Fulham, London 1940 streets, London directories, London history, London street directory

London street directory sites & Fulham in 1940

Well, I now have two sites in the top ten in google search for London street directory. Most people would envy this, and not a bad start.

I moved much of the London streets listings back to my London19 site, and also the massive 1843 street directory. I have only just done this, so it will take a while to feed through in search terms. Actually, I have already changed this, and the 1843 street directory is back on the pubs history site, this is the only change, all 255 pages of it.

I also added my London19 site to the adsense program (nothing to do with rehab!). Their site blanked it as a copy site, I think; and therefore their advertisers do not get the chance to advertise on my great London pub history site. Their loss.

Just added are a few roads in Fulham area, i.e. Fulham High street, Fulham road and Fulham Palace road – all in 1940.

But, I am still looking for a good sponsor.

 

adsense, Finding old London pubs, London history, pub history, Uncategorized

I’m never going to be rich, but my sites are fantastic

OK, the story is in the heading. I have been building web sites, good & bad, for about 18 years. The idea was that this would be my pension top-up, apparently not the case. This is not surprising as there are some billions of people out there who also have the same idea. There is also China who steal and copy what they cannot create; probably like the rest of the UK, and the world.

Anyway, along the way, I have built a few sites which are not bad. I always trend in the top ten for pub history, and more recently for London street directory, these are my main identifiers.

I have been let down by google adsense over the years, I believe, but have stuck with this process for a long time. It is simple, and just works. I like a system which is painless, and just does what it should do. It covers my costs for running my own web server, just about.

So, why do I do this? I spend vast amounts of hours updating pages, and building web sites, etc. I could stop any time, and just stare at my phone, like the vast majority of people who need that recognition.

Why do I do this? Because I want to be Number 1, or in the top ten, or just recognised for doing something nobody else can do. Its a recognition thing.

Or whatever.

Kevan

 

create a sitemap, Finding old London pubs, London 1940 streets, London directories, London history, London street directory, pub history, Uncategorized

London street directory & create a sitemap

Being my normal self, I thought I would have a bit of a change today. So, the london19.com site became important again, it should, what a great name.

I have added the street directories for 1818,1832, 1842, 1843, 1940 and I think that’s all to this site. I have kept all pub stuff on the pub history site, and the 1921 street directory too. I am not sure why I made this decision, but anything can be changed.

The good thing is that the pub history site now has just under 50,000 html pages, which all fit on one sitemap for google. Good old google.

If you are ever interested, i can tell you how to create a site map of even this magnitude in a matter of a minute. Lets do it.

You first need to login via ssh to your linux web site hosting, I use putty which is a free ssh utility. You need to know the correct login details, too.

You then change directory to the top folder for your website, something like :

/var/www/vhosts/p**/httpdocs , e.g. cd /var/www/vhosts/p**/httpdocs

You then run a simple script which finds all files in the folder/s:

find `pwd` > foundthislot.txt

You then need to pick the specifics from this file, i.e. all of the .html pages

cat foundthislot.txt | grep shtml > findjusthtml.txt

Its quite simple.

Download this last file via ftp as you would normally, then do a grand edit of this file so that each line is relevant to the web page you are visiting.

 

Sitemaps are very important, and although this is easy; it took me a couple of years to get this right!

Don’t laugh at me for posting such a ridiculously simple way of creating google sitemaps. It really is that simple, it just took me a long time to realise the potential of linux power against the weakness of running in a Windows environment, which is good for desktop applications only.

You also need to use google webmaster tools to upload the sitemap at some stage, and see how your site is doing in desktop and mobile visibility, but this is another story.

 

 

 

 

Digital design, food standards agency, London history

Digital design skills in London

I got bored doing an update. Well, I have been on the same update for the past twelve hours. In the meantime, like many others, I read the highlights in the news by Alexa, and digital design is hiring. I know I am now retired, but what do I have to offer?

1 Problem solving – I did that for 18 years, always rubbish at that.

2 Marketing, yes I can bull shit like the best of them, I am actually quite good at this, although I struggle to hold an normal conversation!

3 Print design, whatever.  I know how to send stuff to the printer, or a photo design studio.

4 Digital design knowledge – I think my skills start to shine here. I know a range of programming languages, am very fluent in web design, understand the use of databases & wordpress sites. I am not a big fan of the latter, but this is partly because I know how they get lost easily in migration from one site to another.

5 Basic html – I am brilliant at html and building sites for any operating system, including building the actual server (linux or Windows), or other. I am not brilliant at stylesheets, but can add considerable other skills in this area.

6 Software.

I am proficient in University level software, after all, I used to support it. Actually, I taught the academics how to use it, professors usually needing the most time.

7 Social Media & networking.

I came off facebook and twitter after a break down in trust with a recent employer. I think most people understand how they work, and the morons on these sites, and when it is a good time to block content / users.

8 Flexibility & Time management.

If you have a brain, you design, and then re-design. Get something that works, then add the frills. If you are a bad manager, expect it all at the same time!

9 Typography.

Keep it simple.

10 Communication.

Write a simple blog.

ps the page I was working from was a bit simple, but hey ho. I think I score quite well, but I would not want to hire me.

A good grasp of google analytics is also very useful.

I also forgot to add a link to one of my better pages I have been working on, the page is basic and is about the modern pubs in the City of London (plus history), the content it links to gets a lot better. I am still working on a web responsive version of my pages, but I do have nearly 100 thousand pages to edit, rewrite, or rebuild.

 

Accessible rail stations, Coffee Houses, Finding old London pubs, London 1842 street directory, London 1940 streets, London directories, London history, London street directory, pub history, world war one

Maybe I’m a Londoner

My last blog sounded a bit desperate. sorry, I spend a lot of time getting my sites updated with lots of interesting data content, even if it s all a bit nerdy. Perhaps I have rather a lot of different web sites running under the same name, and I could split them all up into separate entities.

But, no, I will concentrate on what I think I am trying to do, and explore the possibility that what I am trying to achieve is something different from other conventional sites.

Lets see what is on offer on my main site. It covers pub history of some sort for London and most of the South of the country. It is stronger in the London areas, but it does have the restriction that most data is before 1944. Excepting the complete listing of all pubs and bars in 2018.

Then there is more detailed data just on London, mainly to do with pubs from about 1800, and also complete London historical directories for 1832, 1843 and parts of 1921 and 1940.

Then there is a small site I built a while back as nogobritain, which demonstrated the difficulties which people with disabilities have with public transport, and this includes a complete listing of the entire tube network, and links to the relevant detail. some of this may be out of date, but still a damned good try.

More recently, well, the Christmas before last, I built a site or two about the 1918 armistice. As part of this, I honed in on a publication by the LCC which listed every Londoner who worked for the LCC (London County Council) who was involved in service in World War One. All of them, about 10,000, I think. I also added some other records of similar nature.

Then there is the Cosford database of Suffolk, this is part of Suffolk where my early agricultural labourer descendants started. They ended up in London, as did many others as agriculture was overrun by cheaper imports from America, and country folk moved into London to find work. I did quite a bit of research on my Suffolk ancestors by visiting record offices, but this database far outweighed any detail I could find at record offices or online. I saved a copy for merit, from the time machine, it’s brilliant.

I think I have summarised my main site, although I have others which research other areas of pub history and early taverns, coffee houses etc etc.

All my sites are searchable by one search engine, it is far from perfect, but I use it a lot.

One last point, I had a drive into London on the second day of the new year. It was an enjoyable drive, and I photographed a number of pubs which were useful. Obviously, driving in London is not conducive with taking photographs, and I got my first £65 fine through today for this! Whoops.