Sharp eyed readers will have spotted we have a new Blog Team member.
Welcome to Fiona from all the Team. She has always been an active supporter of PARWICH.ORG even when living at a distance, so all the Team are very pleased she has joined us.
Archive for the ‘About this site’ Category
New Blog Team Member
Posted in About this site on Friday December 2, 2011| 1 Comment »
Over 5000 images in our Photo archive: so which are the most clicked of all time?
Posted in 2011, About this site, Photography, Posts of Note on Tuesday September 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »
The PARWICH.ORG photo gallery has always been our most popular page on the blog. Since it was set up, the main PHOTOS page has received over 16,000 page views – and following the most recent set of updates, we have now have over 5000 photos archived, dating back to December 2007.
To mark this milestone, let’s look back at the most frequently clicked-upon photos of all time!
Acupuncture available in Alsop.
Posted in About this site, Health Care, Local Links, Services on Monday September 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Alsop resident Natasha Astara is a qualified acupuncturist, with over six years of experience and practice, including traditional Chinese medicine and Five Element.
You can contact Natasha on 01335 390705 / 07816 601782 or via tashspirit@hotmail.com. Her website is here.
Details have also been added to our directory of local businesses and services.
Reminder: If you are a resident of our area, we can add details of your own independent local business or service to our directory – and if you have a website, we can also link to it from the LOCAL BUSINESSES section on the right hand column of the blog. These services are provided to you free of charge.
PARWICH.ORG joins Facebook
Posted in About this site on Monday August 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »
If you’re a Facebook user, then please consider “liking” the Facebook page for PARWICH.ORG. This will send links to all new blog posts to your Facebook News Feed.
Updated: Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/parwich
A record breaking day
Posted in About this site on Wednesday August 3, 2011| 4 Comments »
It seems appropriate that after such a successful evening last night at the PP5, today Parwich.org has broken another record,which was set after the Hill Race in early July. Today we have had the highest number of hits on the blog in one day, 2478.
Thank you to everyone who uses the Blog, don’t forget to keep your comments coming in.
Breaking all previous records
Posted in About this site on Thursday July 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Yesterday saw a record number of hits on Parwich.org, reaching a massive total of 2363 in just one day!
A spring clean for PARWICH.ORG
Posted in About this site on Thursday May 12, 2011| 1 Comment »
As some corners of PARWICH.ORG had become a little dusty over the past three years, we’ve had a bit of a spring clean. Although you won’t notice a great deal of difference, the content on on our various “static” pages has been checked for accuracy, and the various links on our blog sidebar have been verified. So, if it has been a while since you took a tour of the rest of our site, you can now click with confidence!
(That said, if you do spot a link that isn’t working, or some information that is missing or inaccurate, please drop us a line and we’ll put things right.)
Banner archive updated
Posted in About this site on Sunday May 8, 2011| 3 Comments »
Our archive of banner images for PARWICH.ORG now stretches back over three years, encompassing almost 40 different seasonal views of the village. Please click here for the full visual treat!
Follow PARWICH.ORG on Twitter
Posted in About this site on Sunday April 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »
For those of you who use Twitter, PARWICH.ORG is now tweeting at @parwichblog.
Every time we publish a new post to the blog, a new tweet will automatically appear, with a link that will take you straight through to the individual post.
(Note that the system checks for new posts every thirty minutes, so there may be a short delay.)
We hope that some of you might find this a useful way of “following the blog”.
PARWICH.ORG mentioned in The Times
Posted in About this site on Sunday February 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »
In an article in the Property section of The Times on Friday February 18th (“Community websites give the info you need on your neighbourhood”), PARWICH.ORG was cited as an example of a successful “hyperlocal” blog. If you are a paid subscriber to The Times, you can read the article by clicking here.
We’ve Made It To Half A Million!
Posted in 2011, About this site, News, Posts of Note on Saturday January 15, 2011| 9 Comments »
Our village website has just passed a historic milestone today. This blog, set up to serve a few hundred people in and around Parwich, has just received half a million visits.
