Tag Archives: Online

Different Approach

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I have been in deep thinkers mode lately; just too many questions in my head. A letter came in this morning from the Lowlands and it ended up unopened on top of the one that has been lying on my desk for at least two weeks now. Both from the same sender. I wonder what is keeping me from opening and reading them. I don’t know the answer but if I had to guess it’s probably because I might be afraid of having to read about someone’s disappointment. Knowing that I can’t be there for her, coz I have my own worries.

Mine are that I don’t understand what I’m dealing with over here and it’s utterly frustrating because I’m in a catch-22 so it seems. So I’ve decided to adopt a different approach to things which basically means I will have to work extremely hard over the next couple of months to get where I need to be after the summer. No more time for faffing but trying to stay focused. It’s not just a personal situation, it’s also the fact that whatever is going on in this country, it ain’t positive at all and not just scare stories…

I don’t watch the news and I try to avoid the free papers. Reading about a recession and how it affects the economy is not very uplifting. It’s ‘just’ another thing that adds up to the list. I’ve exchanged emails with an English friend and told him that I was thinking about moving back and how it would feel like a failure to me. Admitting to someone that those thoughts have crossed my mind was a hard thing to do. But he reminded me of something he wrote last year when we first started to exchange emails.

He said it’s good to always know that I could return to the Lowlands and that I shouldn’t view it as failure. If anything I should see it as England failed me… He is right, giving up is not my style but having to deal with e.g.: negative figures, a credit crunch, people who take their savings out of the bank and a rising number of unemployment etc. plus struggles that I have in reaching my number one goal which is basically related to everything I just mentioned is not that simple and can be really disheartening most of the time.

But I’ve made a decision and I’m gonna stick with it… Next week I’ll be visiting the summer fair and will network my way into more business. I’m gonna prepare a strategy, keep a stack of business cards ready, wear a gorgeous dress and my nicest smile and talk the talk. Because by the end of the summer I want to have at least six showcases online. I have one showcase in already and will start working on it tomorrow. It’s a total redesign for an online shop that sells leather products to high street department stores like Debenhams, House of Fraser etc.

It’s an exciting project because I’ve never used e-commerce software before. It comes with my hosting package as well: so first thing tomorrow will be installing it on my server. That way I can test the redesigned templates and get familiar with the front- and back-end of the software. Sunday I’ll be meeting up with a garden landscaper to chat about a web design. And today I’ve finished a second Flash website for a client in Scotland. Over the weekend I’ll have to finish a gallery to add to the first website that I did earlier this year.

So forgive me if I seem to have vanished, it’s temporary because I really need to stay focused…

A Thought [or Three]…

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I’ve noticed something a while ago and have been thinking whether I should write a post about this or not but it has been on my mind for some time and I would like to hear other people’s opinion as well. I have discussed it with fellow bloggers [who will remain anonymous] at some point when we met up. I asked them if it was just me but they confirmed my feelings by telling me that they experienced something similar, so I decided to indeed write down my thoughts since after all, this is my blog and I can write whatever I feel like…

8-)

Which is exactly what my first thought is about… I’m not going to pretend to be happy when I’m not. I’m not pretending I never had or have ‘heated’ discussions because after all I’m a passionate person. I’m not going to pretend to be all positive while I might be feeling slightly negative on a particular day when I happen to write a post. Basically what you see -in this case ‘read’- is what you get. That might be a typical Dutch trait but at least it’s one I’m proud of since what you get is honesty as opposed to some -in my opinion- unreal blogs that are out there trying to make things look much nicer than they [probably] are in reality.

Which takes me to my next thought. I’ve noticed some kind of in-crowd in the blogosphere… People who collect your link from a popular blog: add a link on theirs to yours and expect to be linked back to them without ever notifying you, visiting your blog, let alone leave a comment or say at least ‘hi’. True copycats: they hope to get traffic in that way. I check my statistics and I know who visits this blog on a regular basis. I don’t mind quiet readers and I don’t mind when my blog is linked to others. But like in real life it would be nice to at least introduce yourself and say something… but you see, somehow I can even understand that, after all there are shy people in this world as well, so I accept it.

On to my final thought: what I fail to understand is that typical thirteen-year-old kind of playground behaviour where one person [or in this case, ‘the in-crowd’] is so desperately trying to be the most popular of all: collecting links to blogs just to lift on the other’s blog popularity and to get the odd extra comment in. Or they seem to be thriving on the attention they get from visitors who regard them as some divine being. And then true nature shows when they seem to be stepped on their cute little sensitive toes [yes somehow divine beings seem to have extremely sensitive toes!] when the ‘favour’ has not been returned, followed by instant removal of their link to yours. It’s such childish behaviour that it amuses me to a certain level.

I would like to emphasise that I started writing this blog for myself and myself only, then when I moved from the Lowlands to London it started to shift from personal diary to a way to keep my friends and family updated about my expat life over here, a place to record my thoughts and feelings. Then after some time it started to slightly shift again since I started to meet fellow bloggers online and I would leave comments on their blog to get to know them or show my interest in what they had to tell or show. Which often resulted into exchanging links based on mutual appreciation and/or interest. I appreciate real people, those who are not afraid of having an opinion. Those who are not hiding behind masks or pretend to be someone they’re not, people I can relate to.

But you see, this blog is still here for the same purpose after years of writing, which is for me and yes I do feel flattered if people read it and show me they’re interested in what I have to say and leave me a nice comment [or not]. I’m grateful for those who became online friends but like in real life, it takes an effort to become one. And I really don’t feel the need to ‘collect’ or ‘be collected’ by those who are out there just to win lost souls. I don’t need a ‘crowd of followers’ to know that I can be someone, I already am someone, I am defined by me… So the last thing I need is being part of an immature kind of cult that seems to be going on in some parts of this blogosphere. I never wanted to be involved with that playground behaviour when I was twelve or thirteen and I still don’t want to these days, unlike some, I did grow up.