Monday 22 September 2014

To my readers, especially those in Ukraine

Six years ago, in October 2008, I started this blog. I had planned on developing a website to advertise for my consulting services. I kept pondering what would need to be on that site, what the design would need to look like to attract a wide range of potential clients, and so forth. At the same time I was quite busy with my consultancies, learning exciting things and meeting interesting people. I had started a couple of mailing lists which just kept growing, because I wanted to share so many things with so many professionals around the world. In the end, I decided to stop sending mass mailings and to start blogging instead. It turned out to be very easy, and a bit addictive.


I never found time to design that other website which would present my firm. But I still enjoy using this blog to share resources, impressions and opinions with people engaged in similar work. I try to post at least once a month. I make efforts to keep my link lists reasonably up-to-date, even though I have not yet found any moment to add extra pages that would deserve to be on those lists. 
I still resist the temptation to accept advertisements on the blog. This is an entirely voluntary, not-for-profit blog, written in the free moments I find between "normal" work and "normal" life.

The blog has proven quite successful - at the moment of writing, it has recorded more than 130000 page views. Thank you for the massive interest! The analytical data I get from the blog host show that my readership is spread across the entire world. Between 2008 and today, the top ten countries where most page views have originated from are the USA, Ukraine, France, Turkey, Germany, China, Netherlands, Romania, Russia and the United Kingdom. There are visitors from all continents; much depends on the topics, among other factors. For instance, when I posted a few pages in French, the blog received many visits from French-speaking African countries. After having met professionals from the Pacific at a workshop in New York, I started to record visits from Fiji and neighbouring nations.

But what I find most intriguing is that the stream of page visits from Ukraine remains consistently high. I know many people in or from the other countries on the list. But my small number of Ukrainian acquaintances are not involved in development and human rights work at all - as far as I know. That makes it particularly interesting for the blog to receive so much attention from Ukraine.  

Regardless where you are based - I would find it interesting to hear what you have found useful on this blog, or any other comments or recommendations you would like to make. Feel free to use the "comment" function at the bottom of this post to let me know . Clicking on "[no] comment" will take you to a dedicated pop-up window where you can type your comment. Anonymous comments are possible and welcome (as long as they don't advertise for a particular product). 

When reading comments, be careful about opening any links contained in those comments: Although I do my best to filter our spam, I cannot screen every single link displayed on this site.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

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