The site has been extraordinarily successful since it was officially launched in March 2008. The blog plays an important role in keeping the community informed and provides an effective means of holding a collective dialogue. We are regularly cited as one of the most successful ‘hyperlocal‘ websites in the country, and we are held up as an example of what local communities can achieve when they harness the power of the internet.
On average last year, we received 545 page views per day. These visits come from people who live locally and want to know what’s going on; they come from from people who used to live here and like to keep a connection to the area; they come from people as far afield as the USA and Australia, who have historical connections and want to find out more.
So here are some more statistics…
Our most popular month was January 2010, when 72 notices were posted and almost 26,000 page views were recorded. Subjects ranged that month from make-up workshops, through Austrian dinner evenings to a lament that the fish and chip van hadn’t turned up!
Our most popular day was June 30th 2010, when 2003 visitors clicked on the site. The main interest that day was the Hill Race. Many pictures of the contestants were posted and there was great interest in this record of the races.
They say the best form of flattery is imitation. We were particularly chuffed therefore that the creators of that long-running BBC institution – The Archers – have used parwich.org as an input to create their own village website – click here to see just how similar it is! What’s more, Archers scriptwriter Keri Davis dips in to parwich.org to get ideas.
I’ve been popping into parwich.org for quite a while as an Archers scriptwriter, often drawing on it for little village details. So yes, it was a big influence when we were setting up the Ambridge site.
Most of all, we’d would like to thank you for your support and active participation on the website. It’s a cliché, but without you, the whole thing would not work at all! Please keep your information and ideas rolling in….we’ve only just begun……
Where Parwich leads, Ambridge follows?
Posted in 2010, About this site, Local Links, Posts of Note on Wednesday November 17, 2010| 2 Comments »
If you’re an Archers fan, then the newly launched Ambridge village blog might be of interest. But has the Ambridge blog team been taking inspiration from PARWICH.ORG, we wonder?
Comments Policy
Posted in About this site on Friday October 15, 2010| 5 Comments »
Just a reminder to people submitting comments that they must comply with our comments policy (see also the link at the top of the right hand column).
Also unless a valid email address is supplied we can not let you know if your comment is not to be published as submitted.
Blog hits an all time high
Posted in About this site, Wakes on Thursday July 1, 2010| 7 Comments »
With wonderful weather and a superb Wakes Week, the Blog has hit an all time high. Yesterday there were 2032 viewings on the site – our highest ever in one day – with the photos, particularly about the Hill Race, proving the most popular. This week we will also reach another high with 400,000 viewings since we began, 3063 posts put on by the Blog Team and 3010 comments.
We may have changed the Commenting Policy, but please do send your comments in. The main thing to remember is you have to use your real name, so if you are John Smith you can use J Smith, John S or your full name John Smith.
Comments policy.
Posted in About this site on Tuesday June 29, 2010| 1 Comment »
As members of the PARWICH.ORG blog team, we feel that one of this site’s key aims is to encourage a sense of community cohesion. After much discussion amongst ourselves, and having taken into account the various emails we have received and the comments that have been made to us personally by readers of this site, we have concluded that allowing the posting of anonymous and pseudonymous comments is not compatible with that aim.
From a legal standpoint, we have also concluded that it is unwise to allow comments to be posted onto this site automatically.
For these reasons, we are introducing a revised comments policy, which will take effect immediately. Please click here to read it.
Key points to note:
- Anonymous and pseudonymous comments are no longer permitted.
- All submitted comments will be held for moderation, and will only appear once they have been approved by the blog team.
Comments – an update from the blog team.
Posted in About this site on Monday June 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »
The blog team are currently reviewing our policy on comments. In particular, we are reviewing our policy on anonymous comments, and comments left under pseudonyms.
A meeting was held on Sunday morning, at which a number of options were discussed in detail. Our discussions will continue during the week, and a further meeting will be held on Friday at which we hope to reach a solution. As soon as a decision has been reached, we shall publish a new commenting policy, which will be implemented with immediate effect. Until that happens, we must regrettably continue to suspend the commenting facility on this site. We apologise for the inconvenience, and we thank you for your patience.
If you wish to make your opinions known on this subject, please e-mail the blog team at parwich@hotmail.co.uk. Although we would prefer not to comment on specific situations, we would like to stress that we are specifically seeking to address the general issue of anonymous and pseudonymous comments.
