hello all - sorry to have been away for so long. i feel i have a little explaining to do since i have been rather slack in the blogging department for quite some time. here are a few reasons why i’ve been slack:

1. the last few months have been really busy for me workwise
2. my old blog was falling apart
3. my pc ground to a halt
4. traffic to my website dropped significantly

if you’re new to this blog, then my old blog can be found at www.jonathanstewart.co.uk. during the summer, my blog was doing pretty well. on average, it was getting about 400 visitors a day. the problem with it was that it was starting to get unmanageable. my blog started out as a little project that i could work on to learn a little bit about web design / hosting / SEO in my spare time. as it got bigger and bigger, it got more difficult to maintain. i wanted to add more and more content to it, but i needed an easier way to do it.

i effectively built my own CMS (content management system) - this does pretty much what it sounds like - it helps you easily manage your content - at least that’s what it should do. for some reason, it actually made things more difficult for me. my little side project had grown into a big monster, and i was getting frustrated with it.

the new CMS also meant that my site’s architecture had to change quite significantly. quite soon afterwards, i noticed a massive drop in traffic - a drop from which i’ve still not recovered. i went from getting 4oo visitors a day to the current level of about 80 a day. at its peak i was earning $5 a day in adsense - i current earn about 50c a day. Needless to say, when you’ve worked so hard on a project in your spare time and it all starts to go a bit pete tong, you might start to feel a little bit disinterested in it. i guess thats what happened to me with my blog.

my pc also ground to a halt, which didn’t really help matters. i’m too busy at work to blog at lunchtime, so the only time i can blog is at home. when your microsoft hunk of junk takes an age to do anything, again, it can make you feel a little disinterested in blogging.

however, i’ve now taken some steps to remedy these problems:

1. i’ve moved my blog to wordpress
2. i’ve bought a new macbook
3. i’m gonna rebuild my website from the bottom up

as you can see, my site is now hosted on wordpress - http://dangerousdave.wordpress.com. wordpress is a wicked piece of blogging software, that basically makes it really easy for me to blog. what used to take me an hour should now take me 5 minutes. sweet! i’m not sure whether my blog will stay at this address. i’d like to move it back to www.jonathanstewart.co.uk, but there are some hosting issues i need to resolve first.

i ditched my old pc, and bought a macbook. the thing i love about it is the ease of use of everything, especially when it comes to my photos - i can simply plug in my camera and have my photos ready to upload to my blog in 10 minutes. it’s also great because most of the pubs in brighton provide free wi-fi, meaning that i can blog down my local on a sunday afternoon while watching the footy.

finally, when i built www.jonathanstewart.co.uk, i didn’t really know what was going to be on it. as it grew and grew, more and more stuff just got tacked on. now that i’ve got an idea of what i want on my site, i can rebuild it with a much better architecture - this’ll make it much easier for me to add new content, and will hopefully encourage me to blog more often.

well, i hope you accept my apology for being away for so long. i won’t leave it so long next time. i’ve got some great photos of things i’ve been doing lately, so i’m going to start with trying to get my most recent photos uploaded asap. it’s getting late now though, so i’ll love you and leave you - laters potatas!