Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

One of the useful things about Blogger is the stats.  Below is the list of my most popular posts.  I'm slightly depressed by the fact that my two most popular reviews by far are the ones in which I have spread myself somewhat on the book's failings.  It is much easier to be snarky, I find, than to write a really good, positive review.  The position of  War Horse  (which is a positive review) in the stats is more likely to be because of its current mighty popularity as a play. The one post whose position in the top five really mystifies me is  The Way Things Were:  Pony Magazine in the 1960s,  which is a look back at riding clothes adverts and the beauties of the 1960s jodphur .   The stats aren't precise enough for me to work out quite how people find that post, but I'd love to know why it's stayed so popular.   Lauren Brooke: Heartland 19 Sep 2008, 13 comments 1,276  Pageviews Thelwell 29 Jul 2010, 1 commen...

I'm not quick at going with new technological developments, I must admit.  My mobile is of the strictly pared down variety.  It telephones.  It texts.  And that's about it.  Oh, and I can play Sudoku on it as well. However, if you have a more advanced phone my blog now has a mobile version, so you should be able to read it on your phone easily.  If you do happen to look at this blog on your mobile, I'd love to know if you think it works OK.

Perusing my stats, as you do when you know you should be clearing up the horrendous mess underneath your desk so your feet have somewhere to go, I came across the current recent searches: tights bathing machine detailed story summary War Horse (to which the only answer must be READ THE BOOK) and one at which I can only boggle, and hope I don't get sent a review copy.  Or perhaps I do want a review copy.  Who knows? self publishing children's compost book

Thanks to Rachael from Tales from the Village for this idea.  If you have analytics on your site, which I do, you can track what searches people used to find you.  I've often cast a cursory look at the keywords people have used, but boy have I been missing a trick. I wonder why anyone would want to know about Chilprufe children's vests,  a nightmare I remember vividly from my youth.  Those I think must have been the woollen vests Ann Derry's mother forced her to take on a pony trek in Jill's Gymkhana.   Ann buried them in a hedge. There was a rather sad search on "nobody loves me enough to buy me a unicorn ", which poster must have become all the sadder if they read some of my more trenchant posts on the subject of the unicorn . Hopefully the people who searched for Black Beauty , far and away the most popular route to this blog, were a bit happier with what they found.  Goodness knows I've done enough posts on the subject. I am intrigued by the p...

We decided a couple of weeks ago to go wireless, as this would mean I could move the computer back down to the study, rather than upstairs where it has been since we got broadband. One penalty of living in a very old house is that it has had odd things happen to it over the years, which as they would cost a fortune to sort out and there are more important things needing attention, like buildings actually falling down, we have learned to make do with where we can. So, when, after 3 BT engineer visits and countless hours on the telephone, we were told there was only one place broadband would go unless we completely re-did our telephone wiring from scratch, we decided to live with it. But wireless, we thought, would solve all our problems. Two weeks of mind bending frustration later, I am here to tell you it did not. Initially all was well, but then day by day the service got worse and worse, no matter what we did. Last week I ended up with no internet connection at all, which when...

Each and every time I do a catalogue (the new one's out tomorrow, on my website ) a bit of technology gathers itself up and does battle. There was the time the entire website was corrupt (a time so dreadful, and producing such a state of frantic flurry in their mother that the whole family remembers it with awe); the printer has thrown numerous hissy fits; my aged version of Microsoft Word decided that there had been one Windows XP update too many and it would never load again..... but this time I thought I might just make it. I wasn't confident enough to think there wouldn't be any problems, but I did have just the faintest of hopes. I wrote the catalogue on my trusty copy of OpenOffice (advert coming: this is a mostly excellent FREE alternative to Microsoft); managed, oh joy, to work out how to produce a brochure, found a printer to produce the things, loaded everything onto the web ready.... the camera threw a few fits, but I was ready for it and coped, but the lab...