Postcard from Bishkek

The site was actually started long before the days of blogs and social networking sites like My Space and Facebook … at that time, lots of people had personal webpages and websites and I decided to set one up for myself.

Why? … well, I get about 100 emails a day. I deal with them in the following way:

A large number of them are spam — and are immediately junked, spammers please note!

Then there is a number of newsletters that I have subscribed to … news services to help me keep in touch with «home»; trade news about tourism and hotels; articles about topics that interest me such as Chinese cooking, … and so on. These are put to one side and I deal with them later after I have dealt with the urgent matters of the day.

These include the emails from clients and potential clients, which always take priority. Another priority are the emails from my fellow investors about the progress of the companies.

Then, there are emails from friends around the world. Old school friends; former colleagues and pupils; former clients and so on. I used to try and sit down and write personal emails on Saturdays or Sundays – and I called them “Postcards from Bishkek”. I would write the main part which would be a sort of circular “newsletter” and then “top and tail” them individually with personal comments for each of the recipients in turn, (replies to specific questions, news about mutual acquaintances … that sort of thing). Unfortunately, work tended to keep me so busy so that I lost several weekends and I kept falling behind in my personal correspondence. Quite a few of the people that received these “postcards” wrote back saying that they like to read about life out here: the problems with trying to run a company; the social background; the trials and tribulations of dealing with bureaucracy, authorities and so on.

It was in response to these comments that I set up ianbek.com … If my friends were interested in what what I had to say then maybe others would also be interested. I needed somewhere to publish the postcards and a personal website seemed to be the answer, (remember, this was in the days before social networking sites). The other websites I have connections with are concerned just with travel and tourism here in Kyrgyzstan … so I needed a venue where I could publish the “postcards” and so I registered the site and started adding pages.

Why ianbek? … well, I’ve written a separate post about that.

Why do I call it a “Postcard from Bishkek“? … well, I’ve written a separate post about that.

The site ran for a couple of years and then one year I forgot to re-register the domain name in time … and I started getting messages asking what had happened. Apparently someone had bought up the name and parked a site on it.

You can imaging that I wasn’t too happy about it … but, to be honest, it was my own fault.

After a while, however, people were still asking me what had happened and so I decided to resurrect the site. I re-registered it under the name ianbek.kg … ianbek.com was still in use by somebody else … and here we are.

Some of the pages from the original site have been included … in some cases with additional comments … and others are new. When I was without a site to maintain I had stopped writing the “postcards”, although I still worked on them in that I made notes and outlines for suitable posts – after all, you never know when a suitable opportunity might arise to use the idea. I have written up some of the ideas and included them here.

Some of the pages were written specifically for the site but others contain articles that I written for newspapers or magazines. Some of them are quite short, but in some of them I do tend to go on a bit … as I said, I can be quite verbose … and read a bit like a “stream of consciousness”.

It is a personal site … and I suppose it can be a bit idiosyncratic … the pages contain my reminiscences, comments and observations … they are mine and mine alone. You don’t have to agree with me, (but, obviously, I hope you will), and please remember that it’s always possible that I am mistaken when I draw conclusions. I hope there are no big blunders!

It’s a fairly simple site … I am not very keen on flashy effects … keep it “pure and simple” is one of my mottos. I ought to say that it has been through a spellchecker but that won’t catch all the mistakes. It certainly wouldn’t help with the style … I have a very individualist style of writing – I know that! I use, (overuse), lots of idioms and clichés, triple dots (…), dashes (-), sub-phrases separated by commas or enclosed in brackets and I can be very verbose at times creating a sort of “stream of consciousness”, all of which some people find very annoying and/or frustrating … if you are one of those … Sorry!

This is the third version of the new site … First of all I worked on it using Microsoft Pagemaker.  It was Menu driven and the entries were arranged by category: About  (me, Kyrgyzstan, Celestial Mountains) and Postcards (from an expat, from a teacher, about tourism and about business).  As the site grew, however, it became difficult to find particular posts of interest, so I re-worked it, so that you could see postcards in some sort of chronological order of when they were written.   I also added another section, “For the Record” for background information which might help people understand the points I was making in the Postcards.

I still wasn’t happy, however, and when one of our computer consultants suggested switching to using WordPress, I decided to give it a go.  I can still allocate the pages to Categories, show the chronological order and in addition I could also allocate “tags” so that it was easier to find entries across different categories, and also include a Search facility.

To be honest, however, I have cheated a little with the dates – especially when it comes to the earlier postcards when I can’t remember when they were originally written.

I have put the posts that are “about me” with dates in early 2008, and the postcards from the first website in the second half of 2008.   Since I started the new website in 2009, I know which month the posts were written, but not necessarily the actual date.

So, before November 2010, the dates are approximate.

All in all, I hope it is easier to find postcards of interest.