Tag Archives: blog review

2023 and all That

Posted on by Steve Higgins

This is the time of year when I look back at my posts from the previous twelve months and try and work out what was good, what was bad, what was popular and what was a bit of a dud. Looking over at my WordPress stats page I see that this year was an amazing year for me. I had pretty much double the visitors I had last year so my two books, Floating in Space and A Warrior of Words had more exposure than ever before. That sounds good but I can’t say I noticed any corresponding spike in sales which is a pity because that means my chances of ever owning a Ferrari are getting slimmer every week.

On my two main social media channels, WordPress and YouTube, I can click on my stats pages and be presented by all sorts of facts and figures which some bloggers can use to make their channels more and more appealing to their followers. That’s pretty much what I’d like to do but even though I have all that information at my finger tips I’m not sure what to do with it.

Over on YouTube I made a video just after the last lockdown which was basically me wandering about Manchester and blabbing away into my video camera perched on a selfie stick. For some reason It proved quite popular and pulled in a lot of viewers so you might be tempted to think why not do more of those sorts of videos? Well, the thing is, blabbing away to my camera is not really my sort of thing. I like to make a video, choose the best shots, add some stills and then write a voice over, record it and try and match up the visuals to the narration. Should I change everything then to get more viewers? The correct answer is probably yes but as blabbing into the camera is something I’m not really happy with I just tend to stick with my usual way of working.

I should mention here that all the following links to my previous posts should open in a new page.

Over here on WordPress the post that had brought in all my extra readers is a post called Manipulating the Image. It started off about an Instagram glamour model called Olivia Casta who it seems isn’t quite as young as she seems. I spotted an internet article claiming that she was an older model who uses a ‘face app’ to make herself look like a teenager. This led to me looking at various photographic manipulations I’ve heard about including the famous picture of JFK assassin Lee Oswald which, he claimed, was a fake image.

Olivia Casta

I must get 50 or 60 hits on that post every day but I’m not sure why it’s so popular. Perhaps it’s just a really outstanding post (I like to think so anyway) or maybe it’s because it’s linked to a popular young internet model who pops up frequently on Google searches. I could perhaps make more posts about internet glamour models but would that bring serious readers to my blog? Would it bring potential book buyers to me? Probably not. So, stats can be interesting but do they help bloggers and writers like me or do they just tend to confuse us?

Of course, integrity as a writer is important. Do I really care about getting more readers and more likes and better and better stats? Shouldn’t I care more about doing justice to myself as a writer and being true to myself?

Actually, I kind of like getting more readers and more likes. Anyway, time to have a deeper look back to 2023.

Back in January I had got interested in my past family and treated myself to a discounted membership of one of those ancestry sites and I wrote a couple of posts about what was then a new interest for me. I soon found tracing ancestors wasn’t as easy as I had thought. I was also getting ready to jet off to Lanzarote and escape the freezing UK weather and I posted a few Sun Lounger posts about life in Lanzarote.

In February I bought the Richard Burton Diaries. In the first few pages the usual question came up. Why did Burton write them? For eventual publication? Perhaps. Perhaps just like me, he wanted to make a record of what was happening to him. Perhaps again, like me, he just liked writing, he did have ambitions to be a writer. Journaling is good, it enables you to look back, to remember things, to re experience them and it will, hopefully, get one writing when one has few ideas. After a few diary entries I like to think I will be ready, hopefully, to produce some creative writing. That’s my plan anyway. Richard Burton used to take a ‘book bag’ away with him whenever he travelled which has inspired my own Book Bag blog posts.

In Lanzarote I was thinking about Manchester and wrote about Taking The Man out of Manchester. I also rebooted an old post about creating a video in 1992 about Manchester Taxi drivers.

Looking uo at the Beetham Tower

In March, still thinking about my ancestors, I did a post about my DNA and another post looking at interesting transformations.

In April I published a post about connecting classic films and another about the thoughts that came to me while driving my car. I’ve always thought that my best story ideas come while driving.

In May I was still looking back. I opened up my schoolboy scrapbook and took a look at the things I used to paste in there and also another one about my youth in Writing and Young Higgins. May was a sad time for me though as my mother died aged 93.

