Onwards & Upwards

I think today marks  8 months of blogging a post every single day. Yes, this is the most productive Police Blog in the Blogosphere. (OK, sometimes I go for quantity rather than quality, it’s true). What started off as an attempt to post every day for a month slipped into three months & then six months, so I guess it would be rude not to try for a whole year (although when my holiday comes up it might be interesting).

Thanks to my small band of regular supporters & commenters, it would be soul destroying if nobody ever reacted to anything I typed, either pro or against (or indifferent). I couldn’t do it without you!

I was wondering what makes a good blog in general and a good police blog specifically. I know the ones I like & I also recognise ones which I don’t. I guess it’s a matter of personal taste but there are one or two really popular blogs out there which don’t light any fires for me. Yet they are read in the thousands.

So, you read blogs, presumably there is something here which persuades you to give up your valuable time to read it, you probably read other blogs too. What is the secret of a good blog, or in other words, how can I improve this one?  Is it the subject matter, the writing style, how important is humour/seriousness? Is length of post a factor, pictures? What is it which makes you want to come back to read the next update?

Suggestions greatly received….

Something & Nothing

I got interviewed the other day, not by PSD thankfully, but by another police blogger. You can check out the interview in Twining’s unique style over at his blog, The Twining Chronicles. 

I got tagged also by regular contributor, Annette, but owing to me not really understanding all this tagging business I didn’t know what to do. Apparently you have to mention 7 random facts about yourself & then tag 7 other people. I hope Annette will forgive me for not tagging anyone else but I don’t have 7 online friends.

 Here are my random facts. 

1. I have appeared on television in Germany, Russia, Yugoslavia & Poland. (all on different occasions)
   
2. I’ve had a general anaesthetic in hospital on at least  9 separate occasions.
3. I had a trial for the British National American Football Squad in the 80s.
4. I’ve had articles published in the UK & USA (nothing to do with police blogging).
5. I don’t like celery.
6. Before I married, I dated an opera singer.
7. I’ve performed CPR three times.

I’m not sure what that lot says about me, if anything.

Report Writing

Of the reasons I write this blog, one of them isn’t because I want a book deal.

Good luck to those who have, though. I bought PC Copperfield’s "Wasting Police Time", (I didn’t get past the first 20 pages because I had this feeling I’d read it all before - on the blog). I also bought PC Bloggs’ "Life of an on-call girl". I’ve not read that either. I might buy Insp. Gadget’s forthcoming book, & not read it as well.

Nope, I don’t want a book publishing deal… not like their’s anyway.

The kind of book publishing deal I want is more like Cumbria PC, Matt Hilton, who has just signed an £800,000 deal for a five book series of crime thrillers!

PC Hilton is now ex-PC Hilton having resigned on receipt of his good news. I can’t imagine what part of the £800,000 book writing deal has caused him to leave such a great job.

Yep, that’s the kind of book deal I could do with. I’m already dusting down "The Tails of Tigger the Cat", which I wrote for bedtime stories a few years back. Now I only need to find an agent.

Rumbled

It’s official. This blog is shite, it says so on the internet so it must be true.

Commenting on police blogs, PCSO Bloggs says, "After a while, though, you run out of material. You say your piece and then all that’s left is to comment on political news stories and post the odd YouTube video."

Oh dear, I commented on a political story this week AND posted a YouTube video, so it must be me she’s talking about!

And now, with this entry, I’ve gone & done another post which lacks material, is old & unoriginal… Wait a minute! It’s brand new, it’s all my own work & therefore must be original, things are looking up, perhaps it’s not me after all.

Mind you, I’ll give PCSO Bloggs one thing; it is very difficult coming up with something to post day in, day out, every bloody day for 7 months. 420 posts & counting (as opposed to PCSO Bloggs’ 79 posts.) So what I lack in quality I certainly make up for in quantity which is all that matters, according to my pie-eating tutor.

Maybe I’m just being a little sensitive & paranoid & it’s not me that the good PCSO is complaining about or maybe this blog really is shite.

It keeps me off the streets.

(or is that not what policing is about?)

Nightjack

The astute amongst you may have noticed a new link on my Blog inks to the right here.

Nightjack is a detective. I mis-spelled it when I wrote this post & used a ‘M’ instead of a ‘N’ which put me in mind of someone considering a moment or two of self-abuse.

It seems to have started in February & if you’ve not seen it yet, check it out, it looks like it’s going to be a great addition to the Police Blogger Community. (just make sure you come back here too!)

Six Months…

… of posting a blog every single day.

Not a bad achievement though I say so myself.

Must be worthy of a post with very little content or effort…..such as this one! 

New Links

I’m often surprised how people find my little blog.

