For several weeks, Captain Plum was trying to determine whether GoDaddy was a website platform or an elaborate psychological experiment involving a broken vending machine.
You put your writing in. You press Publish. Somewhere a tiny motor whirs. Nothing comes out. You kick the machine. It assures you that everything is working beautifully.
Lifeology.ca had become that machine. Blog posts behaved unpredictably, the writing was not reliably accessible, and getting a clear answer was rather like interviewing a houseplant. So we did the sensible thing: abandoned ship and built a new home on WordPress.
And then something miraculous happened.
GoDaddy’s dashboard suddenly discovered an audience. One day, essentially nobody. The next, roughly 700 visitors. Then close to 800. Numbers we had never seen in the ordinary life of the site.
Had Vitalogy become an international sensation overnight? Had the United Nations ordered all delegates to read the Vitalogue? Was there a conference of philosophers somewhere, frantically refreshing essays about consciousness and the meaning of life?
Apparently not. The new website wasn’t seeing anything like that traffic.
What, then, are we looking at? Bots? Crawlers? Delayed statistics? A purple graph having an emotional crisis? We cannot tell. GoDaddy’s dashboard offers a lovely dramatic number without the detail needed to establish how many visitors were actual human beings.
The timing, however, was comedy gold. Just as Captain Plum sailed away, the old website apparently acquired the crowd of a small Newfoundland village.
It felt rather like leaving a bad relationship only to receive a message: ‘Darling, please come back. I’ve changed. Also, eight hundred people came to my house yesterday and said you were wonderful.’
Well, congratulations. Did any of them read the blog?
To be clear, a weird graph is not proof that GoDaddy invented the numbers, deliberately manipulated anything, or even knows we’ve left. Automated traffic and analytics oddities can produce spectacular nonsense without any conspiracy at all. But after the publishing problems, this particular mystery is not an invitation to return.
We don’t need a website that claims to be busy. We need one that actually serves the writing to readers, reliably and plainly, without requiring a séance with customer support.
On the HMS Archivum, the crew examined the traffic report on a holographic computer, considered the sudden arrival of hundreds of invisible visitors, and reached a unanimous conclusion:
‘Captain, the passenger counter says eight hundred.’
‘Splendid. Where are the passengers?’
‘Unknown, sir.’
‘Then stop counting ghosts and get us out of here.’
The real pleasure of abandoning ship
There is one final, wonderful discovery. All of Captain Plum’s irritation with GoDaddy has vanished. Not because GoDaddy fixed anything. Not because somebody apologized. Not because an engineer finally emerged from the machinery carrying a functioning blog.
It vanished because Plum no longer has to use the bloody thing.
No more checking whether an article appeared. No more wrestling with a website builder. No more customer-service adventures. GoDaddy can do absolutely whatever it likes now. It can display a million visitors tomorrow, declare itself Emperor of the Internet, or teach the purple graph to tap dance. None of it is Plum’s problem.
And there’s a little lesson in that. Sometimes the happiest solution to an irritation is not to defeat it, explain it, or persuade it to improve. It’s simply to remove it from your life. You discover how much attention the nuisance was consuming only when the attention comes back to you.
Freedom doesn’t always arrive with trumpets. Sometimes it arrives when you close an annoying browser tab for the very last time. What a joyful little luxury.
The Archivum sails on. GoDaddy may keep the purple graph. We shall keep the writing.
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