Today marks the 15th anniversary of a rainy bank holiday Monday when I sat down to experiment with the then fairly new trend of blogging. Since then, I've written an average of 59 articles a year covering arts and culture, travel and restaurant reviews. While I've always done this primarily for myself ... and it's proved jolly useful when trying to remember what I did, when ... I've built up a modest readership and am always hoping for more.
If you're reading on a mobile phone you are, sadly, not getting the full experience. It's only on the full-screen version that you see the side-columns and the all-important search function. In the side columns are round-ups of articles from various locations and themes: London, around England, Rome, Japan, wine tourism, etc. New since our last trip is an index of 23 articles on Germany and Austria. My favourite index is probably the list of 23 luxury hotel reviews; lots of precious memories and fantasies of return trips there. You might also enjoy all the Michelin-starred restaurant reviews I've written (27) in one place. Always fascinating is the automatically-generated list of the 10 most popular articles at any one time, which tends to be a mix of the most recent and the wildly random.
Originally called Ferrara's View, I started the blog after a high school reunion where classmates were disappointed that I wasn't writing anything they could read and were dazzled by the excitement of my life in London. I thought it was going to mostly be a food blog filled with restaurant reviews stemming from a
job that saw me taken out to nice places a lot. (Check out London: A Golden City Built on Expense Accounts) Little did I know that I was starting my blog at the very end of that time of big marketing budgets and lavish hospitality. While fabulous work-related experiences have continued to spice my content, by the end of the '00s my stories came primarily from self-funded experiences; thus the shift to travel, museum exhibitions and opera. Though there is, naturally, a lot of food on offer.
My busiest year thus far has been 2015, with 72 different articles thanks to trips to Gascony, Denmark, Austria and Bavaria, my husband's 50th birthday celebrations, visiting American family and loads of cultural activity. But 2014 lagged by just one article. That was my 50th birthday year, when I celebrated in Sicily and the Maldives and packed in a giddy social schedule. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic years were the worst, with just 33 articles in 2020 and 29 in 2021. I'm not on track for many more this year, however, which does remind me that since February of 2020 I've been employed at the biggest and busiest job of my career ... which has nothing to do with this blog.
Average readers per article hover around 50, but a fair few stories have shot into the 1000s. Generally, they're entertainment or travel articles widely-shared by those reviewed. The magnificent Yeatman hotel, for example, is responsible for Porto appearing in three of my top ten. I'm amused that of the scores of art exhibition reviews I've written, it's one of the shows I liked least, the Royal Academy's exploration of Abstract Expressionism, that makes the list. I rather suspect it was my Trump reference and a mention of the Make America Great Again movement that sent search engines my way. It's also a charming mystery how, of all the many hotels I've written about ... famous and undiscovered, big and small, many in exotic locations ... a tiny, not particularly memorable B&B in Kent that's now out of business is my most-read accommodation review. I rather suspect it's because, with their own website taken down, my review is the top result when you Google them. Such are the vagaries of the internet.
My most popular articles of all time by reader's clicks are:
1. No resting on laurels: Longborough kicks off a new Ring June 2019
2. Killer Queen brings a legend to life with near-perfect illusion September 2017"I can never travel without my diary, one should always have something sensational to read on the train."
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