I’ve mentioned Facebook & Safe Speed recently appearing in my stats. I found a new one this week. I’ve been linked to from IPEP - The International Police Expertise Platform. I have no idea what the site is all about but the name gives it a certain flair. They have an extensive links section including a list of police blogs throughout the world. I’m one of only  a few UK Police Blogs listed. I feel so humble, thank you.

Oh I’ve just noticed on the IPEP website that it is a division of the Police Academy of the Netherlands. I can’t see any of the official UK Police organisations linking to the heretics that are us police bloggers.

Quiet Night on the Blogging Front

Hello to the people who are visiting as a result of hearing something or following a link on Facebook. I don’t understand these things except to say that someone appears to be passing round a link to my blog via a message system, or email or something. My logs tell me this, I have no idea how it works.

Are there any of you out there who can help me with setting up Wordpress? I would like my links to go into categories, but at the moment they are just showing in one long list. I know it is something to do with changing something in the template but I don’t really know what to change. I know other police bloggers use Wordpress & have their links showing in categories, how do I do this - help!?

Onward & Upward

It struck me yesterday that I have now been blogging for 5 months with a post every single day. I can tell you that’s no mean feat. There are times, like today, as I write this at 23.45hrs, that I have nearly missed the deadline.

I took the opportunity to have the web stats emailed to me by the host who provides the webspace for this blog. I have to admit, this was somewhat inspired by Inspector Gadget reaching a massive 1 million hits - well done to him!

In September 2005 I had a total of 60 visitors who visited a total of 176 times and loaded 483 pages. A year later there were 1,347 visitors who visited 5,736 times with a total of over 10,000 pages. By September 2007 I was getting 1,800 unique visitors loading nearly 20,000 pages.

Things are looking even better for 2008; in 2007 I had a total of 220,000 hits (page loads). We’re only  one & half months into the year and already I’ve got 53,000 hits. I can’t even blame this meteoric rise on my friends, colleagues & family since none of them know I do this thing called blogging.

If things go as they have been I’ll be well on my way to 1 million hits some time in 2009, not bad for a little blog which doesn’t have anywhere near the following of the ‘Big Three’. Maybe I should aim for 1 million hits before the 200 weeks is up (which will be in the first half of 2009).

It would be great if more of you ‘quiet’ readers would join in.

Thanks to everyone who told me where they found this blog & how long they’ve been reading it, that post alone got me a record comments list. There’s still time to help me with it, just visit the Home Work post.

Homework

I’d be really grateful for some assistance from you lot out there.

I’m trying to make sense of my user stats and would love to know how you found my blog & how long you’ve been reading it.

Can you leave a quick comment on this post please, I’ll be your bestest friend…

Bloody Hell!

I apparently, have a reader who is a nurse in A&E, Mousie. She commented on my previous post about drink driving as I suppose be both see the aftermath of such, only we see it slightly earlier than she(he?) does.

Mousie kindly made an entry on her(his?) website saying "If you’ve never read 200 weeks before, now’s the time" & linking to the drink drive video article. So if you’re visiting this blog as a result of following the link on Mousie’s blog - welcome, and big thanks to you, Mousie.

The reason for the gratitude is that my hit rate in the last 24 hours as somewhat rocketed - well in my terms it’s rocketed, I expect many others are used to seeing figures well above what I reach.

To give you an example, when Inspector Gadget added me to his links, he became the best referrer to my blog over & above David Copperfield’s by maybe 3 to 1. Today, 42 people visited me from his blog. I’m usually happy if I get over  200 unique visitors a day so a quarter of them coming from him is quite impressive. I have had over 300 visitors I think twice, my maximum being 316.

I’ve just logged on to make up something for today’s post only to see that Mousie has sent no less than 150 visitors and yesterday I had 417 visitors, today I have 579 - 274 above my record!!

Cheers Mousie, I’ve not linked to any non-police blogs yet, so in honour of your patronage, I’ve added a link!

Thanks Gadget

Blimey, I knew Inspector Gadget was popular but didn’t realise quite how popular.

A couple of days ago I made mention that he didn’t link to me, he obviously caught site of that and added me on his blog links. On the day he did that my hit rate doubled. Now I say doubled in a Government-speak type of doubled as in, wow doubling is a lot. Unfortunately, it’s not so quite so impressive when you realise that the visitor rate here isn’t very high to start with. On the newish stats thingy I have it shows I usually get between 90 and 200 visitors per day, the highest in the last 3 months or so being 265.

On the day Gadget added me to his site this went up to 362. Sadly 2 days later it’s back down to normal levels. But interestingly I got most referals from David Copperfield’s blog followed by PlanetPolice. Now Gadget sends me the most people. The last 2 days he is sending me double what Copperfield’s blog sends. Does that mean he is doubly as popular as Copperfield? I haven’t a clue but if you’re visiting me from Inspector Gadget for the first time - Hi and thanks for taking a look.

Thanks Gadget, BTW I just got the Xmas Radio Times and see you are on Xmas Day, multi-talented!

