The world's worst writer is so bad, most of the readers are trying to take the web server offline. Syn flood attacks, shell access attempts, PHP probes, and Wordpress vulnerability requests make up the vast majority of traffic to the server. Much of it from nation states trying to protect their citizens from becoming bad writers themselves. Rodney Dangerfield didn't get no respect? Hold my beer.
The only bright spot was Claude bots downloading the entire site every couple of hours. Probably to train their latest atrocious writing AI agent. Claude refused to let me ask why they wanted my poorly written articles unless I paid them $100.
This one really hurt. The world's worst writer (www) has been online since May 26 2024 and there was only one email that I sent to myself to make sure the email address was working. Not one message with "you suck", or "I thought I was bad until I read your web site." I thought about moving to Facebook or X, but the social media diaspora would probably ignore me there just to mess with my head.
My old Wordpress blog had been online for 5 years and there were like 10 readers. There were ads at the bottom with pictures of unrecognizable horrible looking vegetables. Then all of a sudden the advertisers abandoned the blog. Maybe the horrible vegetable ad executives thought the articles made their ads look bad. Maybe I am the world's worst writer.
The world's worst writers need to make their writing look as good as possible. We spend a lot of time on graphics, layout, fonts, and colors to distract readers from the writing. My Wordpress theme was called typo. Typo was the least worst of the free Wordpress themes. The navigation menu is at the top. When a hapless reader clicks on the menu nothing happens. The reader is thinking this stupid thing is broken.
Scrolling down below the menu reveals the article. Now the reader is pissed off. I have to figure out how this freaking web page works to read this trash?
Something had to be done. The WordPress menu was driving readers away before they even read anything. Bad writers need as little friction as possible before the reader gets bored and finds something else to do.
This article from John Ankarstrom about writing HTML in HTML caught my attention. http://john.ankarstrom.se/html. I related to his opening line I'm not lying: this is the last time I'm ever going to rewrite my website.
This was the inspiration to self-host on a $7 raspberry pi zero with my dumpster fire zen.css. Another distraction from writing and no doubt a relief to the readers.
Even the world's worst writer's taste in other writers is suspect. One of my favorite writers is Hermann Hesse and his book Siddartha. The New Yorker wrote an article about how perpetually unfashionable Mr. Hesse is among the critics. They piled on attacking Mr Hesse calling him a little man. They said his readers were adolescents that had never grown up. If the critics can savage a Nobel Prize winning writer, they would have a field day on this web site. Infuriated, I penned another poorly written piece called In Defense of Hermann Hesse. Adam Kirsch is not getting a Christmas card from me this year. He would probably criticize my syntax and adolescent message: "We want to wish you a Merry Christmas."
The worst writers will sometimes do opposition research on other bad writers. It helps to know how low the bar is. The Wikipedia list of books considered the worst has a surprising entry: the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Salman Rushdie called it a novel so bad it gives bad novels a bad name.
It was encouraging this book sold 80 million copies. There was no dirt on Salman Rushdie though. His quote what kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
is way better than my quote There is nothing demilitarized about a demilitarized zone.