On 23 January 1909 two anarchist Latvian immigrants snatched the wages from a factory in Tottenham, making their escape using first a tram, then a milk float and finally a greengrocers van, but could not force the horse into more than the slowest of ambles because they had omitted to release the brake, they killed PC William Tyler and 10-year-old Ralph Joscelyne. The robbers shot themselves rather than face the hangman.
On 23 January 1552 the 2nd version of Book of Common Prayer became mandatory in England, the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI, more radical than the first, was authorised by a second Uniformity Act
It is illegal in London to impersonate a Chelsea pensioner – the offence is still theoretically punishable by death
On 23 January 1571 The Royal Exchange was opened by Elizabeth I who awarded the building its royal title and license to sell alcohol
When King George VI died in 1952 the code ‘Hyde Park Corner’ was used to inform the Government of his death
On 23 January 1985 the proceedings of the House of Lords were televised for the first time – as with nowadays not many tuned in to watch
Established in 1902, Ealing Studios in West London are the oldest continuously working film studios in the world
Almost every day at exactly one o’clock Oscar Wilde would sit down to lunch at the lavish Cafe Royal, 68 Regent Street
Footmen whose job was to run alongside carriages by 1700 were raced against each other for high stakes a pub in Mayfair is named after one
Colonel Pierpoint designed the world’s first ever traffic island in St James’s Street he tripped showing his creation and killed by a cab
Edward Turner, designer of Triumph motorcycles, the Ariel Square Four and the Daimler V8 engine once lived at 87 Rye Hill Park, Southwark
London’s thoroughfares once had Thieving Lane; Whores Nest; Pissing Alley; Cutthroat Lane; Foul Lane; Blowbladder Street; and Cats Hole
Trivial Matter: London in 140 characters is taken from the daily Twitter feed @cabbieblog.
A guide to the symbols used here and source material can be found on the Trivial Matter page.
For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.
White bikes (05.03.09)
They are becoming a familiar sight alongside many British roads. More than 100 old bicycles painted white and chained to lamp posts and railings have sprung up at danger spots over the past year.
Dubbed ‘ghost bikes’, they have been put there to warn motorists approaching dangerous bends to look out for cyclists and, in many cases, have been left at locations where riders were killed.
The UK campaign was started by road safety campaigner Steve Allen after his friend James Foster was struck by a drunk driver doing 55mph on a 30mph road as he cycled in north London. Angry at what he believed to be a lenient sentence, Steve set off on a quest to highlight the dangers for cyclists on Britain’s roads.
Mr Allen established a United Kingdom branch of Ghost Bikes a group that operates in 43 countries. Picking up the bikes for a pittance from landfill dumps and scrap metal merchants he painted them white in his back garden. Now more than 100 of them are to be found in London, Oxfordshire, Manchester and Brighton, although local councils have removed many of them.
One of the white bikes is on a junction in Hackney, North London. It was erected in April after the death of cyclist Anthony Smith, 37, who was crushed by a lorry.
For once does not have much to say, just it’s a pity these selfish drivers that I see every day on London’s roads didn’t for one moment think what these bikes mean. Keep up the good work Steve.
I started the CabbieBlog more than 13 years ago. Over the years, it has had over a million visitors and I’m very proud of it. Nobody told me the whole thing would be so much fun.
This post, on my approach to blogging, was originally published in September 2009 and I have updated it to reflect current practices and fix outdated information.
Write often
When I started, I tried to write twice a week. Nowadays, with more time on my hands, I now post every day.
Keep a notepad handy
I use the Pocket to capture links; ideas, to-do items get updated to Google Tasks. When I actually sit down to write, I’ve usually got two or three ideas to hand and a bunch of links to explore. It’s useful to have a few stub posts ready to expand or edit in case you don’t have time to write a long piece.
Have time to write
For me, that’s most of the day.
Variety, variety
I prefer to do posts of different lengths and styles to give CabbieBlog a degree of energy. I like to run longer, more formal articles and interviews as well as more personal observations, London trivia and quotes along with ‘humourous’ Dr Johnson’s London. One of the pleasures of the blog is that I don’t have an editor who tells me what to write or how to write it. To this extent, blogging is a playground for me.
Contribute to the conversation
There are an awful lot of sheep on the Internet. With nearly 600 million blogs in cyberspace, comprising 2.5 billion posts with 7 million uploaded every day (up from 60m when I started), you really want to try and be a sheepdog. In my opinion, it’s important to say something new and something interesting to contribute that the conversation.
Just be yourself
Some of the best blogs are the ones that are unique, idiosyncratic, and highly personal. The extraordinary thing about the blogosphere is that whatever you write about, there is an audience for it.
Show your face
I think it’s good to put a picture of yourself (see my caricature), your e-mail address, or at least a means to contact, and a little bit of biographical information about yourself on your blog. Sometimes a nom-de-plume is preferred but turns your blogging alter ego into a ‘real’ person too. Might I direct you to Diamond Geezer, The Gentle Author and Bug Woman?
Get the technology right
If you’re serious about blogging, you need to have a proper website address and not one from a free blogging company. I use WordPress software. Consider using WordPress as a host, for self-hosting you have these additional expenses: domain name, web hosting, WordFence to protect from hacking, yearly costs of a digital certificate, WP Rocket to improve speed optimization and a decent Theme.
