Blog Action Day

I was going to do something writer-related this morning, I really was. Then I glanced at my Google Reader and saw a cool post on A Writer’s Edge about the blog participating in Blog Action Day. I watched the YouTube video (see below) and thought, Cool! I want to do that.

Next I went to the Blog Action Day website to register my participation and they asked a simple question that took me about two hours to finally figure out I couldn’t answer: How many RSS subscribers does your blog have?

I figured WordPress would have this information. I mean, it’s good information for blog owners to be able to access even if you’re not signing up for Blog Action Day. But it turns out that — if my two hours of research is right — WordPress used to have this information, then switched it off and eventually replaced it with what WordPress has now: subscriber stats for each blog post, but not total subscriber stats for the blog as a whole. Cool, huh? Uh, no.

Isn’t subscriber stats for the blog as a whole much more useful than stats for just one post? Or maybe having both would be best. At least for those of us who want to participate in Blog Action Day. (By the way, I ended up putting “don’t know” in that field when I registered.)

I don’t mean to criticize the people who keep WordPress going. I’m using the free service and I love it. It’s easy to post, easy to maintain, a little clunky here and there, but hey, it’s free. And one of the things I like best about WordPress is that my readers don’t have to login to anything to comment, which I find frustrating with some other blog tools. And for all of this, I am grateful and say a hearty Thank You to the WordPress team. However, if the WordPress people are reading this, if you can bring back the Feed Stats I saw in my research that I think you had in 2006, that would be sooo awesome, and I don’t think I’m the only WordPress user who thinks this.

In my research, I did find out that I have a number of readers who subscribe to this blog, judging by the single-post stats I looked at. And, for those of you who do, thanks! I’m glad you found me and I hope you’re continuing to get something good out of Day By Day Writer.

Now, onto what started all this: Blog Action Day. I hadn’t heard of it before, but it sounds awesome. Basically, on Oct. 15, all the blogs that have registrated will talk about one subject, this year, climate change. Whether you believe we’re killing the world or it’s just nature moving along her course, I think there are things we can do to clean up our act. I don’t know if we’ll save the world with it; I’m no scientist, and the data we have seems to go both ways. But it seems to me that if steroids in our food is hurting us and pollutions in our air is giving our kids asthma, that’s a good enough reason to clean up. Hey, what does it hurt?

So, on Oct. 15, I’ll blog about that with a bunch of other blogs around the world. (Might even cheat and write it early and set it to post on Oct. 15 so I don’t forget.)

If you’d like to join in or just learn more, check out the video: