A family tour in December 2014 and a lunch stop at a rum shop in Bathsheba was where the idea of setting up a website to record the forgotten history of Barbados and some of our travels was discussed.
Peter has extensive knowledge of web based technology and within hours of getting home a test site was put together.
Unfortunately the rum shop in Bathsheba was destroyed by fire, but BajanThings has grown way beyond our expectation.
We now have over 200 published posts and are proud that we have a pool of contributing authors. They give their time and knowledge in order that the history and folklore of Barbados can be recorded for all who are interested. Thank you.
This means that our content is from many different sources. Without this input we would be unable to have the wide range of topics that we are able to record.
A full listing of the all the posts on BajanThings can be found by clicking on Posts Summary on the navigation menu. You can also see what’s trending on BajanThings over the last 24hrs, 48hrs, 7days, 30days, 90days and last year by visiting the Trending Posts page.
BajanThings now has over 2,000 subscribers who receive an email notification when a new article is added. Usually at the beginning of each month.
Peter has been able to gather a large portfolio of information on the time Errol Barrow spent in the RAF during WWII. We were honoured that his alma mater the London School of Economics used this BajanThings post for his LSE profile. Jim Webster has shared his outstanding knowledge on maps of Barbados and during lock-down transcribed into a digital format details on plantation ownership across the island from 1640 – 1924. John Knox has done outstanding research on the Quakers in Barbados. All of these, and more, are important parts of our history.
Some of our contributing authors like Bill Hern have also lent countless hours of their time to helping other researchers namely the team in France and England that have been trying to locate the family of Wireless Operator/Air Gunner SGT Jack Lewis Franco. Franco was one of the crew members in Bajan P/O George HF Inniss’ aircraft that was shot down in France on 4th February 1941.
One of the highlights for Peter this year was to attend a commemoration ceremony in France on 8th May 2024 – la fête de la Victoire 1945. It was to mark the official opening by the Association pour la Recherche d’Epaves Aéronautiques en Pays de Loire of a permanent exhibition space that documents the four aircraft and their crews that crashed in Pont-Saint-Martin, France during World War II – one of whom was Bajan P/O George HF Inniss.
And for me it was trips to Scotland for TGOC 2024 and to Spain walking a section of the Camino de Santiago.
Over the last ten years BajanThings has had three major updates to the look and feel of the site. The most recent update was this year. This is to keep up with rapidly changing technology of the web and the preferences of our readers. Also periodically small incremental changes are made. These are labour intensive changes and take Peter many hours sitting in front of his computer.
BajanThings typically gets 150 visitors a day and they stay on the site for just under 5 minutes. When a new article is published the visitors peak to between 300 and 900 per day for 3 to 7 days.
Occasionally a post goes viral and we may see thousands and thousands of visitors over a period of a week. This is often driven by social media links that we have no control over and are often unaware of until we see the traffic spike. The record of over 10,000 visitors in a 5 day period goes to the badjohn post.
For those visiting BajanThings, 58% access via a mobile device, 38% via a desktop and 4% via a tablet. Our readership covers a very wide age profile from 35 to 65+ years old.
The top countries where BajanThings is read, other than Barbados, are: USA, Canada, Trinidad, Australia, Germany, France, Netherlands and New Zealand.
Apart from the many countless hours that Peter spends uploading new posts and crunching images and making sure BajanThings is technically up to date, there are monetary costs for maintaining and hosting the site.
Currently 13% of the fixed cost of running BajanThings comes from the ads placed on the site from Google AdSense. It was previously 28%. Google puts ads on the site as they see fit and provide us with a small revenue source. We have no way of having any idea how Google arrives at the income they give us. There is no accountability. They share 70% of the ad revenue, which we have to take on trust.
The feedback we constantly get is that these ads are very intrusive to the reading of BajanThings posts.
From time to time we have put on small recommendations to local restaurants or authors. This is done as a public service with no payment asked.
Based on user feedback, in August 2024 we removed ads from the body of posts and introduced a donations type remuneration to help defray some of the cost of hosting BajanThings. Some of these costs are Domain Registration, Website Hosting, and the costs associated with WordPress specialists tools and plugins.
Going forward we shall see if this new model of peripheral ads in the header, footer and in the sidebar and combined with donations can help cover the lost advertising revenue of removing in post ads.
If you enjoy and appreciate the information on BajanThings, we ask you to make a small donation so that we can continue to have the current information freely available and continue to add new content.
BajanThings is an important source of information for our thousands of readers and to many researchers who access the site. To those that have made a donation – thank you.
As the year draws to end we look forward to adding more information that will educate and enlighten not only Bajans but our friends across the world.
The world in 2024 is a very unsettled place. We are surrounded with bad news from the effects of climate change, wars, corrupt governments, crime, fake news…. just to name a few. We can only hope for a better 2025.
From all our BajanThings contributors and from Peter and I, we wish you a peaceful end of 2024 and we look forward with hope and confidence that 2025 and beyond will bring a safer and more equal world.
William Burton
BajanThings – All things Barbadian. Bajan history. Bajan folklore. Interesting Bajan people. Hiking in Barbados and overseas
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