I decided to take my own medicine today and subscribe to my blog.

You see, it came to my attention earlier this week that every time I made a change, no matter how minor, to one of my existing blog entries, my blog subscribers would receive an e-mail notification. I discovered this after I had cleaned up the formatting on about 25 entries, resulting in my subscribers receiving an equivalent number of e-mails about material that was not by any objective measure “new” or “noteworthy.” (If anyone got excited because I made the fonts consistent and cleaned up extra paragraph breaks, please don’t tell me as it will cause me to look at you differently and not in a good way.)

I scoured my blog’s administrative control panel and couldn’t find any way to prevent this from happening. In fact, I couldn’t find any way to manage these subscriptions or even find out who my subscribers are. I happen to know one of them is my good friend, Bill Mulligan, and the other is my beautiful girlfriend, Jeannie. The third is a mystery to me.

I realized I had no idea how exactly my subscriptions worked, and this was unacceptable. I refuse to be a party to clogging up people’s in-boxes. So I signed up for my own blog. I was relieved to learn that every e-mail notification comes with an actual, working “unsubscribe” link.

I seriously considered switching to WordPress or something similar but those can be one hell of a lot of work to set up. So GoDaddy is off the hook… for now. If I were them, however, I’d get on the stick about offering a more feature-rich blog. Any more headaches and I’m tryin’ WordPress.

And to subscriber number 3: I would’ve personally apologized to you for all those unnecessary e-mails, but I don’t know who you are. And frankly, you have every right to remain anonymous if you wish. I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry, and that I’m holding myself accountable for making sure that subscribing to my blog doesn’t result in problems for my subscribers.