Welcome to the blog
This will be where you can find stuff thatās longer or less topical than on twitter; less niche than Reddit; and less sporadic than Mastodon. Welcome. My aim with it is to resurrect blogging. I set up and ran the Real Finance blog from 2003 to 2006 and found it a brilliant way to order my thoughts, stay up to date with my beat and let readers into the thought processes behind the magazine and its community. It was at least as successful as 95% of other blogs - which is to say, we had a small regular readership, it never made any money, and as soon as the hobbyist curator (me) buggered off, it withered. But 20 years later, the things that killed blogging - Facebook, Twitter, shitty tools, and clickbait - are all obviously defective in some way. (I quit Facebook five years ago, but popped back there this week and foundā¦ well, itās awful isnāt it? Mostly āpromoted postsā and then the same crappy memes and ephemera posts that left me thinking less of the people who posted them.) So maybe, just maybe, blogging can make a comeback. You can find ārandom musingsā (thereās a separate section for my ongoing mega-reflection on teacher training). Iām going to have a place for work - content marketing, writing, presenting, and all the other overspill from my professional life. Personal posts wonāt be that personal, but probably wonāt interest the casual passer-by. And thereās an area for pictures - photoblogging FTW! This page is built using Montaigne - which is a rather clever tool to turn Apple Notes into web pages. You can probably work out the URL, but itās here: https://montaigne.io Itās still teething (the image below is supposed to have a caption, for example), but Iām very impressed so far. About me Iām Richard Young, director and finance manager of Barrow Young Ltd; former editor of Financial Director and Real Finance magazines; freelance writer, editor and presenter; qualified teacher (PGCE Roehampton 2022), but more successfully a trainer and editorial consultant. Family tree enthusiasts can have at the genealogy. I write articles, reports and blogs about pretty much everything related to business. Although I used to specialise in technology and then financial management, Iāve got a strong track record in private equity, financial services, human resources, project management, marketing, general managementā¦ But to give you an idea of the range of stuff I cover, recent work has included an overview of the importance of connectors to modular systems in hostile environments; the emergence of universal payment processing solutions for ISVs; and new developments in packaging for companies undertaking clinical trials for new drugs. I get most enjoyment from presenting, which includes MCing whole events, chairing panels, conducting on-stage interviews and even some TV work (niche stuff, letās be clear, for online outlets). Thatās one of the reasons I stepped away for a year to train to teach; it seemed a great fit and offered much more āpurposeā. That was a roller-coaster ride (which Iāll talk about elsewhere on this site), but the TL;DR is that my requirements to do a teaching job (part-time, localā¦ itās a hard enough job without a massive commuteā¦) crashed into an oversupply of history teachers. Bluntly: Iām never going to be the more attractive option for employers if they have a choice, and they always have a choice. (You can read more about that whole experience in the Reflecting on Teaching section.) So Iām back at the writing, editing and presenting. Itās calmer, better paid, but also leaves me wanting that bit more purpose. So Iām also on the hunt for ways to make a contributionā¦ Updates soon. (Note that itās harder to scale pics in Notes and on Montaigne, pics are fixed width, so this is a bitā¦ big.)