Gosh! It’s 3 years to the day this bright, sunny, fresh Livingstone Saturday morning that I started to blog. Time flies! I remember the day I first tried blogging in June 2006. I’ve always liked writing and blogging seemed a good way to start. I’d looked at a lot of different blog sites before finding Yahoo 360 which was so simple to use for a technophobe like me! My first blog was about the bathroom in room 8 at Chanters Lodge, Livingstone, with which we were having plenty of problems as we tried to complete our 3 roomed extension that year. ‘Bog or blog’, was, I believe somewhere in the title of that first one! I was inordinately proud of myself for being able to publish my first blog with a photo (lousy quality admittedly taken with a subsequently stolen Motorola camera phone) without any assistance from anyone. Edward, my eldest son, a technocrat, was delighted with, and I believe, not a little surprised by my efforts!

3 years later where are we? Well, I’ve posted 1082 blogs, and had 375,746 page views which works out at an average of 343.15 page views per day! A lot of work and a lot of reading. Sometime during these 3 years Ed worked out how to upload the blog from Yahoo 360 on to our main Chanters Lodge site and this really helped expand the readership and to market Chanters Lodge. You’d be surprised how quickly Google finds http://www.chanters-livingstone.com/blog.cfm these days!

(But Google does not Chanters Lodge quickly when you Google ‘accommodation Livingstone’ or ‘lodges Livingstone’ for that matter. I don’t understand Google and that’s a fact. More of that soon.)

What have I blogged about in these 3 years? All manner of different things, you can find more or less the whole list here thanks to Ed who archived the work! But, really, the blog has been about what I said I would write about at the start, ‘a diary of happenings at Chanters Lodge, Livingstone, Zambia with reflections on Zambia and personal matters too’.

The future. Well, there’s no more Yahoo 360 – they’ve redesigned their blog system so that you can’t upload your own photos – very stupid in my opinion but they probably have their reasons. I’m in the process of shifting to Blogger, which seems fine, and I guess the Yahoo 360 work will stay on the net for all to see if and when they wish. The Blogger site will upload to the Chanters site as the Yahoo 360 did. The future of blogging? I don’t know. With Facebook and Twitter and other stuff coming at us thick and fast who knows where the internet and where we’ll be in future?

Thanks to anyone and everyone who’s taken an interest in the past and please keep on doing so in the future! From tomorrow we’ll be posting on Blogger only. The picture? Ireen and I in 2006 – boy! I lost a lot of weight since then!