Light the candles again

That time of year again, as we approach the fourth birthday of the Diary.

Though we seem to have reached a plateau in recent months, there was again a growth in readership during 2008. More than 103,000 visits to the site, with over 150,000 pages read. It's a lot of attention. Thank you, readers.

You tuned in from more than 130 countries, which makes us something of a United Nations. But with around two thirds accessing from Ireland itself -- and by logic, from the more or less direct locality -- the Diary is very much a facility for the community in Kilcullen itself.

That said, our town's expats in the US are the next most interested readers, followed closely by the UK. After a couple of European countries -- Germany has quite a few Kilcullenites -- it won't be any surprise that there's a good chunk of regular readership from Australia. It seems that every second home in Kilcullen has somebody in Ozland at any given time, your Editor's family included.

Why do they bother? I suppose, when you're far away, any regular link with home is nice. I often meet parents or siblings of our Wild Geese and they tell me that the outlanders often know more about what's happening here than do those they've left at home.

For those who look in from around here on a regular basis, we try to offer something new every day. But to be fair, it's a part-time and unpaid effort, and we increasingly find that time is indeed finite, and there are real physical limits to productivity. We'll keep on trying to push out this Internet envelope, though ... because it really is fascinating to this sexagenarian to be still learning new things.

The good thing is that, since we set up the Diary those some years ago, there are other local websites which have come on stream, catering for their own specialised interests here. In most cases, they don't take from what we're at, because we weren't there anyhow.

The Badminton Club, the GAA Club, are to the fore as exemplars, using the WWW in the best way possible, as regularly updated sites to let their members and followers know what's going on in a timely fashion.

The Parish is also getting in on the act, and the original static website is being developed to provide a more dynamic reporting of the Catholic interests in the locality. There's also a new Baptist congregation site which extends further the local spiritual ethos.

Also, Cross & Passion College has now got seriously onto the web, and is providing a regular news feed of the varied and often wonderful things that are happening in that youthful and vibrant part of our community.

Does all this begin to make the Diary look a little redundant? We don't believe so. Apart from the fact that we can direct you to news from these other interests, there are a number of segments out there which still haven't grasped the advantages of what we might call 'Kilcullen on the Net'.

So, approaching this latest birthday of the Diary (third week of January), we're saying 'watch this space'. Because this is the space where we'll try to keep making new things happen.

Otherwise we'd get bored ...

Brian Byrne.