I have also taken this opportunity to purge the 129 “subscribers” who had registered with the site.  None of them had posted a comment, and they all had nonsense-seeming user names and suspicious e-mails, so I suspect they were attempted spam accounts.

If I have deleted the account of an actual reader, my apologies.  But a registered account is not necessary to comment, or read, or subscribe to the RSS feed, so it seemed extraneous to leave that capability up and running as part of my WP install.  If I ever bring in a guest blogger or something, I’ll re-enable that functionality.