Reflections on my blog after a year

There are new developments in the offing! By the end of September I will have finished my Cameroon and Sri Lanka postings. These will not disappear off the site completely, but be turned in to ebooks. The first 20 to sign up to automatic mailing will get a copy of their choice free. Beyond that I intend to charge £3 a book.

I am giving up on fund raising. The blog did not make money for my causes. However, I will keep the Sri Lanka Girls’ Home in the hopes that they can benefit from any future potential sales of my Sri Lanka ebook. Any other potential funding I may make will be used to pay for the costs of running my site so it becomes minimally expensive as a hobby.

Just this week my web designer showed me how to up my SEO ratings when I load my blog posts! Obviously I have not been able to absorb all the technical stuff quickly at all! I still don’t understand it to be honest. I don’t know how people come to my site from all over the world, but they do. The most popular search is breasts, so the post where I wrote about breasts in Sri Lankan culture got a lot of hits even though it is scarcely salacious.

I will change my categories slightly so that my ‘Here and Now’ historic posts can slot in to a number of categories and will still mean that there is a broader range of my writing for new people coming to the site to peruse and get an idea of my style. My community page will include postings on community development from me rather than just hoping for people writing in. This did not materialise in the numbers I might have hoped for.

I will have a new postings series, every Tuesday, ‘letters to Paul’. These letters to cancer sufferer Paul were written 2007 – 2008 and in part chart my post marriage failure anguish. It is a younger, rawer, writing style before I get in to the flow on my cogitations, but I think it may be of interest in a different way.

The general content of the blog will move away from having a more specific community development focus and include musings on other issues and concerns from a 50+ perspective. At the moment there are no VSO style adventures in the offing to write about!

 

The blog continues to be the best experiment. I have found it immensely therapeutic that at a cusp period in my life I can review, reflect and put in order those events and experiences that have been so influential and important to me.

I have found myself as a writer. I am not sure yet I will continue to have enough material to blog three times a week, so for a while, as we go through a transition on the site, I may go down to twice! Thank you so much for following me.