Recently I had an inquiry about cleaning articles. Not cleaning as in editing my posts, but cleaning as in articles about the act of cleaning. My correspondent “noticed we cover similar topics, such as housekeeping and cleaning tips.” I immediately began to worry about my memory. I’m rapidly approaching 50 (birthdays in this mirror are much closer than they appear) and it occurred to me that I had gone on some kind of spree writing posts about housekeeping and cleaning tips.
I immediately ran a search of the blog for the term “housekeeping.” Sure enough, there were six posts returning in the search results:
- Hotel Alarm Clocks (January 24, 2021)
- December Housekeeping (December 12, 2013)
- A Couple of Housekeeping Notes for Friday (October 30, 2012)
- Some Housekeeping Notes (October 10, 2012)
- Going Paperless: Answers to Your Questions on Paperless Lifestyle (August 15, 2013)
- 2 hour nap (July 3, 2007)
Honestly, I was surprised there were six. That was about six more than I expected. 6 posts out of about 7,100 comes to about 1/800th of percent of all of my posts. Of course, I couldn’t leave it at that. I had to search for the term “cleaning tips” as well. I couldn’t imagine there were six of these. I am the last person I know who should be giving cleaning tips–with the possible exception of my kids. It turned out there were four matches in the search results:
- Going Paperless Quick Tip: 5 Spring Cleaning Tips for Streamlining Evernote (April 29, 2014)
- Going Paperless: Automatically Tracking Business Mileage with an Automatic Link, IFTTT, and Evernote (May 6, 2014)
- Going Paperless: 5 Paperless Spring Cleaning Tips (March 26, 2013)
- Going Paperless (undated)
Okay, well, these at least make sense. And they are all related to my Going Paperless series from 8-10 years ago.
I can’t help but be a little suspicious when I get an email request to add a link to a post from someone who says they’ve been enjoying my posts on housekeeping and spring cleaning — but doesn’t mention a specific post. It’s not that I am not grateful that someone is interested in the blog. But I get enough of these requests that I can tell pretty well when the person sending them hasn’t read a word I have written.
Still, I am grateful to the sender’s message because it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do some housekeeping1 here on the blog and revise my Site Policies page. I took care of that earlier today. I also updated the automatically generated email that goes out to requests for guests posts, link sharing, advertising, etc. What’s more, I got a blog post out of it, too, which is always a win.
Written on March 14, 2022.
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- Now this term will return 7 posts. ↩
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I get those. Not about housekeeping but about other things I may have posted at random about at some point. Coffee and sleep are frequent offenders. The people sending those emails are just spammers.