Writers in the Brewery

Writers in the Brewery is a regular event held at Brewery Arts in Cirencester, Glos, UK on the last Thursday of the month. Doors open at 7pm for a 7:30 start. The event goes on until 9pm. A guest speaker starts the evening, followed, after a short break, by open reading when anyone can read poetry, short stories, dialogues, lyrics or anything else they have written (register that you want to read at the door). The event normally costs £3 but is free for those attending the Creative Writing classes run at the Brewery Arts Centre.

I have participated in most of the events and found them highly enjoyable. I have read short stories and poems and listened to all sorts of readings. The evenings provide a great opportunity for local writers to read or perform in public and are very enjoyable.

I was invited as the guest speaker on the 24th September 2009. I talked about the creative process of writing Inspector Hobbes and illustrated it by reading 3 short extracts from the first book. Each extract introduced one of the main characters.

Long may Writers in the Brewery flourish!

Blog reader

We thought we would try registering this blog with some blog readers to see if this increases the blog readership. We decided to start the process with technorati, a site we looked at before. Finding how to claim the blog isn't as straightforward as expected as there wasn't a straight option on the menu, but below are the steps we took.



Subscribing within a blog reader

Continuing the process of linking to this blog on the blog reader site technorati (that we first tried in the post 'Create a blog'):

On http://www.technorati.com/
join and complete the form
respond to the acknowlegment email
open technorati and login
click on your user name
on the account information
at the bottom click on 'claim'
enter your blog url and feed details
on returning to the account page
look for the blog at the bottom and click on 'claim your blog'
put the code given there into a new blog post
then when confirmed delete the post with it in or edit the post to take it out again when technorati update your account to see they have accepted the claim.
Then wait for the blog to be reviewed.

Additional blog setting

Although my blog received some hits and has several subscribers, we have been looking at what improvements we can make. Continuing with the blogs about how we are doing things, here are the settings we changed in my account in Feedburner.com, which we hope will help the blog's profile:

- Publicize->Pingshot->Activate

- Optimize->Smartfeed->Activate

- Optimize->Feedflare->and allow set the tickboxes for feeds, email this, email the author, share in facebook and the tickboxes for the site, subscribe to this feed.

- Publicize->Chicklet Chooser, select the top icon and go. Copy the code given onto the website link for the blog.

We'll see what effect these have on the blog. So far the number of subscribers has increased but the number of visitors hasn't been affected.

Any suggestions on how to increase readership are welcome

Adding a guestbook

Thinking it would be nice to have an area on my website where visitors could add a note or comment we added a guestbook page. We knew this might result in some odd entries but were stunned at how quickly it was picked up and odd spam URLs were added. As we tidied this up every morning we removed the guestbook page completely. The number of countries recorded as visiting the website more than doubled (to 30) when the page was added, though how long this continues now it has gone is open to question.

We may look at adding one again in the future if we can find a good way of stopping spam. As an alternative we have enabled comments on the blog - see the comment policy below.