Plug into the blogosphere
The easiest way to build traffic is to comment appropriately on other sites of similar interest. The blogosphere is a reciprocal sort of place. Link their blogs and they might read and link to yours. Critical to all this is a good newsreader like Newsify with a good selection of sites.
Linking and loving
I’ve always been impressed by people who reply when I comment on their blogs. Surprisingly, the blogs that I am ‘closest’ to in terms of mutual sympathy and mutual linking are also the ones who are, on the face of it, my ‘competitors.’ They write about the similar stuff I write about. Actually, though there’s no real competition and finding your online community is a good way to start building a reader base.
Regular readers rule
Occasionally, you’ll produce a post that goes ballistic. I’ve had nearly 2,000 visitors a day on occasion. Reddit or some other site picks up a post and you’re away. Only a fraction of those people stay and subscribe. It’s very exciting when it happens but what matters is the number of people who keep coming back, who comment, who link to your site and who enjoy what you write. Write for yourself first, the harder you try to get the traffic monster, the more elusive it becomes so I sort of forget about trying and they keep happening.
Use pictures
Pictures, cartoons and illustrations are essential. Just imagine reading your favourite magazine if there were no pictures.
A good picture illustrates the point you are making and draws in readers. You can use your photos but, failing that, pick good stock photography from sites like my go-to for Creative Commons Images Geograph.
Write for the screen
Be conscious of how people read on computer screens. The use of a theme that can cope with mobile phone screens is essential.
Write strong headlines
Headlines are important because most people read blogs using RSS readers and use headlines to decide whether to read the whole post, hence today’s splash – Electric Inky Fingers. (My favourite: man bites robotic dog).
Give people different ways to read
Make the online visit easy to read – don’t go for crazy colours or unreadable fonts. I use 13.5pt Lato, with a line height of 1.6, described by its designer as “[the typeface has] a feeling of warmth, while the strong structure provides stability and seriousness”, which seems, in my mind, to describe a London cabbie. Lato is a sans-serif typeface designed in 2010 for a Polish bank by Łukasz Dziedzic. When it came to paying for it, the bank said it was too expensive and Dziedzic was left with a type family that he didn’t know if it was marketable. So he released it in 2015 under a SIL Open Font License. The name ‘Lato’ is Polish for summer, the name perfectly fits this warm-feeling sans-serif. As of August 2018, Lato is used on more than 9.6 million websites, including Starbucks and Miss Vogue, it is the third most served font on Google Fonts, with over one billion views per day. CabbieBlog’s headings are now displayed in Raleway Extra Bold, which perfectly complements the text. Many bloggers overlook email but try to offer an email subscription option if you can. For personal blogs, WordPress give a perfectly efficient free email subscription.
Avoid detritus
I would avoid the icon clutter that some blogs display when they try to accommodate every single blog reader and every single news aggregator. It’s your site, not a billboard for other people’s.
Schedule blog upgrade days
Maintaining a blog is not just about writing content. I try to dedicate a day every two to three months to upgrading the site itself. This means recategorising posts, checking for broken links, updating plugins, implementing new features and other engineering stuff. I know just about enough HTML and coding to tinker with a site’s template but not enough to build a new template. However, there are plenty of people who can help with this stuff and one way to stand out from the crowd is to have a unique site design as well as unique content.
Market your blog
Occasionally people ask me to contribute to their sites, perhaps with by-lined articles or interviews. For example, I used to write a weekly post for Radio Taxis and have contributed to numerous magazines, books and podcasts. This brought in a nice stream of new visitors who are interested in London, and London’s cabbies. I also make an effort to comment on sites and posts that are relevant to my readers and my areas of interest. This is probably the main form of blog marketing. It takes time but it pays long-term dividends. I still get new visitors from comments I wrote six months ago. However, the comments have to be appropriate, useful and link to a relevant page on my site. Comment spamming is naughty.
And finally . . .
Then there is the old fashioned kind of discipline, writing regularly posting at regular intervals and enjoying the ride.
To try to garner votes for the upcoming local elections they intend to have a blitz on litter. After leaving our streets untouched for three months they will be cleaned in the run-up to May. They must think we’re daft to fall for that one.
On 23 January 1552 the 2nd version of Book of Common Prayer became mandatory in England, the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI, more radical than the first, was authorised by a second Uniformity Act
It is illegal in London to impersonate a Chelsea pensioner – the offence is still theoretically punishable by death
On 23 January 1571 The Royal Exchange was opened by Elizabeth I who awarded the building its royal title and license to sell alcohol
When King George VI died in 1952 the code ‘Hyde Park Corner’ was used to inform the Government of his death
On 23 January 1985 the proceedings of the House of Lords were televised for the first time – as with nowadays not many tuned in to watch
Established in 1902, Ealing Studios in West London are the oldest continuously working film studios in the world
Almost every day at exactly one o’clock Oscar Wilde would sit down to lunch at the lavish Cafe Royal, 68 Regent Street
Footmen whose job was to run alongside carriages by 1700 were raced against each other for high stakes a pub in Mayfair is named after one
Colonel Pierpoint designed the world’s first ever traffic island in St James’s Street he tripped showing his creation and killed by a cab
Edward Turner, designer of Triumph motorcycles, the Ariel Square Four and the Daimler V8 engine once lived at 87 Rye Hill Park, Southwark
London’s thoroughfares once had Thieving Lane; Whores Nest; Pissing Alley; Cutthroat Lane; Foul Lane; Blowbladder Street; and Cats Hole
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