Boring Link Within

A few months ago I added "Link Within" to my blog. It was a nice idea : it would search through my blog back catalogue and pull up three related posts which it would spotlight at the end of the current post under the heading "You Might Also Like". I assume it chooses the related posts by searching for key words in the titles or the labels. However it did it, it seemed to work quite well .... for a time. Then for some reason it became fixated on one particular post and added it to the "You Might Also Like" at the end of every post. What is worse, the post in question was one titled "So Boring"! After a week or two of my readers being asked whether they might also be interested in "So Boring", I began to get a bit of a complex and decided that I was being unfairly targeted by a Google gadget which was far too perceptive for its own good. Deciding to fight back, I deleted the original "So Boring" post in the hope that if the post didn't exist, the gadget would no longer direct readers to it. Did it work? Did it heck. It continued to offer a link to "So Boring" and, when you clicked on it, it suggested that it could no longer locate the particular post in question (hinting, I suspect, that there were too many that fitted the description to choose from). My only recourse was radical surgery and therefore I removed the "Link Within" gadget altogether.

Which was a pity as the ability to point readers in the direction of older posts was quite useful. And it would also be useful to point readers in the direction of some of the posts on my other blogs, or some of the posts of my blogging friends. The only solution was to manually add a Link feature at the end of posts and this I have been experimenting with for the last few days. So, from now onwards, at the end of each post, you will find a ""You Might Also Like...." link list. At some time or another I will try to include links to all the other blogs I follow, but the order will be totally random so if your blog doesn't appear in the near future, just be patient.

As we seem to have got on to the "boring" theme I thought I would share with you another postcard from my collection. I remember buying this postcard forty or so years ago. I was attracted to it at the time because I thought it was probably the most boring picture postcard I had ever seen. It features three buildings in Hipperholme - a village about six miles from where I live - and shows the church, the pub and the newsagents shop. Whilst such a triptych would normally have the power to be visually attractive, poor Hipperholme seems to be devoid of beauty in each case.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE ........

A CANADIAN FAMILY : A blog all about postcards that is never boring is the one published by Canadian blogger Evelyn Yvonne Theriault. Whether your interest lie in postcards or genealogy it is always well worth a visit.

POSTCARDS FROM AMY : Talking of postcards, you can catch up on the latest postcard from my and my dog Amy describing our coast-to-coast walk across America.

Daily Postcard : Laharna Hotel, Co. Antrim

This postcard was sent to Great Uncle Fowler in 1913 by someone who simply identified themselves as G. Curry. It shows the wonderfully Edwardian Laharna Hotel which was the pride of the Northern Ireland holiday coast. The hotel was built in 1903 and replaced an earlier hotel which burned down in 1901. As far as I can discover, the Hotel tottered on until the close of the twentieth century when it was finally demolished and replaced by an instantly forgettable glass and concrete structure. This structure retained the Laharna name but as a business venture it seems to be even less successful than the old hotel. The last report I can find dates back to October last year when the apartments were being disposed of in a clearance sale.

Picture Of The Day : Wahre Geschichten

This is one of those "does anyone have any idea what this means?" posts.  The picture is taken from a postcard I picked up many years ago and it is by the Swiss (?) photo-journalist, Hans Staub. The title seems to be "Wahre Geschichten un 1930" and that is followed by "Lectrice, vers 1930" But are these two versions of the same title - "The Reader" - or is it taken from a publication called The Reader? There must be some expert in these things out there just itching to tell me the background to all this.

Picture Of The Day : Blidworth Strike Centre

The picture is from a series of postcards I bought in 1984. They show scenes from Blidworth Strike Centre in Nottingham in Autumn 1984 and they were sold in support of the miners' strike. Rediscovering the postcards yesterday I Googled Blidworth Strike Centre. According to the Retford Trader and Guardian it was re-opened in February this year as an air-conditioned gym and sports centre. How the world changes.

I Liked Right Well

The postcard is from Uncle Fowler's collection and shows Fleet Street in Bury, Lancashire. It is from Eliza Beanland, Fowler's sister, who was working in Lancashire during the Great War (Fowler and Eliza's brother, Albert, was my Grandfather). As far as I can make out Fleet Street no longer exists - I don't know Bury very well - but if I am wrong I am sure someone will point out my error. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the card is the message on the reverse in my Great Aunt Eliza's spidery hand. It reads as follows:

Dear Brother, Just a line to say I arrived allright. I went to the New Church at Haywood last night and I liked right well, Mrs Land went with me, and they were a man and woman sat with us and they gave us an invitation to their house. With love, Eliza.

In its own way this message is just as fascinating as the messages from the Venetian Ambassador I wrote about yesterday. It tells not of the death of powerful monarchs but the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. Wonderful stuff.

Picture Of The Day : Blackpool Storm

It is a Bank Holiday and in the best traditions of Bank Holidays it is cold, wet and windy. People always used to go to the seaside on Bank Holidays and this card was posted in 1907 and has the title "Storm, North Shore, Blackpool". The card was published by the Scottish firm Valentines and a similar picture - not hand coloured like this one - forms part of the St Andrews University Archives and is dated 1904. On the reverse it is addressed to my Great Uncle Fowler and it has a rather cryptic message : "Methinks remark requires reversing". What that means, I have no idea.

Some Concert

The great thing about old postcards is that they can take you on such voyages of discovery. And the very best don't take you to Sunny Blackpool or Clacton-on-Sea, but take you back in time. Take, for example, this postcard which was printed by "The Printeries, Gorton Lane, Manchester" almost 100 years ago. Doing an Internet search for the card brings up just two references. One is an on-going eBay auction where the postcard is currently listed at $42 and the other is as an item held by the Museum of London. In both cases the card is undated and listed as a "Suffragette Card". The Museum of London catalogue describes it as follows "This satirical postcard was produced as propaganda for the pro-women's suffrage campaign. The programme for this fictional event at the House of Common ridicules MPs, including Lloyd George and the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, for their lack of support for women's suffrage". However, I am not sure that this is the case.