Comments suspended
Posted in About this site on Saturday June 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »
It is with regret that the blog team are temporarily suspending the facility of leaving comments. We have an emergency meeting tomorrow at which we will look at the various options.
Car-sharing via PARWICH.ORG: would you find it useful?
Posted in About this site, Transport on Thursday June 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »
One of our readers has suggested that we start up a new section on this site, dedicated to car-sharing requests.
So, for example, if someone is going to Derby, Ashbourne, Bakewell, Matlock – or even further afield – they could post the information here, along with a phone number or other contact details.
This would also work the other way, so that anyone needing a lift could also post a request. Requests could also be posted on behalf of friends, neighbours and relatives who do not have internet access.
Examples:
- Spaces available in car going to Ashbourne at 10:00am on Friday 25th June – John, tel. xxx
- Lift wanted from Derby station at 6:00pm on Thursday 24th June – Mary, tel. xxx
As for sharing of any petrol costs, this would be left to the discretion of the drivers and passengers.
Our reader says:
This would be ecologically and environmentally sound, cheaper for some, companiable for others and convenient for all.
The blog team are more than happy to trial such a service – but before we make a start, we’d like to know whether or not you would find it useful.
Please let us know what you think by completing our poll.
Note that you can tick more than one option.
If you would NOT find the service useful, please tick the last option only. In this instance, the “negative” votes are just as helpful to us as the “positive” votes, so please don’t hesitate to answer honestly!
Greetings from New Zealand
Posted in About this site on Friday April 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »
PARWICH.ORG continues to attract readers from accross the World:
Good afternoon
Just wanted to tell you how delighted I was to discover your blog. I found it referred to in the Tablet, and was enchanted to read such a vibrant newsy website. I loved Sandra C’s lambs (I live in Masterton, where there are many large sheep farms, or stations as we call them). I loved also the tug of war homily of Andy Larkin.
Thank you for showing what a small community can do when it sets its mind to it.
Mike Kelly
National and international recognition for PARWICH.ORG
Posted in 2010, About this site, Posts of Note on Monday April 19, 2010| 3 Comments »
Although PARWICH.ORG is primarily written for the benefit of our local residents, we have also noticed a steady trickle of interest in our site from further afield. Over the last couple of years, more and more people have started setting up so-called “hyperlocal” community websites to cover events in their own areas, and many of them have taken a good look at what we have managed to achieve in Parwich.
Last weekend, around a hundred “hyperlocal” bloggers and other interested parties gathered together in Leeds, for the second annual “Talk About Local Unconference“. (The event was called an UN-conference, due to its relatively informal nature.) Mike A from the blog team attended the event, and met many other people from other areas of the UK who have set up successful local websites of their own.
The day ended with an awards ceremony – or rather, an UNawards ceremony! – in which PARWICH.ORG was named the winner of “The UnTourist Board Award, for a site that attracts visitors to a place”. As PARWICH.ORG has never won an award before – and who knows whether we ever will again? – we’re rather chuffed, and very grateful to the Talk About Local judging panel for thinking so kindly of our efforts.
And as if this wasn’t enough, we have also been selected by the widely read American site blogs.com as one of their top ten “cool hyperlocal blogs”. In fact, we’re the only British site to make the list! Once again, we’re very pleased to be recognised in this way.
PARWICH.ORG featured in The Tablet.
Posted in About this site, Church, Local Links, News on Tuesday April 13, 2010| Leave a Comment »
A fascinating article (“News on your doorstep”) in the current (10 April) edition of The Tablet talks about the ways that “citizen journalism” – and so-called “hyperlocal” blogs in particular – can help boost the identity of a community. The article makes special mention of PARWICH.ORG throughout, with particular reference to Andy Larkin’s recent series of videos. There are also several quotes from the blog team’s Mike A, who was interviewed by the reporter a couple of weeks ago.
The reporter has placed a copy of his article online, which you can read here. (You’ll need to scroll down a bit, to just past the cartoon.)
