24 December—If you’re reading this on LitchfieldMonitor.com, you know that your prayers were answered (assuming you do that sort of thing) and that I solved the slow-load problem that plagued this website for two days. If you’re reading this on Rep-Am.org, you can return to The Monitor or stay with Rep-Am.

Rep-Am.org contains all the same current essays and other crap as LitchfieldMonitor.com. And don’t fail to have a look at the Rep-Am Masthead.

I say that I solved the slow-load problem because I did. Really. Nobody but computer-semi-literate old me, using classic diagnostic methodology. Not really. None of the expert digital diagnosticians had a clue, so I was all set to find another web host just to see if that was the problem. But in the meantime Rep-Am.org was doing the job.

So before putting the big computer to deep sleep last evening, I decided to check on how many Monitor readers had actually gravitated to Rep-Am during the slowdown. I had installed a visit counter so-called plugin on my websites to inflate my ego. All these things are free on WordPress.org, so why not? But, for some reason, I hadn’t installed it on Rep-Am.org. Careless of me. That’s what happens when you get old. So I installed it; it took about a minute.

Then, when I went out of the admin mode and tried to bring up the website on my browser, I didn’t have the patience for it to load. Eureka! Well, that’s not quite what I said to myself, as it struck me that the visit counter—which, I discovered this morning, had been automatically updated just before the slowdown—was the cause of the problem.

So I went to admin mode of LitchfieldMonitor.com and FU-CT.com and disabled the visit counter on both websites. And we were back in business. Persistence and serendipity.

Unfortunately, that was the best-rated free WordPress visit counter and I won’t even try out the other ones. Pity. Now I won’t have any idea of how many readers haven’t given up on me. On the other hand, I never really trusted the counter. Even with the impressive number of daily hits—from 700 to 1,100 (because my websites are free)–the number of new hits every day was suspect. I mean, with 30 to 50 new hits the visit counter told me The Monitor had every day, in three months I’d have over 3,000 readers rather than 1,100. And that simply isn’t the case, not to mention the inconsistency.

So it’s entirely possible I have only a dozen faithful readers. If that many . . .