Preston Blog is moving to Blog Preston

We're moving, to blogpreston.co.uk

After a very successful first six months of existence, Preston Blog is moving. It’s also changing it’s name, to Blog Preston.

We’ve bought a domain name. We’ve got a fancy new design. But that’s all that’s changed, expect the same great content but just on blogpreston.co.uk and we’ve added a few little extras – like making it easier to contribute, integrating our twitter feed and also we’ll be starting a weekly email newsletter, so get yourself signed up.

There may be a few hiccups as transfer over to the new site, but rest assured we’ll be working as hard as we can to make sure there’s still great content.

Thanks for all your support, reading, commenting and kind words during the last six months. We hope you’ll join us for the rest of the journey at blogpreston.co.uk

Preston Blog on BBC Radio Lancashire

Ed Walker, founder of Preston Blog, was on BBC Radio Lancashire today with John Gillmore talking about the blog, how it started and also about the Preston Bloggers Meetup.

Thanks to BBC Radio Lancashire for the opportunity, and I hope people enjoyed the interview. Apparently John (Gilly) might be setting up a twitter account, so we’ll keep you posted.

You can now listen to Ed on BBC Radio Lancashire thanks to Rick Seymour who managed to record the clip. Ed Walker (Preston Blog) on BBC Radio Lancashire.

BBC London mentions Preston Blog

There’s an article on the BBC London site called ‘Me and My Blog‘ about blogging and particularly hyper-local blogging and it mentions Preston Blog.

It’s always nice to be noticed. If you don’t know what hyper-local blogging is (and a few years ago I wouldn’t have known), the article states:

Hyper-local bloggers – who blog about one street, borough or town – have served to replace aspects of the dying local paper, nourishing community life and reporting on anything from council meetings to new restaurant openings.

Thanks for the mention Clarissa, and let’s keep it going.

The first three months of Preston Blog

Preston Blog has now been running for just over three months. I thought I’d take a moment to take stock and reflect on my personal blog about how I set up a community journalism blog for where I live.

I also thought our readers might be interested to see a ‘Preston Blog in numbers’ and get behind the content and see some of the figures.

To date Preston Blog has had 9,477 visitors. The busiest day was Sunday 15th March 2009 when over 300 people came and viewed the blog. We’ve had 74 posts, in 24 categories and we’ve tagged our posts with 437 tags.

Top five search terms for people finding the blog through Google etc are: preston blog, moonlight walk 2009, dr preston blog, preston twitter, prestonblog. According to my Google search we are now #2 if you search for ‘preston blog’. We’re only being beaten by Robert Peston’s BBC blog. Pesky doom merchant.

Our most viewed content has been about the charity Moonlight Walk, an abandoned local mental asylum, a local group for geeks, a tweetup about Preston Guild 2012 and legislation that could force music venues to fit noise limiters.

That’s just a flavour. There’s loads of great stuff to read on here, plenty of ways to get involved and we’ve got plenty more to come in the future.

Thanks for reading the blog, thanks for your support.

Preston Tweetup Logo Competition

We’ve been running a competition to design a logo for Preston Tweetup. The entries are now in, and here they are with a short write up of why the designer picked the fonts, colours etc that they did:

Entry 1 – submitted by David Perkins

Preston Tweetup Logo Entry by David Perkins

Description:

It was basically a quick concept that I thought looked quite cool, I then added colour in the style of the twitter colours (blue and yellow). I thought that i should use a handwritten sort of font to make a point that handwriting is becoming less and less used due to the the amount of / the evolution of social networking and blogging around the world!

Entry 2 – submitted by J0sh D Semans

Preston Tweetup Logo Entry by Josh D Semans

Description:

When I first thought about “Preston Tweetup” I immediately thought about Preston. In my minds eye, I saw a city. I wanted my logo to draw the mind away from the urban view of Preston and focus on the calmer side, like the nature side, like Winckley Square. Hence the nice green grass, the blue sky and the clouds. I also tried to capture the essence of Twitter itself, simple, pleasing to the eye, and somewhat humorous. The lamb is, of course, the lamb from the Preston Coat of Arms. The lamb is at a laptop computer, on Twitter.com, the humour side breaks through around here. On the back of the Lamb, is the Twitter bird, perched happily and looking at two banners that read “PRESTON” and “TWEETUP”. This text is in PNE-like colours, the “PRESTON” in white, and the “TWEETUP” being in two different shades of blue. The overall appearance of my logo is quite Twitter-Like and has obvious references to the city of Preston.

Entry 3 – submitted by Kerry Sholicar

Preston Tweetup Logo Entry by Kerry Sholicar

Description:

My initial thought was to design a typographical logo that could somehow represent the social occasion, capture an essence of Preston City and still give people a relation to Twitter and the Twitter logo. My first job in creating this was to find a font that I felt fitted the criteria. After sifting through and trying many fonts, I decided to stick with “Learning Curve” for the main “Tweetup” part of the logo. I chose this font as I think it represents the relaxed and friendly feel of the event. I then chose a simpler font for the “Preston” part to contrast and help it to stand out, ensuring that it can easily be read. I then decided to go with the blue theme as it relates to both Preston (the city councils coat of arms and the football team) and Twitter.

Voting

You can vote now for your favourite entry. You have until Tuesday 10th March 2009 at 5 PM to register your vote.

Don’t forget to register for Preston Tweetup and claim your free drink on arrival.

Preston Blog takes on music, film and entertainments correspondent

Kirsty Higginson will be Preston Blog's music, film and entertainments correspondent

Preston Blog is branching out a little bit and as the site has been growing in popularity over the last few weeks I’ve decided to hire an eager journalism student from UCLan as the Preston Blog music, film and entertainments correspondent. Kirsty Higginson will be starting as of Friday and covering the beat.

She’s keen, wants to write about the local music, film and entertainments scene. So if you’re in a local band, a local director, actor, producer or work in the entertainments industry get in touch with prestonblogs@googlemail.com and we’ll hook you up.

Kirsty already has her own blog – The Blunt Side of the World – and she’s on twitter @Kirstyhigginson – so feel free to go and follow her, she won’t mind.

Her first project is going to be to create a directory (a bit like the Twitter one we’ve got going on) of bands in Preston and the local area.