For the benefit of anyone who has visited the site in order to find Andy’s videos, here they are again:
Diary
Posted in About this site, Events, Out & About on Tuesday March 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »
The village diary has been updated through to December. Thank you to those groups that have sent in details for events that they are holding this year. Please do send in dates as soon as you have them, this way any potential clashes can be avoided. The diary is included in the Parish Magazine, but details need to be sent in by the 21st of every month. So if you have anything else that you want including email them to Jane at parwich@hotmail.co.uk
PARWICH.ORG hits the quarter million.
Posted in About this site on Wednesday October 14, 2009| 3 Comments »
Just before 5:30 pm this afternoon, PARWICH.ORG received its 250,000th page view – which isn’t bad going, considering that we only launched the site 19 months ago.
Stats buffs might like to know that in that time, we’ve published 2,203 blog posts and we’ve received almost the same number of comments: 2,158 in total. (There have also been over 14,000 spam comments, which are automatically removed by our blogging software – why do these people bother?) We’ve also uploaded a frankly astonishing 4,245 images onto the site – and if you only knew what a tedious process it was to upload each image, you’d be even more astonished!
We’re currently averaging about 470 page views a day, and our busiest day was July 1st 2009, when we received a whopping 1,772 page views as a result of Wakes Week. Our most viewed page on the site, by some considerable distance, is the first Photos page, while our most viewed blog post – bizarrrely enough, but that’s Google for you! – is “Easter Cards & Scrapbooking with the WI“. And finally, our most clicked outbound link is the Paypal donation page, followed by the Ashbourne News Telegraph.
We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far. It can be a bumpy ride from time to time – and it has certainly been a learning process for all of us – but those of us who work on the blog team remain committed to reflecting as many aspects of village life as we are able to squeeze onto one website. Thanks for reading, and thanks to all who have contributed so far. We’ll do another trumpet-blowing, self-congratulatory post when we reach the half million!
Downloading PDFs
Posted in About this site on Monday October 5, 2009| 1 Comment »
There has been debate as to whether we should use the PDF format for information accessible through posts on the site. PDFs have the advantage that we do not need to copy and reformat the information into posts and for some contributors such as Parish Councils it ensures official information remains in the format they agreed. Also use of PDFs means the information can be printed out by the reader in the form intended regardless of the web browser they use.
Most computers now are supplied with PDF reader software already loaded, alternatively relevant software can be downloaded for free from Adobe (click here to download Adobe Reader). However some people find the need to switch into a different format irritating or even confusing.
What are your thoughts?
A busy week for PARWICH.ORG.
Posted in 2009, About this site, Posts of Note on Thursday July 2, 2009| Leave a Comment »
We knew that Wakes Week was going to be a busy time for PARWICH.ORG, but we didn’t quite expect such record-breaking traffic. Yesterday, there were a whopping 1790 page views on this site: a new record. And at some point during the course of today, we will reach 200,000 page views since the site began. Keep an eye on the “BLOG STATS” section on the right hand column, and maybe you’ll be our 200,000th viewer?
Update: We passed the 200,000 mark somewhere around 15:10 this afternoon.
As many of you will already have noticed, there’s also a feature on this blog on page 8 of the new (July 2009) edition of the PDNPA’s Park Life magazine, which the is distributed free of charge to every household in the Peak District National Park.
Click here for an electronic version, in PDF format.
If you’ve reached us as a result of the article, then welcome – and we hope that having taken a look at what we do, you might feel inspired to launch a similar venture in your own community.
For more information on how to set up a village blog, then the PDNPA have provided a useful set of instructions and guidelines, which can be accessed via this link.
And finally… PARWICH.ORG’s spies in London tell us that we were mentioned at yesterday’s “Activate 09” conference, in front of a whole host of “new media” luminaries, as a shining example of how small communities can make successful use of blogging tools. Click here for the visual evidence. OK, that’s quite enough trumpet-blowing!
PARWICH.ORG in Park Life
Posted in About this site, Peak Park on Thursday June 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »
The Peak District National Park Authority are taking seriously their commitment to promote community websites and community blogs in particular. An article on PARWICH.ORG and the new Alstonefield community site has already been drafted for the next issue of Park Life (due out at the start of July).
