I've been pretty silent on the blogging front over the last three weeks and I wanted to apologize to my regular readers.  It looks like I'll be having time to blog again next week.

According to most blogging pundits going silent is a sure way to kill readership.  They recommend sharing short personal snippets to keep your blog going so that people find something (even something useless) on your blog every day.  At the same time others recommend that you never share personal information in your blog as that is "dangerous" (it invites stalking I suppose). 

To achieve both of these goals, I offer below the follow potential reasons that I haven't updated my blog in a while:

Reason 1:  My life-partner Sven and I felt we needed to spend quality time giving emotional support to a family of adopted ducks.  This emotional support was needed since we recently lost our beloved goat Harriet and the ducks (especially Bob, Little Lisa, and Carlos) were taking it very hard. 

Reason 2:  There is no Kevin Barnes, I'm really a short bearded woman named Anna Nicole Jones who lives alone with my 59 cats.  I was busy kidnapping them back from the animal shelter after they were taken away by fiendish do-gooders.  Apparently my nosy neighbor reported strange smells coming from my house.  I was so preoccupied that I couldn't find time to make it to the library to write my Code Craft column.

Reason 3:  I'm a top-secret agent who works for a counter-terrorism agency so secret that it doesn't even have its own three letter acronym.  The Code Craft site is really a fiendishly well-crafted honey-pot designed to draw in members of the Tibet-based Al-Codie terrorist sect.  Going silent was a way to provide the double-secret "go" codes to my cohorts in preparation for our forthcoming assault on the Al-Codie Ninja Code-Hause.

Reason 4: I work for a fast-paced startup, have a wife and two kids, and help out friends with various projects; all of this cuts in to my writing time occasionally.