Why I Picked My Own Post on Blotanical

Both the Weed Whackin Wenches and Lona at Hocking Hills Garden recently wrote about going through “Blotanical Withdrawl.” Now that I’ve been using Blotanical for a few months, I can definitely understand why that would happen. Why its absence might cause people to go into a tailspin of rebooting, reconfiguring, recoding and worrying. Blotanical is, after all, the best gardeners soiree on the web. At least that I’ve found. You can find gardeners there from all over the world! Search by plant! "Pick" your favorite blogs and posts! Send messages! Enter contests! And on and on. For a beginning gardener like me it has been a godsend because I can see photos of what my plants are SUPPOSED to look like.

But let me tell you about another phenomenon that I experienced when I first signed on: the Blotanical Feed Frenzy. Back when I signed up, Blogger was merging with Google and there was some screwup with the feeds. Poor Stuart, our fabulous reliable Blotanical creator and answerman, (of Gardening Tips n Ideas), was working night and day to straighten it out, but in the meantime, the S. man (my husband, not Stuart) and I were geeking around here trying to get my feed through. Would “pinging” the post help? What about rebooting? Emptying the cache?

Finally after some Simple Pie, cutting and copying and pasting, we (Yay!) got the feed through. The S. man (again, not Stuart, my phenomenally patient husband)asked innocently “But why is it so important to have your feed on THIS site?’

“Well,” I said, “so that I can see the new posts and pick them and so that my posts can be picked…”

“What does that mean?”

So I showed him how to vote for a favorite post by "picking" it, and even picked a couple myself to demonstrate. Then, while I was out walking the dog, he did it. He went to the “Current Posts” area and PICKED MY POST!! Yes, it appeared that Nyack Backyard had the nerve and audacity to deem her own post worthy of recognition.

Oh the mortification.

“But I just wanted to see if it worked….” he said. But posts cannot be unpicked. It was done. And, in the end, I doubt anyone even noticed. Still, there was no shortage of office drama around here that day.