In July I had been looking through some of the books in my collection and wrote about my interest in Marilyn Monroe. In August I wrote some more about Marilyn this time after searching through some of my old VHS documentary films.

Round about this time I had a complete personal disaster when I somehow managed to delete my diary for the year. It’s a diary written in a word document and I must have somehow selected everything, instead of a small passage I had wanted to rewrite and deleted it all. I was on a new page so I hadn’t realised everything was gone. Just a short new sentence remained although I did have a backup copy but that only ran to March. Everything I had written about my mother’s death and funeral was gone. I managed to reconstruct some entries made up of what I remembered about that period but even so, I was really unhappy.

In September I wrote about the year 1977 which of course is the year Floating in Space is set and I was reading a collection of Noel Coward’s autobiographies.

October is my birthday month although I’ve always wished I could have been born in the summer. October always signals to me the beginning of the end of the year. What is there to look forward to except dark nights, bonfire night, Halloween and the cold? I’ve produced quite a few repeated themes in my posts and one of them, A Slice of My Life, was published in this month.

In November I was hit by one of the deadliest diseases known to man yes, the dreaded man-flu. I managed to knock out a few blog posts though including a homage to some of my favourite TV shows produced by Gerry Anderson.

In December I wrote about the Godfather; the film and the book and one of my favourite film actors, Cary Grant, inspired by the new TV series about Cary, Archie.

That then was my year in the blogging world. This post is my 596th post and all being well in a short while I’ll be publishing post number 600. Getting back to my stats, this year was a bumper year for me in terms of visitors to my pages. as I mentioned earlier, visits to my site were almost double of those in 2022 but have readers been interested enough to buy Floating in Space or my poetry anthology, A Warrior of Words? Actually, no they haven’t. Perhaps then I should just pack it all, give up blogging and writing. Of course, if I did that, how else would I occupy myself? The thing is, I actually like writing and not only that, I’ve just had an idea for another blog post.

Tune in next week for more book and film posts as well as more observations and anecdotes.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

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If That was 2022, I’ve Had It!

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s that time again when I like to take a look back to the previous year and review what I have done and what I’ve written. All the links here open up into a new page and will reveal my previous blog posts and open them up for another read.

January

I started off with a post called The Worst Week of My Life. I’m not sure where that subject came from but I’m guessing that it was a blog prompt idea that I’d seen somewhere. Having led a reasonably pleasant life, I’ve not really had many particularly low points, or particularly high points when it comes down to it. I mention fleetingly the time my car engine was ruined when I forgot to put anti freeze in and the time my Kawasaki Z500 was stolen but I mostly focus on the lives of some people in the news at the time. Boris Johnson who was then the Prime Minister wasn’t having a good week and in fact was later forced to resign.

February

The Electric Bill, The Banking App and Me was a post about the difficulties one can get into using modern technology. Banking applications can be pretty handy but they all work by removing people from the equation. When things go wrong it’s not always easy to find people; actual people, bank employees or staff from whatever organisation you are trying to get through to. You’ll get directed to various pages of the company website or even to the Frequently Asked Questions page but getting hold of another human being? That can be hard work.

January and February are my least favourite times of the year and when it’s cold and wet I tend to just clam up in front of the fire and wait for the Spring. One thing I like to do though is eat and I don’t just mean restaurants and pubs, I actually cook things and I look to my small collections of cookery books for inspiration, which I talked about in a post called Cooks and Cookbooks.

March

When I started this blog a few years ago my aim was just to promote my book Floating in Space. After all, writing a book is one thing but getting people to know about it and then actually buy it is another thing altogether. Since then, even though each post finishes with a little plug for my book, I’ve found that I’m actually more interested in the blog posts themselves rather than Floating in Space. That’s why hitting my 500th blog post with The Big 500 was such a special event.

Blogs, Video and a Social Media Marketing Mix was a popular blog post and in it I explored all the things we self published authors have to do in terms of social media to get our message out to the public.

