Moving on
Well the editor of the Lavender Rocking Chair had a dig at me for not updating this and is has been a while - but I do tend to concentrate on updating GrayGay.com.
Sooooooooo - the big news is that I'm relocating from wet and cold England to be with my BF in sunny Australia - for 6 months to start and then, hopefully, permenantly - the pic shows the new location which is about 1hr North of Sydney.Of course I have guilty feelings about this since my Ex will be left in London and my mother too. But as the former is so fiercely independent and the latter has full-time care, I don't feel too bad about it and it's one of those opportunites which doesn't come too often. The other sad thing is that my BF's older partner (yes it is complicated) with whom he has lived for over 40 years, has Motor Neurone Disease which means he probably won't last more than 6-12 months.
However, I can't work in Australia until I can get residency after a year, so it does mean I can work on the site and I might just add a dating site to take then money - everyone else seems to be doing it, though some attempts are terrible (e.g. one sie where the messages are in 4pt text - almost impossible for me to read let alone an older guy who has poor eyesight). I do send back critiques of the sites I review to the webmasters but some are so stuck in a rut - or can't afford the changes that they get stuck with an old-fashioned and clunky design.
Yes I know GrayGay.com has the same problem but I'm moving that to an open source CMS shortly - although the main problem is transferring all the old content to a database and setting up the tags as I go - tedious and time consuming.
Meanwhile there's been a spate of articles on Gay Retirement opportunites in the US, or lack of them, and now some "enterprising" person has copied all my retirement information and set up gayretirement.com (Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr). Fortunately they don't seem to be able to keep up with the news and blogs which I find and comment on. Including this one (which brought a tear to my eye when I read it). No-one in Europe seems to be the slightest bit interested in gay retirement communites so god knows what's going to happen here in 10 years time.
This is typified by the post at leading blog Queerty which ran the headline, "LA Gay Geezers Find Home...Sounds like a regular snooze fest." I would urge you to leave your comment on the Queerty site about the author of that comment.
One good dead for the week was to email a press release about the campaign to save the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach (one of the first gay bars on the West Coast) to the people who just opened the Barbary Lane Senior Community in Oakland on the basis that the hotel attached to the bar in Laguna Beach might make a good location for their planned expansion. I received thanks from the Save the Boom campaigner but I think he mixed up my name with that of the Barbary Lane VP - oh well - one hope it works and if not, he did seem interested in the concept as a means of saving the Boom.
I'm stil struggling with my Google page rank and having gone for all the tricks I could find on other sites that were high ranked, I've noticed that one with few tricks but lots of links seems to be doing better. However, I did note that Google only indexed part of the site so I have updated the site map and submitted this so hopefully that will improve things.
I spent far too much time today faffing about with a scrolling picture and text display using Javascript with the idea that it would rotate images form the shop as well as provide information about the links and rest of the site (which so many seem to miss) but I gave up after 2 hrs as I couldn't get the damn thing to work - I may try tommorow.
Finally I went to the Quebec* to meet up with the Friday night crowd and met N who is friends with another man I met from Melbourne last week. N told me of his falling out with his "shop-girl" (a married older guy who became obsessed with him - but of course wanted him on his terms -and far too much baggage). N is going on up in the tourism marketing world and I urged him to work on a campaign to bring more Americans to London - we're missing you!
I then introduced N to E who is South African but now trips between the two - nice guy but gets very "arch" (upper-class camp) when pissed and as they seemed to be getting on well I left them to it and came home to cam with the BF, which was nice.
*Small co-incidence, the chimney-sweep who came this morning was from a company called Quebec Chimney Sweeps and I asked him how it got the name. He told me the company was set up in the 60's by a group of friends who drank in the Qubec and named their new company after the bar - he said he'd been there for a drink once - I told him I have been there too - but I didn't notice any gaydar and he wasn't my type anyway.
I can't get the Blogger spell check to work so appologies for any typos.
Pewit
posted by Pewit @ 5:43 am
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