Whoopee

Well, that makes 3 months with at least one blog entry every single solitary day, hurrah for me.

And that’s the easiest blog entry I’ve done for some time. 

Just Showing Off

I just noticed I’ve managed to post a blog every single day for TWO months! 

And a big thank you to the people who have supported this blog over the last two months too!  It’s great that most of my posts are being commented on now & gives me such a warm feeling inside. Mind you, it’s not easy, several times I’ve been siting her at 20 minutes to midnight having not posted that day and wondering what the f*** to post about - that’s usually when Mr Internet Video comes to the rescue, so if you see a video, you’ll know I took the easy way out!

Blog Updates

Well it seems the recent changes to the ‘back end’ I made have speeded up the site a bit with nobody reporting hung pages or dreadful loading times for a while now.

It appears that Belfast Peeler has given up the blog, all blog entries have been removed apart from the most current which appears to suggest someone at PSNI has found him out, if that’s true, that’s a shame, another nail in the coffin for police bloggers.

The Sleepy Policeman hasn’t posted since the beginning of July so I’ve removed that blog from the list. Police Camera Paperwork & Unlikely Cop haven’t blogged for a several weeks, will keep an eye on that to see if it’s just a temporary lapse.

I used to have a link to Police.UK which was the government Police portal set up when the police.uk domain name was first registered. There’s a limp message on the front page saying the service is no longer available. I’m not sure what happened there, maybe nobody used it.

And yes, this little roundup is just a way of making sure I have a post every day which so far I’ve managed since the 13th September!

Fame & Fortune Awaits

I got a pleasant surprise today. I went to check the forums over at police999.com as I usually do a couple of times a week, to see that they have a new design for the website. On the front page is a small section called "Police Blog Friends"  in which they link to yours truly together with a small select bunch of "WhichEndBites", "Toytown" & "Planet Police".

So welcome to anyone who might have clicked on that link!!

Personal Blogging Record

I’ve just realised I’ve made one post every day for a month. Phew!

I have to say it’s an awful lot of work. I’m spending my day wondering what the bloody hell I’m going to talk about. I’ve read more papers in the last few weeks than I have all year up ’til then. But I have to say I’ve enjoyed it.

Part of the reason I wanted to give it a go was to see if I could garner some extra involement from my readers in the form of comments. Most of my entries have comments you could count on the fingers of a half-eaten Kit-kat (or less) so the jury’s still out on that. I also wanted to see if it increased the amount of people visting.

Unfortunately, the stats plug-in I’ve been using for the last 18 months seems to slow the site down. I turned it off a couple of days ago and it appears that maybe the site is now loading more normally. I added a new stats plugin which is supposed to use far less load on the site so it will take me some time to see if readership is up.

Can I just take the opportunity to thank those of you who continue to read my blog (even if most of you are silent). If you’re a new reader, let me know and tell me how you found my blog.

I’m not promising to blog every day from now on, but I have a few ideas for the next few days so I’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and to WhichEndBites - yes you’re right it’s now much less than 200 weeks to go, quite a lot less. I don’t know when you get your resettlement courses but the lunches on ours are very good.

Planet Police

PlanetPolice.org is a police blog amalgamation. They trawl through various police blogs and reproduce posts with links back to the individual sites.

I had a few posts from my blog on there, some time ago, then for some reason they stopped posting my blog entries there. I was going to make a blog entry about it something along the lines of thinking it was an online advert for PC Bloggs, the Inspector Blog & David Copperfield, so many of their posts appear there and what have I done for them to lose interest in me, when I visited yesterday, it was the same, lots of entries from the big three, a few from one or two others & none from me.

Imagine my surprise, when I came to write the piece tonight and checked PlanetPolice I found no less than 7, count ‘em, seven 200weeks’ entries. Not that I object to having my posts reposted elsewhere, far from it, it’s nice to think someone feels they may be worthy of reporting.

In recognition of my recent re-entry into PlanetPolice’s blogs, I’ve added a link to them on my blog-roll. If you are PlanetPolice, reading this now, thanks very much, it’s great for us less-visited blogs to get some extra exposure, so don’t be a stranger!

Blog Speed - Any Difference?

Thanks to the reader who saw some people were having slow load times on this site & suggested a plugin thingy which is supposed to help improve the speed of the page loads.

I’ve added it.

Is there any difference? 

Blog Probs?

A few people have mentioned that this blog is slow to load and the comments system takes even longer which might be a clue as to why I get very few comments.

I’d be really grateful if you could let me know whether the site is slow or slower than usual for you because I really have no problems loading it or replying to comments, it seems fine from my end, but enough people have mentioned it that it must be an issue for some. Is it the same for everyone else? Doe sit really take so long for the comments screen to open that you give up waiting?

Please let me know. In the meantime I;ve contacted the people who provide the blog space to ask for assistance in speeding it up.