Clicking Publish – The Life Cycle Of A Blog Post

Remember when you were in the 4th grade and the school sent home a permission slip for your parents to sign that allowed you to attend the upcoming Sex Ed class lecture? For many parents, including mine, I’m sure it was a relief to be somewhat "let off the hook" when it came to having "The Birds & Bees talk" with their kids. Although I think I was more uncomfortable and embarrassed for my parents to talk to me about sex than they actually were about approaching the subject. I think my biggest fear was that they would use their own relationship as an example in explaining certain aspects. That alone horrified me! It would start with the phrase..."When two people love each other like your Dad and I do, they want to show..." Even to this day, I DO NOT want to think that my parents have sex! It grosses me out to see my parents hug, hold hands or kiss. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy my parents have been married for over 30 years, but as far as I’m concerned, they’ve only done it 3 times in their lives – once to produce my oldest sister, again to produce my other sister and a final time to produce me. And that is it and that is all the information I need from them.

Apparently public schooling was doing something right because it saved me from the horror of having to hear how babies are made from my parents. I remember coming home from class that day, hoping my Mom wouldn’t ask how school went. Hoping she wouldn’t want to go over the somewhat confusing and messy lecture I endured in school. However, being the good Mom she is, she couldn’t resist asking me if I had any questions. She knew my Dad would be more squeamish talking to me about sex, so she took it upon herself to engage me in the topic and leave herself open to any and all questions I may have. Sensing that I wasn’t going to share with her what I learned in school today, my Mom decided that the best thing to do was to just ask me if I had any questions. My reply..."Yeah, what’s for dinner?"

It was rather apparent, I had no interest in knowing how babies are made. I didn’t want a baby. I wanted a puppy and maybe a new skateboard. Watching that baby being delivered was f*cking gross! So disgusting in fact that I vowed right then and there that anyone who wanted to have a baby was certified crazy! Even the making of the baby was gross. Who would want to touch a girl? Girls are dumb and I didn’t like them. They did stupid stuff, like scream while running in a game of tag. I didn’t understand them so I kept them at a distance...and they seemed like nothing but trouble. I protected myself with a nice thick layer of cootie spray. It was my shield from icky girls trying to touch me. And I certainly didn’t want to accidently touch a girl or she would become pregnant! Then I would never have time to ride my skateboard.

Over the years, the cycle of life became less scary to me. Sure the getting a girl pregnant part still frightens me, but the touching a girl part is a lot more fun than they made it look like in that Sex Ed video. So now that the truth is out, that the stork doesn’t deliver babies, I started wondering about life’s other great mysterious. Like whether or not the tale my Dad told me about a miniature man living behind the traffic lights is true or not. I pictured him to be roughly 6 inches tall and dressed like a lumberjack (why a lumberjack I have no idea). He wore overalls, a red flannel, a knit cap, construction boots and sported reddish/brown curly hair and a mustache - like the Brawny paper towels dude. He was in charge of turning the lights from red to green. He only switched them to yellow momentarily because he was a prankster and was just trying to see if people were paying attention. If we encountered a traffic light that wasn't working, it meant that one of the miniature men called off sick. This is the tale my Dad filled my head with, I more or less ran with the story and gave it so much detail that it was really believable. I was so sure this was true that I began telling my friends about the traffic signal phenomenon and wondered why their parents would chuckle at me.

Sadly though, not everything in life is run by midgets or occurs via a sprinkling of magic pixie dust. The only true miracle in life is the miracle of life itself, and even it is more or less a scientific process that evolves over a series of stages. So if you are thinking that an Ompa Loompa, MiniMe, WeeMan, Gary Coleman or even Webster is behind the magic of how your blog post gets published instantly the moment you click your mouse, you’re wrong. Perhaps you take the instant gratification of publishing your words on the web for granted, but I don’t. I’m rather curious about the life cycle of a blog post. Is a tiny lumberjack or the stork behind it? Think about it. I've looked into it and this is what I've learned...

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents. From there it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers. Thanks to search engines and aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a lot of people. And thanks to the folks at Wired Magazine, you can see how the whole process unfolds - The Life Cycle Of A Blog Post