Ten years of CONFUSION

I had grand plans, in my head, for this post noting the tenth anniversary (I think people stopped saying “blogiversary,” thankfully) of LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®.   I am very pleased to say, however, that life and the practice of law got very stubbornly in the way.

They were some pretty funny ideas, too!

But unlike in the past — I probably last marked the blog’s birthday five years ago — these days I don’t even have time to tell you what those great ideas were.  Life is too rich, full, exhausting, interest-bearing, scary for a lot of navel-gazing, and coming from LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®, that’s saying something.

And maybe I’ll use them for my 15th anniversary.  Because even though blogging will be even more out of style by then, I’ll probably still be doing this anyway.  By then, after all, the way things are going I’ll have lots of time for creative projects like this because I don’t know anything about intellectual property sharia law.

Okay, now that I mention it, to play it safe maybe I’ll use that stuff for the 12th anniversary.  Now, some remarks are, perhaps, called for, if remarks are ever called for on a blog, which they so seldom are.

So, if you don’t mothball it, you have to, at the very least, maintain a blog.  You have to keep the database clean, update it, optimize the SEO, the themes, do upgrades.  You realize, I’ve got 2,300 posts archived here.  As I’ve said many times here — and, spoiler alert, I’m not treating you to my maudlin blogging-is-hard symphony today; you can get that, most recently, at this post — many of the posts from the first five to seven years of the blog would only qualify as Twitter tweets in 2015.  But there was no such thing then, just this crystal set you had to put together yourself.

And in fact, in the very beginning, either I couldn’t figure out how to make it do pictures, or maybe Blogger (Blogspot, actually) didn’t offer it at first — I’m not clear — but looking at those old posts, without the illustrations, well, it’s quite a dry presentation.

As I encounter these old posts, as I optimize and cleanup and sometimes address dead links and dead graphics (for I did far too much of the dreaded hotlinking in those days — forgive! forgive!), I sometimes insert new graphics, either because the post comes up in the recycle cycle are because I link to it.  This is especially important for adaptation of the blog theme on a mobile device and for SEO, where having a featured image can really be helpful.  When I do this, I try not to use pics that are jarringly anachronistic in terms of the date of the post, and, thank Google, you can often do a search to get just the right logo for the right year by simply pairing the name of the brand with the year and doing an image search.

And to think that some folks once thought that was trademark infringement!  But I regress.

This process exposed me to the realization that I still have almost 800 posts that are not categorized, which is awful, as well as probably a majority that don’t have featured images.  Probably a majority of them have dead links or dead graphics, many of which are being addressed as they are resurrected via recycling.

I recycle posts, as I have mentioned before, because quite a few of them represent good, substantive thinking and expression or a good laugh.  Obviously while as a percentage of the earth’s English-speaking population almost no one reads LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®, still and all a ton more people read it today than read it ten, eight or even five years ago.  So why should people miss out on the old good stuff?  They aren’t going to go into the archive and fetch themselves, especially with the legacy stuff being such a blessed mess SEO-wise.  Also, even your humble blogger has completely forgotten some really interesting old posts.

Recycling gives me the opportunity, as the automated widget sends the old stuff back up, to delete posts that simply don’t make any sense any more (such as one-liners where the punchline is contained in a link that no longer works), to update reports on cases that were still in progress when I wrote about them, to admit I was wrong about a prediction or gloat that I was right, or to quietly tuck a recycled post back to its original place in the chronological order because, well, it doesn’t really merit the front page in 2015.

So… a few years ago, when I started tracking traffic, I noticed that it fell off the table in August and December.  Most law bloggers know this; that’s when lawyers go on vacation.  So I started doing a month-by-month best of the year in the latter half of December, into early January.  No one complained or asked for his money back.  So, tell you what I’m going to do, in honor of this tenth anniversary of cosa nostra — for indeed it is ours, yours and mine, together.

Starting something like tomorrow, to give the world time to prepare technologically and spiritually, I’m going to schedule on some kind of basis, either regular or the other kind, the tweetage of links, via the blog’s official Twitter feed (@likely2confuse) to all those “Best of” posts till they’re done — till you’re blue in the face with what we used to cleverly call “bloggy goodness” (except the ones for 2014, which you were already treated to recently).  for the first five years of the blog (2005-2009).

And I’m going to find the time, it is sincerely to be hoped, to reach back and find older posts that precede the annual best-of period and tweet those, too.

So if you subscribe to @likely2confuse, or have an Internet machine which you know how to point to it, you can relive those thrilling days, and otherwise I will just leave you and everybody else alone and be done with it.

And for sure you’re off the hook on this for another ten years.  Or was it two-and-a-half, actually?