I have however become quite addicted to the latest addition to the WordPress.com stats page, the ability to view which country the visitors to my blog come from.

My plans for World domination were progressing well ....

As you can see people are finding their way to my blog from all over the world, whether this is by accident and whether they find what they are looking for are both different questions.

The numbers themselves are not particularly exciting, but the distribution of visitors is quite interesting. The most popular country of origin is the United Kingdom, followed by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in that order.

Next up after that are Germany and France, which surprised me. I’m not sure why or how they found their way to my blog, but I hope they found what they were looking for.

Most interesting is the long tail, the likes of Azerbaijan, Albania, Georgia, Latvia, Senegal, Slovakia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Nigeria, Jordan, Japan, Lithuania, Taiwan, Republic of Korea, Colombia and Chile. There are only one or two visitors from each, but it is good to see a stream steady trickle of international visitors coming to see me.

Wherever you call home you are more than welcome to my blog and I hope you enjoy your visit.

Copyright © 2012 John Gasson.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

In the post Tom McDonald, the executive producer for this series, describes some of the work that goes into making the series and discusses some of the issues faced when dealing with some of the more difficult topics covered in the this and past series.

What really comes across in this blog post is the amount of work that goes into producing each series, with 30 celebrities being researched to produce a series of just ten episodes. It sounds to me as if a programme about the making of each episode would be just as interesting, documenting the research process and sharing the breakthroughs that are made along the way, many of which I am sure that we never see on the finished episode.

Thanks to Gary Andrews of the BBC TV Blog for bringing this to my attention.

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.
	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

When my father passed away I had no time or energy to blog and to be honest time had been an issue for quite a while before that but I insisted on continuing with my daily posting schedule even though it was a struggle. Having taken a break I now don’t feel quite so bad about not posting every day, so I probably won’t be. After all it is my blog so I make up the rules.

The other problem had been a lack of things to write about. Again time was an issue here and I hadn’t really been doing much family history, so as a genealogy blogger it was sometimes a struggle to come up with things to write about or to find time to research the things I wanted to write about.

I have started to do a bit of family history again, although I am getting a little frustrated by frequently running into dead-ends where a visit to an archive or record office is needed before I can continue. The problem of course is that I don’t have the time to actually visit an archive or record office at the moment, but I do know that time will come.

I should probably give my blog a bit of a makeover, I think the design is looking a little tired now although I am sure that the majority of you are reading this through a feed reader of some description and will never see my blog on the web for months on end.

As for content, I have lots of ideas about what I want to write about, but in general I want to focus more on Sussex. It is where I live, where the majority of my ancestors and relations lived and where my expertise (such as it is) lies, so it seems natural to me that I should concentrate on Sussex. I know I will sometime stray over the county boundary and occasionally leave these shores, but I would like the focus to be on Sussex.

Whether this actually happens is different matter, but watch this space…

Copyright © 2011 John Gasson.
	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

My life was full of challenges last year, beginning with unemployment in January. Although this gave me time to pursue a lot of the things I wanted to, there was always the worry that my dwindling pot of redundancy money would run out before I found work. Back in employment in the middle of the year it was suddenly all changed, from plenty of time to very little spare time at all. Money was still a problem as my travel costs increased along with the cost of doing genealogy, but at least I have some job security.

Still that shortage of time is a problem, I have tried to keep up my daily blogging schedule (and succeeded), but often this has often been at the expense of other things, such as actual family history research. Blogging is too much of a part of my life now to give up, but a delicate balance has to be found. I haven’t quite found that balance yet but things are improving. It is like anything in life, if you really want to do it you will find a way.

So what of the future? I have lots of idea for this and other blogs, but I know that I would be stretching myself too thin if I was to try to pursue them now. Their time will come in the future but for now I need to concentrate on this blog and improving my communication. I wrote a while ago that I was particularly bad at replying to emails and comments and commenting myself, hopefully things have improved slightly, but I feel there is plenty of room for further improvement.

One thing I really want to do is improve the appearance of this blog, I want a more professional appearance, which may mean moving away from a free wordpress.com blog to paid for wordpress.org hosting. Also I am getting bored with the photo of me at the top of the right-hand column and I would like to replace this with a logo of some sort.

I also have an idea for a series of guest posts with a difference, I am not sure if it will work out (I haven’t asked the guest poster yet) but it would be a win-win situation for me if it does happen.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has made this such a wonderful experience, I wouldn’t have got this far without you. Whether it is by commenting, emailing, providing ideas and inspiration in your writing or by just proving that I am not alone. Thank you all.