Today John Fern, Head of Communications visited Parwich to video members of our team creating the B5056 post and explaining the site, so that the short Park Life piece can be supplemented with more detailed information on the Peak Park’s own website. Watch this space.
Our email account parwich@hotmail.co.uk
Posted in About this site on Wednesday May 27, 2009| 2 Comments »
Recently someone had an email to parwich@hotmail.co.uk bounced with an error message, saying the email address was not valid. They contacted a member of the blog team directly, and we suggested they try sending it again. The second time it came through OK. This may have been an isolated incident, but do let us know if anyone else has had problems. You can do this either by adding a comment below or speaking to one of the team (Mike A, Jane B, Lynne G, Mike H, Emma S or Peter T).
When emailing the hotmail account, if you do not hear back from us within a few days, either on the blog or directly, please contact one of the team in person.
Term dates for the Primary School.
Posted in About this site, School on Tuesday April 28, 2009| Leave a Comment »
We’ve added a permanent page to this site, which shows contact details and term dates for Primary School. (These currently stretch as far ahead as July 2010.)
In the future, you’ll be able to find it in the “Elsewhere on PARWICH.ORG section” on the right hand side of this page (it’s listed under “Primary school term dates”), or alternatively via the main Site Map, or via our permanent INFO page.
(Everyone has their favourite way of navigating the further reaches of this site, and we like to provide alternative routes!)
Park Life
Posted in About this site, Peak Park on Thursday April 23, 2009| Leave a Comment »
During the Blog Team’s meeting with representatives of the Peak Park Authority in January, they were very supportive of what we have been trying to achieve here at PARWICH.ORG and keen to promote other communities to to follow suit.
Following this up, John Fern (Head of Communications for the PDNPA) is visiting Parwich this afternoon to meet again with members of our Team. He is writing an article on PARWICH.ORG and taking photographs to appear in the next issue of the Authority’s magazine ‘Park Life’.
If you have any thoughts on how community blogging in the Peak Park can be developed leave a comment below. Alternatively John Fern can be contacted on john.fern@peakdistrict.gov.uk and as always we can be contacted on parwich@hotmail.co.uk
Some developments are already in the pipeline. Following a couple of meetings with our Team, Alstonefield have developed their own interactive site using Blogging software which is due to be launched on 1st May (see www.alstonefield.org). Also after his January visit to Parwich Jim Dixon the Cheif Executive of the Peak District National Park Authority has set up his own Blog (see http://jimdixon.wordpress.com/).
Happy birthday to us.
Posted in About this site on Monday March 16, 2009| 1 Comment »
Exactly one year ago today, PARWICH.ORG was officially launched. With 1400 blog posts, 1525 comments and over 150,000 page views under our belts to date, it’s been quite a journey – and we hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far.
Thanks to all our readers – both within the Parwich/Alsop/Ballidon/Pikehall district and further afield – for supporting this experiment, and helping to make it a success. We would particularly like to thank all those who have so generously supplied us with articles, photographs, newsletters, posters, calendar dates and the like. Scarcely a day goes by without some new material for an article dropping into our Hotmail Inbox, and it has been our pleasure to convert your e-mails and file attachments into blog posts.
Here’s to the next twelve months! Cheers, everyone!
What do you think of the blog?
Posted in About this site on Tuesday February 24, 2009| 7 Comments »
Dear blog readers,
As many of you know, we have been blogging for nearly a year now. We went “live” to the world at large in March 2008. We tend to get about 10,000 to 15,000 hits a month with a high of 20,671 hits in December last year (when Tom Chambers was dancing his socks off). We know who some of our readers are as we have comments posted on the site by people both in and outside our catchment area of Parwich, Alsop, Ballidon and Pikehall. But we would like to know more about our readers, who and where they are and what they do and don’t like on the blog. (more…)
PARWICH.ORG in the Derby Evening Telegraph.
Posted in About this site, Local Links, News on Tuesday January 6, 2009| Leave a Comment »
There’s a nice article about us in today’s Derby Evening Telegraph:
“Tom’s Strictly stint results in a record for village’s website.”
Copies of the newspaper are available in the Sycamore shop.
You can also click here to read the article online.
20,000+ page views in a month… good grief!
