The main message

Since I started it in July 2019, this blog, SilverTiger at home and abroad has been the main focus of my attention. I am happy and grateful to say that a number of people follow the blog, some of whom do so by subscribing or using RSS.

More recently, I started publishing my posts both here and on my old blog, SilverTiger, running the two blogs in parallel. The “change of focus” mentioned in the title means that in future I will be blogging first and foremost on SilverTiger and echoing those posts here, a reversal of the previous system.

Will I continue to post here as well as on SilverTiger? To start with, yes, though, depending on workloads, there may sometimes be a delay before a post finds its way here from SilverTiger. At some future date, however, I may decide to continue blogging on SilverTiger only. If I do decide to do this, I will give advance warning of the fact.

This, then, is the main message: will you please start following me on SilverTiger rather than here. This is especially important if you subscribe or use RSS: please move those subscriptions to SilverTiger.

The reasons why

Read this only if you are interested in the reasons why I am making the change. More important is to take note of the main message above.

I maintained SilverTiger for two months short of 13 years, 2006 to 2019. In 2019, material for posts was piling up faster than I could deal with it and I felt that the only option was to cease blogging.

After a brief holiday from blogging, however, I found myself missing it. By now, mobile phones had become very powerful and flexible and WordPress, along with other blogging platforms, provided an app for mobiles. This led to me making two decisions, one that was good and sensible, and the other that was, frankly, a mistake.

The good decision was to blog on my mobile and to post “on the hoof”, that is, as the events described were occurring, This would give a sense of immediacy and – very important – avoid the build-up of material that had caused me to give up on the old blog. Two years on, I can say that that was indeed a good decision and I have enjoyed taking and editing photos and writing posts, all on the one device.

The bad decision was to give myself a new moniker, SilverCat, and to start an entirely new blog, abandoning the old one. I did this because I thought I ought to start entirely afresh without anyone knowing that I was also the author of the discontinued SilverTiger, an idea that seems rather pointless in retrospect.

Two things happened to change my mind. Firstly, the new moniker didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t feel like SilverCat: after 13 years, I was SilverTiger! So I reclaimed my identity.

The second thing that happened was that even though I had stopped updating the old blog, visits to it continued at much the same level as before. I also received comments and emails from readers, along with requests to use photos of mine. The Mary Celeste, it seemed, was still seaworthy! I therefore decided to give it continued existence by cross-posting to it from SilverTiger at home and abroad.The signs are that that was a good decision.

Maintaining two blogs of course requires more work than maintaining one. Crossposting from one to the other cannot easily be done on the mobile but needs the use of a computer. This was not needed when I first started SilverTiger at home and abroad, when I did everything on the mobile. This is why it would simplify my life to be able to maintain just a single blog by running it on my mobile.