2007 Review

2007 was the point at which I decided to stop writing web pages from scratch and start to use some of the new tools that were becoming available.

This blog and the others listed in the column to the left are the result of that, as are the 1100+ photographs at my Flickr account.

The original websites still exist though, a legacy that started in 1996, with the first web page about Blackpool.

I'm not sure how many photographs I took in 2007 because I throw out mercilessly, anything blurred, uninteresting, too dark/too light or that duplicates too closely another photograph. I do know that I kept 1401 photographs on my hard drive, some of which will have been donated by friends. Together with previous years and the odd photo filched from the Internet or scanned from books makes up 15,734 images at full screen resolution.

You can add to that a further 37,886 photos at smaller resolution that I have included within the 4,085 web pages, all of my own creation that exist on my hard drive.

That makes the 500 or so web pages available from my online index pale into insignificance. However the previously mentioned Blackpool pages alone include 886 photographs on 103 web pages. Each of the holiday web sites have around 200 photos included. All in all, there's a few hours reading material on the website!

In 2007 I started this blog, originally known as John's Place until I decided there were just too many Johns in the world for this to allow people to find me easily. Even with the current name there are so many John Burkes that any friend looking for me would probably find it hard to find this blog. The web page though is normally No.1 listed on a search for John Burke at http://www.google.co.uk.

See - shown up as a liar, I've just looked and I've dropped to No.2! Happily though four of my pages come up within the first ten entries. There's an incredible number of John Burkes listed, many of whom are interested in music and/or showbiz. One makes Northumbrian pipes and another, probably my favourite, performs in German circuses with a troupe of sealions!

In 2007 I created 357 blog entries and ceased to publish the monthly web page updates which I wrote for 10 years. The first monthly update appeared on my website in May 1997 and the final one in May 2007 when I realised that all I was doing was trawling the blog for material for the monthly update!

Anything is fair game for the blog. A colleague losing a yoghurt in the office at the end of October started a series which is still ongoing and which has generated so much interest and suggested storylines from others that I was amazed. One person said they were going to write to yoghurt manufacturers Danone about it. I'm not sure whether they did or not but if so then the manufacturers have stayed aloof, probably wisely!

Another entry that created quite a bit of interest was the entry following an email from Blackpool's Margot Carey about the remains of the box where her father used to keep a telescope on the North Pier. Margot contributed several interesting memories of Blackpool and is still in touch.

The two ladies we met on our cruise, who I called Cissie and Ada on the blog have also kept in touch and were much tickled at their new names. We received Christmas cards signed "Cissie and Ada" and whilst Ada realised straight away we did receive one message from Cissie that finished "Which one am I?" Come on, flower, that one should have been obvious!!! They spent a week in Blackpool during one of the worst weeks for weather in October and we went down to the hotel a couple of times to have a drink with them.

The band I play in, Creeping Bentgrass, had a record number of gigs during the year and since March have been featured every month in the downloadable Sounds Special feature on the Billy Fury website. The site is superb and there's a whole host of friends there for anyone with an interest in Billy Fury.

Fellow Blackpool-based musician Les Cotton was instrumental (sorry!) in getting one of my solo songs featured on The Strawbs website. Thanks Les for your help with that!

I found somewhere on the Internet to store music and you can now download a selection of Creeping Bentgrass and solo tracks and older stuff from my music web page.

Then finally at the beginning of December we finished the band's third CD album which after a year and a bit of having the working title "Already Plastered" has been released with the title "Right On The Line". We feel it's our best yet. It took so long to make we're starting the 4th straight away!

So, here's to a new year full of blog entries. I hope you, the readers, will contribute, suggest, send photos, get in touch and most of all, provide lots of the ideas and anecdotes. I seem to have a bit of a reputation now with one person from the next office saying "Watch what you say - it'll end up on his blog!", but it's all in fun and what better way of remembering those one-off spur-of-the-moment things that happen or are said that would otherwise just be forgotten about?

Like the male colleague who responded to the usual January greeting with: "Oh my God, I've spent all Christmas sneezing my baubles off..."

To be continued...