to the main plot:

I want to thank James Lincoln Warren for setting up this arena and inviting me to play here. Since I hope to have a long relationship with each of you wise and discerning readers, I thought I should begin by laying down some guidelines. This is my pledge as to what you will and won’t find in my blog in weeks to come. Some of them are based on what irritates me in other blogs (not ones on this site, of course: not yet anyway.)

* Every week’s entry will have something to do with mystery or short fiction or (ideally) both.
* If my other loves, like folk music and librarianship, slip into this space, I will make an effort to tie them to short mystery fiction.
* I don’t swear much, so those who enjoy maledicta will have to go elsewhere for such amusements.
* If I complain about something that someone else in the blogosphere said I will link to the offense, not asking you to take my word for it.
* If I link to another page, I’ll tell you what I’m linking to, so you don’t have to go there to find out.
* There are plenty of wonderful political blogs. I won’t try to compete.
* I won’t mention my brilliant and talented daughter unless she does something relevant to short mystery fiction. This may be the hardest part of my pledge to keep.
* I intend to commit plagiarism on a regular basis, but only from the column I wrote a decade ago for the late lamented Murderous Intent Mystery Magazine, edited by the wonderful Margo Power. I still get the occasional request for information that was in those columns, so I expect to steal from them here. If you were one of my estimated three faithful readers you may get a sense of déjà vu. Or not.

Another thread from the web.

As an aging baby boomer I always assume everyone knows more about technology than I do, but in my day job I am constantly introducing college students to some little trick of the World Wide Web that is news to them. As a librarian I can’t help but want to spread knowledge. As Mark Twain said “Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter.”

So I will sometimes end these notes with such a tip; no extra charge. For example: when I discovered my links page had been truncated this morning I used the Google cache to find the missing, uh, links.

So what’s a Google cache? Use Google to find my page. Under the summary on the Google’s results page is the word Cached. Click on it and you see a copy of the page as it looked the last time Google noticed it, which as of today is April 21. So if something disappeared recently from a page (yours or someone else’s) you may be able to find it in the cache.

Until next time, keep tuning. And reading.