April

2022 was the year Vladimir Putin decided he was going to attack the Ukraine. He wasn’t happy that the Ukrainians were getting too friendly with the west and reports indicating they were considering joining NATO alarmed him so much that he ordered his army to invade. Things however didn’t go too well for the Russians and instead of a quick takeover, the Ukrainians fought back and may even defeat the invaders. What this will mean for Russia and the world it’s difficult to say. Can Putin carry on as leader if the Ukraine repulses his invasion? I think we’d all sleep a little easier if someone less agressive and more democratic took over. I wrote more about Putin and other Russian leaders in Those Pesky Rouskies.

When I’m stuck for a blog idea I sometimes tend to just write about myself. I’ve done it a few times before and now I’m up to part 3 of The Story of My Life.

As you might have guessed if you are a regular reader I really hate the cold and I was so happy to see the arrival of summer. Liz and I dusted off our motorhome, filled up the tank and took off for an extended trip to France. We had a couple of problems but were helped by members of the motorhoming community and I wrote more about that in Returning to France and the Kindness of Strangers.

June

I retired this year and retirement was on my mind when I wrote about The Day I Finally Cracked It. Retiring brought back memories of an old bus colleague whose catchphrase was ‘have you cracked it yet?’.

July

Memory, Memories and Memorabilia was a post about memory and was inspired by a photograph of my late aunt Ada who was killed in a cycling accident before I was born. My mother suffers with dementia but a picture I found of Ada seemed to lift her up and stimulate her memories.

August

2022’s most viewed blog post was Manipulating the Image. It started off when some spam email sent me looking for an internet glamour girl called Olivia Casta. One internet post claimed Olivia was actually a much older woman made to look younger by an imaging app so I spent the rest of the post looking at ways images can be manipulated.

September

Blogging Out Loud was a post about sounds; the sound of my voice which I use in podcasts and video voiceovers and even sounds that conjure up old memories.

October

After a summer spent in our motorhome I decided to write more about A Day in The Life of a Motorhomer and filled readers in about a typical day spent in our small van out in the quiet of the Loire Valley.

I’ve not written much about Formula 1 racing this year, perhaps my interest in the sport is waning a little, despite following the sport since childhood. This year we had a number of world champions competing together; Lewis Hamilton with 7 titles, Sebastian Vettel with 4, Fernando Alonso with 2 and current champion Max Verstappen who added the 2022 crown to his controversial win the previous year. Ferrari started the year on top but their challenge gradually faded and Max took an amazing 15 wins in 2022. None of the champions I have mentioned made any great contributions to the action in 2022, perhaps because this is the era of the car and without a great, or even a good car, champions like Hamilton, Vettel and others are just wasting their time. Of course Perez, Max’s teammate had, supposedly, the same car as Max and although he won a few times he was hardly close enough to challenge for the championship. Even so the times when a driver like Moss or Stewart could manhandle a bad car into the winners’ circle are long gone. An F1 post I wrote this year was about the F1 of the past, Autographs, Murray Walker and F1.

Being a bit of an amateur film buff, I always tend to produce plenty of film themed posts and 2022 was no exception. Two particular posts I should mention were ones when I decided to review entire film franchises. This was greatly helped when Film 4 in the UK decided to show the entire Mission Impossible series and a few weeks later ITV3 or 4 did a similar thing with the Rocky films. I sat through both film series with my notebook in hand and jotted down my thoughts.

Another October post was one I wrote about Things I Couldn’t do Without and as I missed out music, I put together a music post titled If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On.

November

One of the places I visited this year was Compiègne in France where the armistice was signed which ended the First World War. Hitler came here in 1940 when Nazi Germany defeated France and forced the French to sign the surrender in the same railway car where the Germans had surrendered in 1918. I shot a short video at the site and wrote a post titled The Glade of the Armistice.

December

As we moved into December things started to get cold and as I mentioned earlier, I really do hate the cold, so much so I’m seriously considering moving to somewhere hot. It’s C C Cold was a post about the cold with a few links to cold themed films thrown in for good measure.

That then was my life, at least my blogging life in 2022. I’m looking forward to 2023 and hoping that I don’t run out of blog post ideas. I hope you had a good 2022. Best wishes for 2023!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.