Over 11000 visits to my blog since I started it - THANKS!!

I noticed tonight that my 'visitor counter' went over 11000 hits since I started it around January 2008 so I just want to thank everyone who stops by and do a brief retrospective.

I hope you find the site useful (well I know from the emails that I receive that people do). Do feel free to email me if there's anything particular you would like to see on the blog - I may or may not follow up suggestions depending how I feel.

This site is intended to be mainly practical though I reserve the right to go utterly off-topic if I feel like it :D I won't be discussing politics or religion anytime soon though I may make posts referring to these issues from a practical perspective occasionally.

I'm actually amazed to find that I come up on the first page of Google quite often without putting any effort at all in to SEO strategies!

I think my "proudest" moment was when I pulled together information for how people could help in the aftermath of last year's landslide. I had not originally intended to blog on the matter, feeling uneasy about riding on disaster's coat-tails, but my blog started getting hit after hit - I think over a hundred in the first few hours after news started coming out, several hundred in a couple of days - from Google on my visit to St Simon Tanner in Mokattam article which is in the vicinity of where the landslide occurred, and I could see from the search terms that people were looking for information on this disaster.

I searched the net and there was no information available on how the public could help. I contacted a friend of mine who provided me with contact details she had received privately via email, thus enabling me to act as a central point of information for people wishing to provide assistance.

I was also chuffed when a couple of friends told me that they had Googled the El Korba festival this year and were amazed to discover the OBC had pride of place at the top of the first page of Google! Oldbag - in the Loop :D

I have also been contacted by some of the big 'time' sites to confirm information about dates and times of things in Egypt!

An issue which I also like to bring to attention is POSITIVE aspects of women's lives in Egypt. There is plenty out there focusing on the negative, so I have set up a little online project - a database which ANYONE can contribute to - feel free!!! of EGYPTIAN WOMEN in any kind of positions of influence or 'role modelling'.

If you have names and details, follow this link, check whether the person is already listed (be creative with the spelling - it is all transliterated into English so sometimes there are variations) and if not, please add them on! You can't edit mistakes, so if you DO make a big mistake, add the corrected details as a fresh entry, and email me so I can delete the incorrect entry.

So far, I have only added 39 women - but they range from athletes to professors, artists to politicians. I do have more in the cupboard culled from the newspapers, but it is a slow process.

I hope to start getting out and about again late October so look forward to making more fresh posts then.

That's all for now folks.....