2014 - time for another change?

With hindsight I shouldn't have stopped posting to this blog. That decision was just another example of "the way I am" - I either do something wholeheartedly or I don't do it at all. I know that my nearest and dearest sometimes find this character trait rather wearing, as indeed do I. Perhaps 2014 will be the year when I finally do something about this aspect of my nature that has cost me so dear more than once!

I'm not going to make any public commitment regarding the frequency of posting to my re-launched blog because if I don't have a target then I cannot fail to achieve it - and if I'm not failing to meet some self-imposed challenge then I shouldn't feel the need to beat myself up if events conspire to thwart me.

So what has happened since July 2013?

The good
The Ragleth Writers is a top-priority fixed point in my month. I have not missed a single meeting since I moved to Ticklerton.

The Walking for Health group on a Wednesday is good for me both physically and emotionally. It is a shame that it sometimes clashes with other equally important events.

My cemetery blog http://grave-mistakes.blogspot.co.uk/ attracts as many as 2000 visitors a day which exceeds my wildest pre-launch dreams by a factor of 10!

The bad or sad
My long running email conversation with a fellow amateur astronomer and teacher in the USA has come to an end after 6 years. I wrote a long email to her in the summer and a much shorter "Happy Christmas" email last month but neither received a reply. The exchanges had flagged somewhat over the last 18 months as our family and hobby priorities changed but prior to that our regular correspondence had been a source of much pleasure to me.

Eve and Ella have finally decided to go public with their decision to stop publishing their monthly newsletter and blog. They mentioned this to me some months ago so it didn't come as a total surprise. However my email inbox is full of shocked responses from their wide circle of friends and it is obvious that their decision is seen by many as marking the end of an era. The good news is that the entire operation has been passed on to very capable replacements who, by the way, have already been shouldering quite of a lot of the burden since September.

The ugly
The long running saga of who owns the copyright to the 4 books on Nigerian postal history written by me as part of the Philip Cockrill series came to an end. The Court of Chancery in Bristol found 100% in my favour and I was awarded costs plus damages. Despite this the illegal copies are still on sale in the USA - although not in the UK.

Blogs - Part 2

There is something about blogging that brings out the worst in some people. When you launch a blog two things will almost inevitably happen.

The first is that you will start receiving spam comments, nominally responding to what you wrote but in practice containing a link, or links, to some questionable site. I assume that somebody has created a software programme that trawls the net looking for places to post promotional material thinly camouflaged as an expression of interest or support. Clicking on the link provided is always bad idea: unless you want to give your virus or malware checker some work to do!

The second, albeit marginally less annoying, thing that will happen, is that people will ask to swap links to your blog for links to their blog. On the face of it there is nothing wrong with doing this: although links between blogs with totally unrelated target audiences presumably don’t generate many hits.

In practice many of the young bloggers who do this have a strange way of behaving. They could, proactively, put a link to my blog from theirs. Then they could make contact asking me to reciprocate. This approach is almost never used but would work almost every time.

They could make contact to suggest a mutual link swap and demonstrate their sincerity by offering to link to my blog first or they could make contact and say that once I had put a link on my blog they would do the same and then actually do so. Neither approach seems to get used very often.

In practice they tend to make contact to say that once I had put a link on my blog they would do the same but then “forget” to do so until reminded or they never get around to doing so even if reminded. Both approaches are commonly used but both unfailingly result in me regarding them negatively.

And the whole process makes me sigh every time!