Having struggled with my own mental health this year (see Finally…in Recovery and getting Back to Life), it’s unsurprising that two of my charitable donations have been to mental health charities:
SANE
SANE is a UK mental health charity, which aims to improve the lives of people affected by mental illness.
Mind
Mind is a UK mental health charity that states that it won’t give up until everyone experiencing a mental health problem gets support and respect.
JDRF
I gave another donation to JDRF who are an international charity that fund research into a cure for type 1 diabetes. Currently one of the things they’re funding is smart insulin, which could be life-changing for diabetics.
They have great Christmas cards and wrapping paper in their shop, all the proceeds of which go to them. So I stocked up.
The Brick Project
My final donation was to The Brick Project, which supports homeless people in the Wigan borough (my hometown). Through circumstances and life events anyone could end up homeless. I’d never want to be homeless and like to support any charities that help people to rebuild their lives.
The numbers are in and according to my WordPress Jetpack Annual Report in 2014 I had 20,000 views of my blog. Not bad for a little personal blog! Click the image left to see the screenshot. Any image in this post can be clicked for full size.
My hosting provider Vidahost (who you can learn more about here) provide AWStats software. According to AWStats I’ve had (see image below):
58, 101 unique visitors to my blog in 2014.
Who have visited 149,103 times in 2014.
And have resulted in over a million hits in 2014.
AWStats from Hosting Provider Vidahost.
The WordPress Jetpack Annual Report reports that my biggest referrers in 2014 were from social media sites Facebook and Twitter:
Jetpack Annual Report 2014 – How did they find you?
Jetpack Annual Report 2014 – Attractions
The WordPress Jetpack Annual Report indicate that my five most popular posts in 2014 were:
I’ve really grown my blog in the last few years, with Reviews of books, films and technology seeming to make the big difference to increasing the number of visitors. But what keeps my visitors returning seems to be blogging about my personal life. Below is the result of a readers survey undertaken in 2014. It that shows that readers enjoy the current content I create and would like more of everything. It shows that 80% of readers surveyed said that they would like more personal blog posts:
Readers were asked: What sort of blog posts would you like to see more of?
I think these statistics are great. In the next year and beyond I hope to continue to grow my loyal blog readership.
The blog costs money to host and takes up a considerable chunk of my time. So if you have a product or service that you’d like to advertise on the blog, please don’t hesitate to Contact me. Your advert could reach 20,000+ unique visitors a year.
Talk Talk are incompetent and terrible at Customer Service. This is a summary of what I’ve learned from trying to place a new order with them.
My switch over date was supposed to be Monday 27th October 2014, with the router to arrive before and the Engineer to come on the day. No router arrived. No Engineer arrived. I complained to Talk Talk on their premium phone number, by email and by Twitter. I spoke to a Talk Talk Manager on the phone whose English I could barely understand and who could barely understand me. After 72 hours she still couldn’t tell me what the issue was with my order or what had happened with it. I called my old provider to arrange a further month of broadband and they told me that Talk Talk hadn’t even contacted them to let them know that they would be taking over the line.
Feeling irritated at this point, I told the Talk Talk Manager to cancel my order but apparently she couldn’t. I canceled my direct debit and told her this. I told her that I had emailed Talk Talk to confirm in writing my demand that they cancel the order. I informed her that I have a legal right to cancel the order, as the cooling off period is 14 days from commencement of the service being provided. And I still haven’t received any service from Talk Talk.
The whole point of switching to Talk Talk was to save money. Talk Talk’s incompetency and frankly terrible customer service has cost me £150. This £150 comes from: time off work speaking/emailing/tweeting them, time off work for the engineer visit, many phone calls to their premium line phone number and an extra two months broadband with my old provider (which has cost more as is a rolling contract).
I have now signed up to Plus Net for the same monthly price. So far, so good. They have done everything they said they would and have kept me informed throughout the process. The switch over date is today and all has gone well.
