I am currently trying to tidy up my web presence so that I have fewer sites to maintain, and deciding what to mothball and what to delete altogether. My old website has now gone, as it started out as a simple to use site and in the best traditions of the Internet, became difficult to navigate once they implemented unnecessary changes (Twitter haven’t heeded the warning example of Myspace and Facebook and as such might be the next casualty thanks to their hideous new design). I’ve been using this blog as a one-stop shop to all of my work so haven’t maintained the website for ages, and would have set up another one if I could have found a free to use service that make sense. Freewebs (which gave you a ‘dot webs dot’ within the URL) wasn’t up to the job, and another one I tried but can’t recall the full name, Weeble or thereabouts, didn’t look good either and as I don’t know anyone who uses it I couldn’t ask for advice. Weeble might be the best, but as I have never seen a website that uses it I don’t know. Maybe nobody uses it and they are waiting for the first person to create an account.

So far I have mothballed the Mixcloud and Soundcloud profiles for The Sunday Alternative as I intend to keep them as museum pieces of the show when it was on Trent Sound. However I am still using the show blog and various other places. One thing I was keen to get rid of was an old YouTube channel called The Oliver Sessions. The name related to the comparisons that were made between John Peel and me when I first got into radio, and although it was flattering it is something I have never encouraged. The channel was made up of live appearances on the Sherwood Radio show, the Captain Dangerous balcony shoot, the video I made with Jake Morley in a beer garden and some of the early sessions from The Sunday Alternative. It was too messy a channel and I set about trying to close it, which wasn’t easy as in order to close it you have to close the entire Google account that it is a part of. Luckily, the blog is connected to a different email address, and so I deleted the Gmail address that I didn’t need any more.

What then happened was that I tried to sign into my main email address that I use for most things, and it told me that the account doesn’t exist. I had that momentary panic that makes your blood stop flowing and your body temperature shoot up, as I thought I had dropped a bollock by deleting the wrong account. I typed in the URL of my blog and it came up with a 404 message to tell me that the blog didn’t exist. As this blog has been going since 2007 (daily since 2011) I realised that I had lost a lot of information in one go. Not only had my blog gone, which is irreplaceable, but all my pages too. My pages can be replaced, but without the blog I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. This also meant of course that I had lost the blogs for The Sunday Alternative, The Sound Of Nottingham UK, my newsletter, the old Sherwood Radio blog, the album review blog that I haven’t had the time to do for ages but I had been intending to start again, and least serious of all, the photo blog containing plates of colour separated Skittles.

The strange thing was that my email address was still there, so I sent a ‘help’ message to Mr. Google to see what had happened and if I could retrieve everything. Within minutes I had an email back saying that my blog and everything connected to it was right where it should be.

Obviously I was relieved that I hadn’t fucked it up by deleting the wrong Google, but the strange thing was that I had already resigned myself to not having the blog anymore. If the worst had happened I could have rebuilt the ‘website’ element of it in time, but as for the blog itself I started to wonder what I would have done. The original intention was to enable myself to say that I had written something every day, even if the blog was the only thing. When it started I wasn’t as busy as I am these days; I didn’t work in radio, nor did I write for the newspaper. In fact I didn’t seem to be making much headway at all. There’s a part of me that wonders if the blog (the daily blog at least) has outlived its original purpose now that I have so much stuff going on. The blog did spawn two books I suppose, (available from here) but the newspaper work has also resulted in a book, and I have just finished writing another one that will be out next year. I have never written fiction before so this one was a challenge and it has made me want to do more of the same, so I have pulled all the notes I made when I found the weirdest ever to-do list at the tram stop and attempted to kick start the book idea I had based on that. Radio has been very kind to me, giving me two successful and highly influential shows in this country and another one in America, and The Sunday Alternative is heading into an exciting new future. It looks like my film making career will soon be receiving the much needed kick up the arse it has been waiting for, with at least one project coming off the starting blocks this year, a project that I have had the idea for since 2008.

Did the blog help with any of my successes? I don’t know the answer conclusively and suspect that I never will, but it has certainly been of use. It has produced two film ideas and a book idea simply by writing about something that happened during my day, but would my slow but sure climb up the ladder continue if I stop writing a daily blog, or do I need to continue with it in order to keep my ideas coming? Perhaps this will be the last ever blog, then we’ll know for sure. On the other hand, I am an obsessive completest and couldn’t leave the daily blog behind, could I?

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please consider showing your appreciation by way of a donation using the PayPal button above this blog. Every penny will be used to create free online content. There are currently plans for a comedy sketch series, an online cookery and music show, a video version of The Sunday Alternative and plenty more including documentaries, short films and podcasts.

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here.