Dating the card is not too difficult - my best guess would be that it was published in 1912. The card makes several references to the "New Copyright Act" and this will have been the 1911 Copyright Act which came into force in July 1912. It also says that entry to the fictional concert will be "by Insurance Card" which will be a reference to the 1911 National Insurance Act which, again, came into force in July 1912. Other events can also be dated to around this time - the Siege of Sidney Street took place in 1911 and the Marconi Scandal (where Lloyd George and Sir Rufus Isaacs were accused on insider trading in Marconi shares)  came to light in mid 1912. 

Whilst the date of the card is fairly easy to calculate, it is less clear why it is listed as a pro-suffragette item. Whilst the suffragette movement is mentioned a couple of times this is not surprising : the activities of the  National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies reached a peak in 1911 and 1912. The claim that Home Secretary Reginald McKenna would sing "I Am The Softest Of The Family" and Prime Minister H H Asqith would sing "Wait and See" is more likely to be an attack on their lack of resolve in tackling what some saw as the threat posed by the Suffragettes and their campaign. It is far more likely that the card constitutes an attack on women's suffrage and also an attack on other "radical" ideas of the time such as National Insurance and Irish Home Rule.

Regardless of the politics involved, it would have been some concert.

Do Bring Lulu

Well it will not come as a big surprise to most people to discover the second item on my list of "Things to do before I'm 50" which I only discovered a few weeks before I became 60 was to "publish my first book". Writing, publishing and printing a book within four weeks was quite a challenge, but challenges are there to be overcome (or some such silly phrase from the bottom of a daily calendar). And the challenge was overcome by using the wonderful print-on-demand services of Lulu.com. I cheated somewhat by using a selection of 2007 postings from this blog as the subject of the book, together with some updated notes and an introduction. The whole thing came to some 120 or so full-colour pages and I was anxious to discover two things : (i) how easy was the Lulu self-publishing process, and (ii) what the resulting quality of printed book was like? And it has to be said that the results in both cases were quite exceptional.

The process leading to the up-loading of a manuscript, its formatting, and its translation from a Word document to a pdf file which could be read by the printers was much easier than expected. Using the templates provided it was not difficult to achieve a pdf file which had none of the hanging paragraphs or cut images that you might expect. I was able to achieve a near-perfect result at the first attempt. The nature of my book meant that it required full colour on every page and a reasonably large A5 format. This did mean that the production costs - at about £13.50 per copy - were not cheap, but as you are not tied to a print-run, there is no investment required other than perhaps buying a copy for yourself!

Printing for the European market takes place in Spain. Even so, the turn-around from order to delivery was very good at about 10 days. When the two copies I ordered did eventually arrive I was very impressed by the quality. The print quality is excellent, as is the paper quality. The binding is also very robust. The idea of producing "Postcards From Nowhere" was intended not only to achieve the second of my stated ambitions (OK, ten years too late but what the hell) but also to test out the self-publishing, print-on-demand process. I have to say that I am very impressed indeed by the whole undertaking.

I am already planning Book No. 2 and for that I hope to go one step further and make use of the full publishing service package offered by Lulu. I will report back when the results are available. In the meantime you can sample the quality of the product yourself .... just follow the link in the side panel.

Throwing Myself On The PC Bandwagon

I don't normally join campaigns. Whilst I did lend my support to the campaign to ban plastic carrier bags, I am normally happier to launch my own campaigns rather than join someone else's. Who, for example, can forget my campaign to fit modesty lids on waste bottle boxes, or my bid to get the Staunton and Stanley Ferro-concrete part-clad lamp-post on Bradley Road declared an endangered species. However, every so often a public campaign comes along - a campaign so close to the heart, a campaign so essentially right in every sense - that I can't stop myself leaping onto the band-wagon. And this weekend I have enthusiastically thrown myself onto the PC band-wagon.

It all started with an article by James Meek in yesterday's Guardian on the glories of the British postcard. "In our age of privacy, the postcard is an endangered, subversive species", declares the title. I am hooked. Here is a philosophy that, in one fell swoop, links my intense dislike of the twenty-first century fad of middle-class privacy with my love of old picture postcards. I have not felt so excited, so motivated, since I read Frederich Engel's "Condition of the Working Class in England. I want to reach for my banner and marching boots, but instead I reach for my pen.

The actual campaign to save the Great British Postcard has been launched by Coast Magazine as a means of supporting the British seaside economy. But in his article, James Meek, rightly identifies a whole series of other reasons to celebrate the "union of card, stamp, pen address, message and postbox". There is a pleasure in seeking out an appropriate picture postcard to suit the recipient, or the intended message, or both. There is a joy in having to take time over the very physical act of sending a card which, compared to an e-mail or a text, represents a major investment of time. There is the satisfaction in knowing that you will give the postman something to read as he pounds the pavements. And there is the possibility that you might have created something which will be left at the back of a dusty drawer or the bottom of old filing cabinet to be re-discovered fifty years later. The postcard is a lasting public statement, a ticking literate time-bomb, a thing of beauty.

I am resolved to send off a postcard immediately. The nearest blank postcard to hand is a picture of Manchester Central Library. Libraries mean books and books, to me, mean my good friend Dave Hornby (the infamous dph of mythology). In future I will send off a postcard each week. It could be to anyone of my acquaintance, so be warned. If anyone is moved to respond in a similar fashion ... be my guest. Together we could start a PC revolution.