Introduction

This OS Wayfarer quarterly journal for January 2020 is our very first. Welcome to this new initiative for 2020 designed to record, review, and plan our quarterly activities. I have supported quarterly reporting since I first encountered it in my role as the electronic trades’ adviser in Bandung in the early 80s. Quarterly reporting provides time to plan, conduct and review activities. Worthwhile activities get time to surface. Plus, you are not spending all your time reporting, as you would with monthly reporting!

It is our goal to write an OS Wayfarer quarterly journal throughout 2020. So, let’s see!

Why start now? An interesting question. There are three main reasons: the past year has been a challenging year, which has led to a reassessment of life’s priorities and a desire to move onwards and upwards; secondly, we are entering a new decade, which always prompts a re-appraisal of past, current and future plans and activities; and finally, writing a journal forces you to sort out your thinking which will help us.

The framework for our OS Wayfarer quarterly journal, which is not cast in concrete, reflects the major areas of activity for OS Wayfarer. This framework is:

  1. eBooks: On average we have produced an eBook every year for the last eight years. In this section we’ll discuss our current and planned eBook activities.
  2. Our website: This is our major online platform which we own and can control. It is a significant resource which must be kept up to date. In this section we’ll discuss our website activities.
  3. Posts: Producing posts is an essential and ongoing requirement to maintaining an interesting website. And, guess what? We have not been that good at it, but we are getting better. Our posts will be discussed in this section.
  4. Travel: Undertaking in-Australia and overseas travel is important to us. We travelled in our professional life and now we travel for pleasure. We’ve realised that documenting the research, planning, conduct, and review of our travel activities enhances our experiences and memories. This section of the journal will discuss our travel initiatives and travel photography initiatives.
  5. Other activities: There are always other activities (such as the dreaded “marketing” and “social media”) to discuss. This is the “grab all” section to discuss other “things”.

So, wish us luck and let’s get going!

eBooks

Self-publishing eBooks is our primary focus. All the investment in the website, posts, travel, and photography etc., is designed to support our eBook production.

Ambitiously, we have planned for 2020 – one new eBook (Cornwall – follow our planning posts), a new eBook based on our series of posts – Our Approach to Self-publishing, and an update of our Regent’s Canal eBook. Perhaps it is a goal too far, but an eBook/Printed Book of our Queensland Heritage Buildings is an ambition.  The focus is still to be determined (e.g. Post Offices, Pubs, or Schools of Arts) so watch this space.

Wish us luck with this agenda!

Our website

The last big change to our website occurred in 2015 after consultations with Geoff Powell. Geoff has a background in writing, photography and website development. Our website is based on WordPress and he recommended we use the Avada theme to help drag our website into the 21st Century. We think it was a great success.

Last month we consulted Geoff again to review our website, and this has led to some new ideas. In the spirit of our Do it Yourself approach we’ll start implementing these ideas across the year – can’t wait. In fact, we’ve started. Geoff challenges us with new ideas and we implement the ideas we like.

The immediate changes we want to make include:

  • A revamped header and footer (already adjusted)
  • A revamped “About Us” page (in progress)
  • Improving the website speed (installing a cache and reducing image size across the site). Initial adjustments (mainly reducing image size) have improved the Homepage loading time from 9.6 seconds to about three seconds! But I’m not happy with the cache. More about this next month.
  • Adopting other Avada features such as the Post Slider feature (not yet)

Over the past 12 months Geoff has been developing resources for the Avada theme. It has been quite an amazing project and the bank of resources is impressive and growing.

We’ll report on our website progress in the next OS Wayfarer Quarterly Journal.

Posts

Writing regular posts is always a challenge for us. However, we have found the travel planning posts (e.g. Athens) and the posts about our approach to self-publishing a more satisfying and interesting way to post. Plus, our focus on Queensland heritage is becoming a higher priority and we have some further posts in the pipeline.

The newest initiative is this OS Wayfarer quarterly journal idea and it remains to be seen how this will pan out. But we are optimistic (always overly so).

Our eBook self-publishing approach - Part 1
Our eBook: Six Days in Prague can be found on:

Amazon (Kindle US), Amazon (Kindle UK), Amazon (Kindle AU), and Amazon (Kindle CA)

Smashwords (EPUB), Smashwords also distributes to Oyster, Scribd, Yuzu, Blio and Inktera (formerly Page Foundry) and reaches OverDrive (world’s largest library ebook platform serving 20,000+ libraries), Baker & Taylor Axis 360, Gardners (Askews & Holts and Browns Books for Students), and Odilo (2,100 public libraries in North America, South America and Europe)
Kobo; Apple iTunes; Barnes and Noble

Note: Also available in print and PDF format from Blurb Bookstore

Travel

Destinations

A trip to the UK is locked in for 2020. It’s our normal bi-annual trip to visit our daughter, her partner and grand-daughter. As usual we will extend our trip and visit Cornwall and Scotland (again). As far as OS Wayfarer is concerned, the planned fortnight in Cornwall and a revisit to Regent’s Canal are important activities. As indicated earlier an eBook for Cornwall is planned as well as a revamp of the Regent’s Canal eBook (giveaway).

Further Australian trips are also envisaged. However, the destinations aren’t finalised yet. This will be a topic for a future journal entry.

Photography

As usual we will emphasise travel photography, however a new focus for 2020 will be travel videos. We’ve bought a DJI Osmo Pocket (Some retail therapy has been a priority recently to boost the spirits during our challenging year). So, mastering the “OS Wayfarer Pocket” will be a focus over coming months. A lesson already learnt is that you can spend just as much on the accessories as on the Pocket itself! But more about that in a future post.

Conclusion

Another problem we have, or I have (i.e. Graham), is that we are always trying “to bite off more than we can chew”. A pretty ambitious 2020 is planned but this is better than no plan at all. If we can be successful in self-reporting in this OS Wayfarer Quarterly Journal it should keep us disciplined (Ha Ha).

BTW we have updated the OS Wayfarer About page and I’ve included a Profile Summary.

Catch up in April’s OS Wayfarer Quarterly Journal.

Graham & Katherine

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