Summer of progress?

Progress of a kind.

Obviously, this isn't good enough. The fact that I haven't written about Peterborough Business since the spring says something about my commitment.

The site has developed at bit, but my reluctance to blog about it is telling. And I can hardly criticise visitors to the main site for not taking part when I setting such a bad example.

Let me try to make amends by filling in this huge gap.

So, I met with Donald of Customers Matter and he gave me some encouragement. I created Localbusinessmedia.com, too.

For most of the summer I spent every Sunday morning rewriting the press releases coming into news@peterboroughbusiness.co.uk

A typical week would see six or seven news stories posted and I started to send out a news email to a slowly-growing email "database". That's how I remember summer Sunday mornings 2008 - a cafetiere of coffee, iPod on shuffle and a laptop in the conservatory.

I enjoyed doing something satisfying and learning more about what's going on in the city.

But August crept up on me and the family had a massive adventure planned. We went to America for a month and you can read all about it here: http://la2ny08.blogspot.com

My mailing list had grown to over 200 email addresses, some taken from research but many from visitors to the site signing up. Traffic to the site was around 40 visitors a day - relatively tiny.

I wondered how I might keep the site ticking over for a month and on the last Sunday before we left for America I had the bright idea of feeding RSS news into panels automatically. I took RSS news from the Evening Telegraph, the BBC Business and Economy news, Opportunity Peterborough's feed and other local news from BBC Cambridgeshire.

Feeling quite pleased with myself I left it all behind me and came back a month later to quite a shock. Because of all the dynamic content feeding into the site, the constantly-changing news page had become a popular destination. The site was getting over 100 visits a day (admittedly, a proportion from America) and my email list had grown to nearly 300 recipients.

Not so successful is the community section, which started as an experiment before the holiday and has still not caught on.

But bouyed by the activity on the main site, normal service was resumed in September and October.

September saw another milestone. I spent some money. Apart from registering the website address last winter, I hadn't spent a penny on Peterborough Business, but now I decided I needed business cards for a forthcoming business exhibition in the city. I ordered 200 and they arrived the day AFTER the event. Typical.

The event was Business Focus and I had three or four interesting conversations squeezed into my lunch hour away from the day job at Fleet News. Holly Draper at Opportunity Peterborough was wonderfully encouraging and friendly. She admonished me for not writing the blog, so I hope you're pleased to see this, Holly.

A week later I wrote an editorial about the media talking us into a recession and found myself on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire talking about Peterborough Business and hearing my name mentioned in the news all morning. That was weird.

The last meeting of note was with a local journalist, Joanna Borrett. Joanna is a former editor of Nene Valley Living and shares my enthusiasm for the region and city's potential. Joanna has a project in the planning stages and we met to compare experiences, share ideas and talk about ways we might be able to help each other.

That happened about three weeks ago and I'm afraid since then I've struggled a bit. My day job is busier than ever and I've had a number of weekends away. News, features and emails out have all but dried up. Information is still coming in to me, though, and I will get back into the swing of things soon.

Traffic to the site is now running at 200 visits on the day after a news email, settling down to 120 visits for the rest of the week. Many visitors are obviously happy with the varied news feeds coming into one page automatically, making Peterborough Business a kind of news portal.