The Gloucestershire Blog

Posts Tagged ‘cotswolds’

Yesterday I decided that enough was enough and deleted my Facebook account. There are many reasons, but here are the principle ones:

• Facebook now permits anyone to advertise on my pages and timeline, even direct competitors
• Facebook now seems to echo the old CB channels of a few years back. A large proportion of people I saw every day were people who for various reasons  don’t work, so they can sit there all day
• Every day, on my timeline I saw the most dreadful lefty propaganda posted, particularly from the “Nobody likes a Tory” group. I do wonder how they won the election.
• My work, particularly local photographs have been consistently stolen and put up on Facebook. When I tried to challenge these out of work thieves, the reply was, “If you don’t want it stolen, don’t put it on the web”, and another was “If I want it I’ll take it”
• My wife asked me, how many of your “Friends” on Facebook would you invite to your home. The answer was depressingly few.
• Other social media groups like Twitter and Linked In, do provide contacts and even work. I have had some very good leads from both, but not 1 single one from Facebook. In fact looking back, 200 orders direct from Linked in and about 50 from Twitter. None from Facebook
• I am frankly bored with it, and the time spent there is just wasted.

So in the end I pulled the plug and will not be going back

The Gloucestershire Portal has been promoting local business for many years. There are also many ways that you can promote yourself here as well.

• Join our bulletin boards ( free of charge )
• We have a section “Tell us about your business” that you can use to advertise your services, again free of charge
• Astute posters will take part in the discussions here. So long as you have set up your profile, then every post leaves a link to your website.
• You can send every post you make to your twitter, facebook or Google + page with a single click
• Advertise with us - The best advertising rates in the county
• Make sure you are listed in our local Directory , the largest on the web

Don’t forget that SoftData Internet are full nominet members and can register your domain and host your web site. Again, local companies recieve many extra benefits.

The Gloucestershire Portal was created by a local man who is intensly proud of the county and his home town of Gloucester. It started when I first started my company and was then SoftData and Virtual Gloucester. For those of you who would like a laugh and a bit of nostalgia you can still see the site on the Way Back Machine in May 1998 which is when archive.org first crawled the site.

Since then the site has gone through many updates until it now sites on it’s own domain that you see now. The current site consists of many pages about the county, Old Gloucester, Gloucester history, Forums for personal and business use, Streaming videos and our famous Gloucestershire Directory

The busiest sections are the forums and the directory. If you have any interest in the county at all, whether it is business or personal then our forums are for you.

Gloucester council have been planting trees throughout the city, and today they have been adding annuals around the base of the planters. A brilliant idea.

Bluebells in Gloucestershire

The old theme on this blog has been up for a very long time now, so I thought I’d create a brand new one. Due to pressure at work this blog, and to a certain extent our forums have been neglected of late.

Hapilly, now that I have help in the office that should change.

We are always hearing that we should support local business, and that is something dear to my heart. I have always done my best to do just that, and now I’m going to have a regular Featured Business of the Week .

The first is up now, TammyLynn Photography

stroud Gloucestershire

Our Gloucestershire Directory now lists 7664 local web sites. I’ve always been proud of the directory and I still maintain it is the largest and best directory in Gloucestershire. Submissions are free. You can either browse by town or use the extensive search facility.

What’s new

Gloucestershire

Every web site goes up and down with it’s visitor count of course, but the stats for June on this site are astonishing. We have had nearly double our normal quota. That is marvelous for me of course, because it means the hard work is paying off, our advertisers are getting a better deal, and it shows the interest there is in the beautiful county of Gloucestershire. We still have not reached the end of the month, but I’m looking forward to analyzing our stats more than normal.

Well, I’m 62 years old today, and probably one of the very few to get a birthday card from my dog. The changes have been incredible. I remember being told off by my physics master ( at the crypt School) for insisting we would one day land on the moon. I have worked in many jobs from my first, aprentice gardener, machine operator, inspector, postman , quality engineer and finally to running my own business.

I’ve watched computers change from huge things that took up whole buildings, programmed by paper cards and no screens ( all data was printed ), to today where a mobile phone has more powr than the Appolo space shots. I’ve seen the birth of bulletin boards with modems so slow that text crawled down the screen ( remember compuserver anyone?  to the birth of the Internet, and today where everyone has a net presence.

It does make you wonder what the next few years will bring.

As local people we have always seen the value in promoting truly local business. The site has many features valuable to local business.

1. Our local directory - Free to list your business, our Gloucestershire Directory has many imitators, but none match it. We list over 8000 local web sites, all by their locality
2. Our Bulletin Boards – Members have many advantages. You can list your events free of charge. We have a dedicated board for you to tell us all about your business. Unlike many boards today, because we check our members we do allow a sig with a link to your site on every port you make.
3. Free Blogs -  again we do allow links in just the same way as in the forums
4. Free Image Gallery – Upload your photos here
5. Send your posts, blogs and images directly to your twitter and facebook pages
6. For a very modest fee, advertise on our site – one of the busiest in Gloucestershire

There is much more, so come on in, the water is fine