Posted in About this site on Tuesday December 30, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Thanks to the triple-whammy of a) the Big Lottery Fund grant, b) the cheeky Advent Calendar pages and c) Tom’s Strictly Come Dancing victory, PARWICH.ORG has enjoyed a record month in terms of visitor numbers, with over 20,000 page views (and counting).
This beats our previous record of just over 15,000 page views in July, when the excitement of Wakes Week also sent the stats sky high. Interestingly, the week following Wakes remains our busiest week to date, by the merest of whiskers.
Perhaps this goes to show us what tabloid newspaper editors have known for a long time: that nothing “sells” like sauciness, sportiness, success and celebrity!
We’d be surprised if these extraordinary figures were ever matched again in the future… but then again, as 2008 has shown us time and time again, you never quite know what’s lurking around the corner…
Christmas Cards @ PARWICH.ORG
Posted in About this site, Project Parwich on Friday December 12, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Click on card to find out more
Merry Christmas from PARWICH.ORG
Posted in About this site on Wednesday December 3, 2008| 1 Comment »
We know it is early but this gives us an excuse to promote our Memorial Hall Project Christmas card fund raiser. Click here to see the full sized image and to find out how you can have your own Christmas cards created and put on-line by PARWICH.ORG
Ideas/suggestions for on-line fund-raising wanted
Posted in About this site, Memorial hall, Project Parwich on Friday November 28, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Do you have any ideas? Can you help?
The PARWICH.ORG team are looking to make use of the potential of our websites to encourage sponsorship of the new Memorial Hall and use the sites to generate some cash for the redevelopment.
We have dabbled our toes with such as the commission on the Y-Not Festival ticket sales, Christmas Cards and on-line donations. We have lots of ideas, but are inexperienced in what will work best. Also we feel it is important that any advertising does not interfere with using the site or put off our users.
On-line fund raising means we can access a much larger pool of potential donors.
We would be pleased to hear from anyone who can support us through information, advice, ideas or contacts. Speak to Emma S, Jane B, Mike A or Peter T or email parwich@hotmail.co.uk.
Put your Christmas cards on-line
Posted in About this site, Memorial hall on Wednesday November 26, 2008| 3 Comments »
Save money, save paper, save the Planet and support the Memorial Hall Project.
In exchange for a moderate donation (£5 minimum) to the new Memorial Hall fund we will create solely for you a unique virtual Christmas Card. You can then email your friends and family (and any enemies) the link instead of posting them an old fashioned paper version.
Click here for more details.
100,000 page views and counting…
Posted in About this site on Monday November 10, 2008| 1 Comment »
Yes, it’s another milestone….
Somewhere around breakfast time on Monday November 10th, PARWICH.ORG clocked up its 100,000th page view.
(The actual total is a little higher, but our stats counter disregards page views registered by members of the editorial team.)
How long until we reach the million mark, one wonders?
Photographs of Parwich wanted
Posted in About this site, Parish Council, Photography on Friday October 24, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Parwich Parish Council are developing their own web-pages to be created in conjunction with PARWICH.ORG. They would like to include photographs of the village, particularly those associated with the facilities under their umbrella such as the sports facilities, the greens and the children’s play area. Also photos including people and activities will be more interesting on the site than just empty greens or sports areas.
If you have any photographs they could use, please email them to parwich@hotmail.co.uk (marked for the attention of Peter T) or directly to the Parish Council’s Clerk, Karen Wigley on ppccl@fsmail.net.
Do you know about pdf.s?
Posted in About this site on Friday October 10, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Some of the information you can access via PARWICH.ORG is in pdf format (e.g. the School Newsletters and Memorial Hall Management Committee minutes). This format was designed so that people can access documents in exactly the layout they were written, unaltered by the various web browsers. Also it is a quick and easy way to convert documents for the Internet and means they can be printed out readily in the layout intended.
However, to read pdf.s you need the appropriate reader software. Most new computers now come with Adobe Reader already loaded, otherwise it can be downloaded for free by clicking on the icon below. If you have Adobe Reader, but are having problems with some pdf files, check you have the latest version. They are currently on Version 9, and you can update older versions by clicking on:
click here to download the latest version
of the free software Adobe Reader
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