I haven’t blogged very much lately, although that’s not to say there’s nothing to say or comment on. So here’s my pondering…..
I’ve had a few technical issues with my blog, this is about being an amateur blogger and not always keeping up with the latest widget or plug in updates. So sometimes things go seriously wrong and a while back it went off-line for a few hours while totally out of action. Talk about frustrating! Thankfully it came back okay but sometimes this seems through luck and not judgement or skill.
Another thing to be thankful for is my friend Alex who has kindly allowed me to twist his arm and give me some assistance again. This might include giving the whole blog a make-over with a new theme.
The benefits of blogging
I have commented on blogging before and sometimes need to remind myself of this. It seems the more I blog, the more rewarding it becomes. It’s nice when readers leave comments or get in touch to chat, have a conversation or ask me to do a review or something. Alongside this is that the more I blog, the more interaction, the higher the hit rate becomes.
Right now the hit rate is seriously in the doldrums. Normally feels more healthy when I get several hundred hits a day, potentially from all around the World. That’s nice, but it’s not the reason for blogging. The main thing is to have some kind of on-line journal that will be nice to look back on. This combined with the interaction with others makes it good fun.
Future directions
Having paid in advance for my domain name and hosting for the next few years I am keeping this blog going, so no worries there. What has been running through my mind is starting another blog along the lines of healthy living for my age group (sort of middle age) which should keep me going for quite a while.
The advantage of this direction is clear – I can blog perhaps about a wider range of issues that interest me. This means other things alongside cycling – i.e. running, food, nutrition, gym workouts, coffee, dealing with stress and so on. I feel as if I’d like to adopt a more personal style for the next blog. This is where getting the strategy sorted is vital of the blog’s success.
Other musings of the past and future….
It must be a year ago when I handed in my resignation for the job I’d been in for many years; this was all to do with criminal justice, rehabilitation and the like. I surprised myself – possibly a few others – by resigning. My next career step was into my local authority for a modest manager job in the world of regeneration and I’ve been there for almost a year. I’ve taken a slight drop in salary but we can afford to take the hit.
It would have been so easy for that route to have been different asI had been half hoping for a redundancy payment. In fact this is where it all went wrong; let me explain. Knowing there was a going to be a surplus of corporate services staff, an enhanced voluntary redundancy scheme was introduced and quite a lot of people took it. It was tempting as I could have walked with 18 months salary. And yet there was meant to be a second phase which I thought I’d wait for, in case things turned out to be as disastrous as I feared. Yes things became disastrous and to make it worse, the scheme didn’t have a second phase, only straight redundancies or an unattractive voluntary severance scheme.
The general mood amongst my colleagues had been low for some time and the future direction seemed bleak. I asked myself if I would encourage a younger person to enter the profession now: the answer would have to be a clear “no”. This, combined with the immoral commercialisation of justice is why I decided to quit. The biggest regret I have is leaving behind some great colleagues, many I liked a great deal.
While all of this was going on, I was considering other options including blogging more seriously and a few other things which were loosely connected. I sometimes wonder where I could have ended up had I taken this route instead. One of the things I would have looked into would be setting up a bicycle workshop to support those with mental health problems (blogged before about this) and a few other things.
Now our two daughters are away at University and College, I ought to have a little more time on my hands to work through a few of these things. While 2016 has been eventful for us as a family, I suspect 2017 could be an interesting year….
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