Audrey Collins had mentioned on The Family Recorder blog that both Anglo-Celtic Connections and Scottish GENES were mentioned in this edition, and I will forgive her for not mentioning my blog (I think she wanted to keep it a surprise for me!)

I resisted to temptation to wander around waving the magazine in front of anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity, I don’t think they would have been quite so excited as I was.

So thank you Jonathan Warren (the author of the piece) and Who Do You Think You Are Magazine for publishing the article, it means a lot to me  to be recognised in this way.

If you were to ask me why I would probably lay the blame on a lack of time, and whilst there is an element of truth to this it is more of an excuse rather than the reason. I guess the real reason is a cross between laziness and not being that outgoing a person.

So let me take this opportunity to apologise for my lack of involvement in the community and slowness to respond to emails and comments, and tell you that I am going to try harder in the future.

Starting today I am going to put aside some time each day for commenting, replying to comments and dealing with emails. It is true that I don’t have a lot of spare time, but I am sure that I can spare 15 to 30 minutes a day, it is after all part of the whole genealogy process, so I will still be able to count it as doing my family history.

This new static page is entitled My Ancestors and can be accessed from the link at the top of my blog. It list the names of 120 of my direct ancestors, those of my great-grandparents, my 2x great-grandparents, my 3x great-grandparents and my 4x great-grandparents.

I have been meaning to put up this page for a while (admittedly it has been available for several weeks already), partly to get the names of all my direct ancestors out on the internet, but also to act as an index to my various Ancestral Profile posts.

You will notice that the majority of my ancestors don’t have dates associated with them yet and that is my next job, to add some more detailed information to each person, at least dates but hopefully also places.

I am fortunate that many of the surnames in my family tree are quite unusual and most of them are from Sussex, but it still needs a little more detail to make it easier to find out if we are related.

There will be some new daily blogging themes, although they are not really new, more a case that I haven’t used them on a regular basis before. The intention is that I will know what sort of post I am supposed to be writing on each day, but there is lots of scope within each theme for plenty of variety.

There is also plenty of scope to allow me to make a whole week’s posts based on a particular subject, such as a place or a person. Also I will occasionally do away with the themes altogether for "special occasions", like genealogy conferences or Remembrance Day.

In essence what I am saying is that although I am setting myself some guidelines, they are not hard and fast rules, so expect things to change. That is assuming of course that I can stick to my plans, which is by no means guaranteed, and it goes without saying that I will probably have switched everything round within a couple of weeks anyway.

Now the only thing I have to sort out is the crazy idea that I should turn my current obsession with the parish of West Dean (near Chichester), Sussex into a one-place study. One part of me says "go for it, it would be a great subject for a one-place study", but the more practical part of me says "when are you ever going to find time to fit that in as well?"

I just can’t get the idea out of my head at the moment and I am already mentally making plans, but I know it is just not practical at the moment, but more ideas still keep coming, the more I try and suppress them the more they demand to be brought to life. I need to be strong for now and not give in to them, but I think I will have to eventually.

I know this is not the first time I have struggled to post every day and I am sure it will not be the last. I think time is probably the biggest issue here. I have lots of things I want to write about, but most of them seem to be things that will take more research than I really have time for. I want my posts to be more detailed, but that takes up lots more time.

I know there are lots of great blogging themes over at GeneaBloggers and I seem to have fallen out of the habit of using them, but perhaps I should. They are a great way to inspire ideas and generate content. I also have some regular themes of my own, Picture Postcard Parade and Personal Genealogy Update are two of my regular ones.

I think what is needed is a more regular schedule, perhaps not a calendar as such, but just a weekly list, so that I know in advance what I should be writing about on a particular day. What the actual themes are, and how many of the GeneaBloggers themes I use still needs to be worked out, but I think now is the time I got more organised.

I do like the fact that I seem to have a "West Dean" theme running through many of my posts at the moment, if I could manage to do that every week then that would be good, but I think that would probably take too much effort and at times would leave me struggling to find something to fit rather than whatever came naturally.

I will almost certainly allow myself to break out of the routine from time to time, so that I can focus on a particular topic for a week. For example, I have several postcards on a particular subject that I would like to showcase, but dragging it out over several weeks doesn’t make sense, neither does cramming them all together into one really long post.

Having written about my blogging challenges and describing the probable solution, I now feel a lot more positive about the whole subject. It is amazing how getting things off your chest can help, I now feel ready to go out and conquer the blogosphere, well maybe not, but at least I might be able to stop worrying.