Izdihar - Magic Kingdom Escapology

For my sins, I was born in a two-up, two-down in Stoke-on-Trent some 47+ years back. The house is still there and on occasion, I think I ought to go back and get myself photographed outside the joint wearing one of my Stoke City shirts - courtesy dictates that I would knock on the front door and ask the current owners if they minded me doing that, my luck would inevitably see me being told to poke off because said occupants would be Port Vale fans, but hey I can but try. The house belonged to my long since departed Great Grandma, my Dad's Gran. As I understand it, my parents lived there for a while after they were married till they got a place of their own in Campbell Road opposite the Victoria Ground. Don't think my Mum enjoyed being there much (Great Gran's, not Campbell Road), but my Dad was doing his National Service at the time and was in Belize for some emergency or other at the time I popped my head into the world.

Most of the first 8 years of my life was spent at the Campbell Road address and it is the place that is primarily responsible for me ending up a Stoke City supporter. I can still picture cold, dark, winter Saturday afternoons when the game was at home, sitting in the front bay window, looking out onto the road where thousands of fans would stream past on their way home, breathe caught white by the lights from the Vic. An image of a Christmas tree covered in fairy lights inside and the floodlights on the front of our house outside remains etched into my memory - how could I not be a fan? In later years, we would find a way of going into the last 10 minutes of the game, when they opened the gates, if we were were really lucky we might see a goal, if not, all we'd likely get the chance to do would be to commiserate with the 'old' men in there and wander off back home dejected. I can still smell the place, the Boothen End, a great Kop like terrace of swaying and chanting folk all of one voice and one aim, to see the mighty Potters win at home. Names like Banks, Ritchie (RIP), Greenhoff, Marsh, Pejic and Smith fought the good fight in our name. They were good days, but being young and largely bereft of money, seeing a whole game was something of a treat despite our proximity to the ground. It wasn't until a few years later that I began to see rather more of the games, once we'd moved out of Campbell Road and up to Oakhill where my parent still live today.

Schooling I largely recall as being something of a trial at every level, as I ended up being bullied in each of the three I attended. Not consistently, but for long enough stretches to make it a fairly miserable experience all round. I survived though, whether the influence has quite worn off all these years later though is debatable - let's just say I'm self reliant and leave it at that. I did though manage to get through enough 'O' Levels to get into the RAF, work on the aircraft and see some small part of the outside world.

I'll leave this here for now and shall on occasion return to pick up the story. Feel free to ask questions should you so desire. I'm no great raconteur, so any jog to the memory is likely to turn up some or other snippet.

I generally find that I need to be in the right mood to write something on here. Other than dropping a couple of photo links on here over the last week or so, I guess you could say that the mood hasn't been quite there for me. I will be back all the same. Patience my dears, patience...

Exton, Rutland

Iran's Post-Election Uprising: Hopes & Fears Revealed

Read, digest and understand

If I were to look back a few posts on here, I'd eventually find that this blog got set up a good couple of years ago, since when traffic has been somewhat tricky to come by. I don't know much about SEO, in fact I know virtually nothing. I post something, I get a few views, there's a cross link here and there at flickr and on some of the forums I partake of, but nothing too serious. That said, Izdihar.com does come up as the fourth ranked link if I search for "Izdihar", but who does that other than me?

Now I've never really played around with too many of the social networking sites, to be honest their point was eluding me. I have a Facebook account but I turned that off around 18 months back, as I was getting a little jaded with being asked to take part in the dumb games and inane quizzes it plays host to. In a moment of weakness a couple of weeks back, I decided to re-awaken the account because I'd noticed one of my favourite flickr contacts was on there. Before I know it, I've ended up tracking down a bunch of work colleagues past and present, as well as family members, some of whom I've not seen in 20 years. I add the blog link to my Facebook profile and maybe I get one or two views showing up in the stats that suggest a small connection has been made somewhere, but I'm not exactly being inundated.

A few days back, I decided to set up a Twitter account, mainly because a man in the office suggested it's worth registering yourself on all these things, just to protect your identity and prevent someone else passing themselves off as you - seems a reasonable suggestion. Now I mentioned a while back in these parts that I'd had a Pownce account which lasted right up until Six Apart pulled the plug on it - thank you Messrs Rose, Burka & Ms. Culver . I used to quite enjoy it, I liked the idea that it was smaller than Twitter and I could get my head around what was going on.

Anyway the new account is created, but I know (as in have actually met or spoken to) no one on there, so what's the point? Who have I heard of then that's on there? Well I knew that Photoshop Creative had something going, there was an article on doing Twitter backgrounds for your profile page in the latest issue, let's add them then. So far so good, I'm now seeing a whole bunch of links I can look up, vast quantities of which seem to be using the bit.ly thing - no idea what that is, but make mental note to investigate when I remember. Who else then? Well I noticed that Ms. Margolis had a link listed across at 'The Girl' - that could be interesting, let's follow that one then and in the process I added SandieQ who'd listed Twitter as her homepage in a comment on one of Zoe's blog posts. So that's three then - not very many but enough to try and work out what's going on - and there's that bit.ly thing popping up again...

So a few days pass, I start adding some random thoughts of my own (they are very random I assure you) and once in a while, I'll see a comment from either Zoe or SandieQ and perhaps I'll add my own thought to theirs. So far so good, but I don't see any fireworks going off in this, it's just good clean, low level fun with a small 'f'.

So a day or two passes and Monday (today) arrives in the calendar - no real reason why it should be any different. The weather here in Riyadh has been crap the last couple of days, no real sign of the sun due to the dust hanging in the lower atmosphere, looks like it's going to rain, the sky is brown, but it's still 45C out there. A few more posts get made of no great import and the working day draws to a close. Then Ms. M makes a post about a book she's contributed a piece to - it's called "The Atheists Guide to Christmas" (snappy title), exactly what you need in June, and there's that bit.ly thing again. 'bout time I found out what that was...

It turns out that bit.ly is a URL shortener much like TinyURL, but unlike that one, it's not blocked by the KACST, or at least not yet. In itself, URL shortening is nothing new, but it really comes in its own where Twitter is concerned, because of the 140 character limit that it imposes. But the real benefit comes from a couple of clever little tricks that have been included there: One is that you can create an account, use it to create your shortened URL and post it directly into Twitter; secondly it will give you stats based on the traffic that passes through that short URL. Now that is interesting, time to do some tests...

Newly armed with a bit.ly logon, I notice that my flickr photostream has just ticked over the 11,000 views mark, 11,001 to be precise - let's try Twittering the stat from bit.ly. By the time bit.ly has managed to refresh the screen, it's showing that the short URL has been clicked on 3 times. Now bearing in mind I've only got 11 people following me on Twitter, 4 of whom I've blocked, this comes as surprise. By the time I get flickr refreshed, it's had 11,011 views. OK, let's try that on the blog and see what occurs. One Tweet later and I can see the stats in the blog back office collect another 10 referrals.

Now out in the serious world of SEO, the figures in of themselves are quite pathetic and not worth a mention, but considering I have a largely ignored blog, a flickr account that gets maybe 40 views a day and a Twitter following that ranks barely above single figures, the ease with which I've driven traffic from one to the other (in minutes) is something of a revelation to me. I've now converted some of my forum links into bit.ly URLs, more because I want to see what the stats do, what's more I can see where to clicks are coming from.

This could be worth watching, in fact for my next trick, I'm going to turn the permalink for this post into a short URL and Twitter it - if you've read this far, you may well have just become a statistic...