Every now and then this Blog becomes almost inactive. It still receives tens of thousands of views per month. I still use it as my Exobrain, but I go through weeks or months without posting anything new. The last three months have been like that, since this piece shortly after Tony Slattery died in mid-January.… Continue reading A long overdue catch-up (April 2025)
Over the years, most recently in this piece from September 2020 (updated in February 2021), I have written about the visitors that this Blog has attracted from faraway countries. In 2020 this site had been viewed at least once by people in 48 of the world’s 50 most populous countries. The exceptions were Iran (18th… Continue reading More about visitors from faraway countries (Iran, Yemen …)
Before setting up this Blog in 2015 I drafted hundreds of versions of pieces that eventually appeared here. I can trace some of these drafts back to 2006. That was when I started my daily habit of trying to write (or type, if you prefer) at least a thousand words of something every day. The… Continue reading “It’s not a switch, it’s a dial”
Things have been rather quiet on this Blog in recent months. It happens from time to time. I aim to have no more than a five-day gap between each post. I fell behind this target earlier in the year. In May I “back-filled” several months’ worth of pieces, going back to 2022 and explained the… Continue reading Three months to catch up on
Do you remember the concept of “Googlewhacking”? It was described on Dave Gorman’s website as “what happens when two words are entered in to Google and it comes back with one and only one hit.” I wrote about it in this piece in 2017, and included a link to Gorman’s site. Click on the link… Continue reading “Blogwhacking”
Last year, in this piece about the word “Journal”, I wrote about a Reunion Lunch at my old school, the first such event that I have attended. Of the seven people in my year who were there, five of us are connected through Facebook. I assume that the other two do not have Facebook accounts, like many other people… Continue reading A thousand stories I can’t tell you right now
In September 2019, in this piece about readers in distant places, I noted that this Blog has attracted at least one visitor from 38 of the 40 most populous nations on earth. The exceptions were Iran and Sudan (18th and 34th respectively in the list of countries by population). I wrote, “If either country does… Continue reading An update about readers in faraway places (Angola, Cuba, Sudan …)
A few months ago I wrote, in this piece, about readers in places like Nepal, Palau and the Falkland Islands, thousands of miles from West London where these words are being drafted. I noted that more than half of the countries in the world appear in the basic statistical information provided by WordPress about Visitors… Continue reading More about readers in distant places, and population
Feel free to leave a comment. Occasionally people do. Comments await approval before they are displayed on this Blog, so it might be a day or two before they appear. My most diligent readers email me directly about pieces, and tens of thousands of words have been drafted and sent in private email conversations. All… Continue reading Comments, and a selection of recent Spam
Every now and then I post an update about how many words there are on this Blog. The last such piece was in January 2018, when the word count for all Blog Posts and Menu Items had just passed 300,000. Thanks to some additions made yesterday to this piece about ITV quiz show “Tenable”, the… Continue reading Another milestone: 500,000 words
The Compartments 