Treasures old....

Back in 2006/7, when I was out of work for some months, I was persuaded I could produce some income by writing blog posts for various sites. According to the site owners I would make piles of money and probably never have to go to work again. Yeah, right.

However, I did write a lot of blog posts, including ones for a site called Orble, where I had two blogs running consecutively. Both of these blogs mysteriously disappeared a few years ago, and no amount of inquiry to Orble elicited any response. Thankfully, I'd kept the posts from one of the sites - WorkReport.net - relating to issues I had with my prostate in the late 2008-early 2009, because I wanted to write a book using them. (The book eventually got published as Diary of a Prostate Wimp, available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle as well as other devices.)

I did make some cash out of these sites, through Google Adsense, so they weren't entirely wasted.

Another site, Triond, where I also made a small amount of cash (they paid monthly, rather than waiting till the payments had built up to US$100) also eventually went into some kind of AWOL status, and refused to respond to enquiries. Dozens of bloggers wrote to them but they just ignored us all.

The problem with these sites gradually disappearing off the Net is that you lose all the blog posts you've written - unless you're very good at backing things up. I wasn't that good, but early on I tended to write the posts offline, in Word, and then upload them to the blog. Which meant I had copies of them.

I've been sifting back through my old files, and have discovered a fairly large wad of posts, some good, some not so good. In order to give the better ones a new lease of life, I'll add them to this blog over the next months/year. I'll note on when and where they first appeared (if I actually have those details) so that you don't think you're reading totally new material. Not that it would matter: there's an awful lot of recycled material on the Internet!

Just another little project....

Post-Grimhilda!

Now that Grimhilda! is online, I can move onto the next project. Some will no doubt think this will be the sequel to Grimhilda! and originally that was my intention.  However, I've had another writing project sitting on the backburner for some time, and since it's mainly a matter of editing and editing (and perhaps editing again) I've gone on to do that.  I'm planning on getting the book online by April.

It concerns a time in late 2008 when I had a biopsy for possible prostate cancer. The biopsy itself was unpleasant, but the aftermath was much worse. You'll have to wait until the book comes out to find out why.

Suffice to say I didn't go on to have prostate cancer, for which I'm very grateful, but at the time I was going through a painful period, and I wrote a number of blog posts about it on WorkReport, a blog I used - as you might infer by its name - mainly for work-related posts. It had started when I was looking for work in late 2006 and I'm still running it today, though, since I'm now retired, it's changed its focus considerably. That's one of the great boons of blogs: you can move them on as your situation changes.

Anyway, the book is obviously non-fiction, so that'll be something of a shift from Grimhilda!  But for those who are wondering when the sequel to the musical is going to arrive, I can tell you that I had a meeting today with my co-writer, and we threw some ideas around. It may not be quite the sequel you'll expect - it may not be what we expect - but it will be a musical and of course it'll be great fun to be involved in. So put your name down now!  :)

Going round the mountains

Just occurred to me that when I began this blog I didn't have much idea what I was going to write about (some might say that nothing's changed), so the first bunch of posts I put up on here were quotes, (mostly from books, some from newspaper reports), that I'd collected over the years, and which I thought were worth sharing.   The quotes aspect quickly gave way to writing about a host of different subjects, so much so that whenever I'm asked by some group to tell them what the focus of my blog is, I'm at a loss.  It has an arts aspect, but also deals with religion, politics, social issues, and a variety of quirky things that happened to interest me.  It's rather like a follow-up to the weekly column I used to write for Dunedin's weekly Star newspaper, back in the 90s.  It also had a wide-ranging 'focus.'   I was fortunate that the editor of the paper didn't see any problem with me writing about whatever I felt like.  I always think that columnists who have to focus on the same topic week after week (or even day after day) have a kind of corner they're stuck in.

Anyway, I was going to say that another blog I write, Workreport.net, started out as having a particular focus: seeking work when I was unemployed.  That's what the first bunch of posts covered, and then gradually, when I actually got a job, I moved into writing about that job itself, to some degree.  Then, in early 2009, when I was having prostate problems, that's what the column focused on (to the extent that I was planning at one stage to form these posts into an ebook).  The blog stuttered along for a while after that, and then found itself revitalised as a...blog for quotes!  Full circle.  Sort of.

Stats at the all-time high!

Got my readership stats from the Orble.com site today and was pleasantly surprised to see that they were the highest they’ve ever been. Curiously enough, these high numbers are never reflected in their counterpart over on Google Analytics. I’d love to know why the two don’t match, but it’s not the end of the world. I presume Orble’s stats system knows what it’s doing.
Top of the list of posts on WorkReport.net is the one about the Titanic Museum. It’s been top of the list every time I’ve checked the stats. Again this is a curious thing: why does this particular post get picked up time and again? I don’t come up anywhere near the top on Google with this particular item, so how is that a bunch of people find my post each day? And what’s so hot about the Titanic Museum anyway?
I know that the movie, Titanic, is one of the all-time most-loved movies (don’t even consider asking me why), so does that have some kind of offshoot to the Museum? Who knows? As long as it keeps bringing one of my posts higher up the list, I’m happy!
The other top post, the one on Webitz.net, is called 69 Ways. It talks about a blog run by a 13-year-old (at least he was when I wrote the post back in 2007) called Make Money Online with a 13-year-old.
I’d love to know more about this guy – my suspicion is that he’s actually rather more than a 13-year-old. More likely he’s a smart adult cookie who thought that passing himself off as a teenager would have more effect. It obviously does! I wonder how long he can remain a teenager, though? Or won’t people care?
Anyway, his site is still a lot of fun to visit: full of money-making schemes, some of them typical of the Net as a whole, some of them workable. He also has an article on there written by someone else on driving traffic to your blog. It’s the sort of thing ProBlogger does well, and it’s the sort of thing that does drive traffic – just writing about it seems to do it!