Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, in The Importance of Being Earnest, says, “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

I have created, and then accidentally destroyed, two relatively successful blogs. The first time was carelessness, the second was a misfortune.

In fact I’ve created three blogs. My cricket blog was hardly read. It was a collection of columns I was commissioned to write for a local magazine. You can read one of my favourite posts from 2011 “My ability as a cricketer is the polar opposite to my love of the game“.

For over four years I wrote another, anonymous, blog on local politics. It was scurrilous and, while I was nice about most people, I did take the proverbial out of everyone.

As a local niche blog it was successful, attracting hundreds and sometimes thousands of readers each day, notwithstanding my regular refrain about “my two regular readers”. (They say a local niche blog is successful if you get one hundred hits a day. If you are writing a blog about Manchester United or cricket in India, if you don’t get 5 million hits a day, you are a failure!)

So what went wrong? I was careless. I used the wrong twitter account when posting something about my daughter and me watching cricket.

The blog only worked when there was some intrigue. I used to hear people speculating as to the identity of ‘The Blogger’. But once my identity was out, I had to kill it off.

Misfortune has all but destroyed this blog. After the general election, and more so after the Grenfell Tower disaster, I wanted greater freedom in what I could write, particularly about politics. As a charity chief executive I have restrictions on what I can say in a work capacity. So I decided to remove reference to my organisation in the name of the blog and in its URL.

What I hadn’t realised was that by changing the user name it destroyed previous traffic generated by google searches. Now if you google, say, “andy winter bht blog” the search results will reveal links to the old URL. But when you click a link you are advised: “andywinterbht.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this site.”

That isn’t totally accurate. The content remains but now at ‘andywinterbn1.wordpress.com‘. The consequence has been catastrophic. Hits on the blog are down 95%! I hope it will recover in time, but the lesson is to create a blog name that is future-proofed so that there is no need to change its name, URL or user name.