A few changes to the blog

As I am coming up to the third anniversary of this blog, I have been making some changes, and I hope, improvements.

It partly came about as a result of the fear of losing it all, if some internet or computer glitch should wipe some or all of it. A great deal of time and effort has gone into creating the blog, and while I hope that others “out there” are enjoying reading about our biking adventures, it is also a visual diary for ourselves.

I started by copy-and-pasting our major away trips into separate documents for myself. Then came the idea that some of our readers might like to see these trips as separate entities, to make them easier to find. We think – we hope – that other (retired? or maybe overseas?) cyclists might get ideas from our rides for their own explorations of our beautiful country. So I created a separate tab (across the top of the blog), where I have detailed our major trips, with links to the relevant posts.



This then led to the question of “what about our Wellington rides, or Kapiti rides?” etc. Result: a whole swag of tabs, summarising our rides by area in the Wellington Region – Wellington City, the Hutt Valley, Porirua, Kapiti and the Wairarapa.

As well, I have added to the “Other Stuff” tab, which has been sitting idle for quite a while. In this page, I have summarised the blog posts that relate to non-cycling activities that I have written about, such as my involvement in Scottish country dancing, visits to exhibitions, or musical performances we have attended.

I have also added my email address in the Contact tab, so I welcome any comments or questions – provided, of course, that they are relevant to the blog or activities described in it.

It’s been a bit of a learning curve too. Learning how to add these tabs, and overcoming the fact that some of my actions actually did lose some of my writings. Good thing I normally write the text of a blog post in a Word document first, so I could recreate what I had lost.

I also found out how to display just the first part of a post, with a “Read more” link, so that I can display more posts per page. This is a work in progress – I haven't done it to all the posts yet.

I would be interested to receive comments – either in the “comments” feature at the bottom of each post, or by email – on what people think about the changes. It would be nice to know too, how many real people actually read my blog – as opposed to mechanical web crawlers, or people who click on my blog by mistake because they are looking for something else.

I look forward to hearing from you. 

Biking on the Moonshine Road in December 2015 (photo by Alastair Smith)