Tag Archives: blogging

Banned in the UAE!

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The other night, I did some work on my blog, behind the scenes. I spiffed up the ‘About’ page, and a couple of the other sections. I also knocked out a quick post – nothing controversial, just a conversation that had taken place with my sons at bedtime.

So you can imagine my surprise when I woke up in the morning and discovered my blog had been banned in the UAE!

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My ban came in the same week that the UAE cracked down on applying makeup while driving and taking selfies at the wheel

Not the whole website, it turned out, but the latest post (below if you’re online). If you click on it in the UAE, you get the Du surf safely message, telling you that the website you’re trying to access contains prohibited material (!) Don’t worry, I’m not writing this from behind bars [laughs nervously].

I’ve no idea what I’d written that was so offensive, but I took this to be a blogging milestone – at a vast quantum leap of the imagination, could it put Circles in the Sand in the same category as the FHM and Maxim websites, which are blocked in the UAE, I wondered? Or, at an even further stretch, The Wolf of Wall Street? Martin Scorsese’s film had 45 minutes of unsuitable content cut, and in places didn’t even make sense. My blog only had about 300 words censored, but I do often wonder if my late-night ramblings about the non-stop party that motherhood is (joke!) are coherent.

Given that I’m pretty sure it comes across in my humble blog that I genuinely love living in Dubai, I can only imagine the censorship software was feeling a little oversensitive – perhaps trying to get its point across to all the newbies here in time for the new school year, and that it will gradually lose interest. Like a really bad teacher.

So, here goes … testing … testing … testing: I’m gingerly pushing Publish and hoping it was a one-off glitch. Fingers crossed. If you don’t hear from me again, I’m writing my novel in jail.

On finding out you think I’m Shouty Mummy

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This post was meant to be about new year’s resolutions, which, briefly, for me are to:

– Get back to the gym, lose a stone, grow taller

– Feel less stressed by the noise/mess/chaos that emanates from the boys

– Blog less under the influence

– Make more – not fewer – honest Facebook updates such as, “My kids are bored. We’re climbing the walls here!” (why not tell everyone how it really is?)

– Eat more dark chocolate to give me the endorphin-high needed to keep up with my children

But then I got a rather spiffy email from WordPress.com this morning, with roaming spotlights, fireworks, a map and more.

My ‘2012 in Blogging’ annual report – I started scrolling, intrigued.

I have to admit I laughed out loud (while secretly being quite pleased) at the comparison to Jay-Z. Some 19,000 people packed out the new Barclays Center in New York to see the rapper perform recently. Circles in the Sand was viewed about 120,000 times in 2012. If the blog were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take six sold-out performances for that many people to see it [laughs in disbelief again].

I’m under no illusions – a large proportion of those hits were people running an image search on the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, which I wrote about in September 2011. For some reason, the search engines love this post, causing more than 68,000 people to crash-land, accidentally, on my ramblings.

But there are other posts, too, that have proven popular and are more relevant to the tired, expat mummies who relate to my life:

In order of the most-viewed posts in 2012:

Expat brats: The signs to look out for – (clearly a pressing concern in Dubai)

A sticky story about having a housemaid – (no prizes for linking this to the above)

On yelling at your kids – (oh Gawd, please don’t let this be what I’m remembered for)

I was also interested to learn what search words, other than the Burj Khalifa and yelling, had sent internet users my way: not sure what this says about my life, but the most-frequent search terms that led to my blog were hair salon, Kidzania and Duran Duran.

So there it was in black and white: readers of Circles in the Sand are under the impression I’m an all-singing, Shouty Mummy, cavorting round the house to the sound of Wild Boys and The Reflex – with nice hair.

Could be worse.

Dear Google, Thanks for the hits!

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Bloggers reading this will know that it can be fun to keep an eye on your ‘blog stats’ – not in an obsessive-compulsive fashion, but to see where traffic is coming from.

Special thanks to readers in North America, the UK and the UAE!

I love the new feature that WordPress.com recently installed – a world map on the stats page that means I can see where you live! Not your house or anything, but the country in which you reside. It’s fascinating to see which corners of the world are actually visiting little old me via the blogosphere!

I also love seeing how visitors stumble across my blog. The stats page lists the search terms that Internet users around the globe have typed into search engines such as Google – leading people, usually by accident, to Circles in the Sand.

Some of the terms searched for are hilarious – here are a few recent examples:

‘Mum screaming’ Can’t think how this led to my blog!

‘Expats gone bad’ Ditto

‘Dubai women seeking house-cleaning naked male for job’ Sorry, next time search for Chippendales in Dubai – or try an agency

‘Toilet sign styles in Dubai’ Do I look like a lavatory? (BB’s toilet talk the culprit, me thinks)

‘Exotic hair shears’ Mmm, don’t own any of those

‘Sugar mommies in Dubai’ You’ve come to the wrong place, hon!

‘My housemaid in tape’ Eeee-uw!

Postscript: Dear Australia, I’m terribly sorry, but you disappeared when I downloaded the map. I don’t know why! It has just been pointed out to me that I have a reader in Sydney (yay!) so thanks to Aus too…

Our life on the small screen

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My humble and tiny corner of the blogosphere has kept me busy this year, providing a creative outlet and distraction for me and, I really hope, some entertaining insight into life in Dubai for people who’ve read it.

And a huge thank you for reading.

My goal when I started this blog was to attract one or two readers who aren’t related to me and, amazingly, I’ve achieved that!

Desert dwelling: Sandy pastures outside our compound

One of the fascinating things about blogging is being able to track the readership via your ‘blog stats’. I keep an eye on these because it’s fun to find out where traffic is coming from and also good to know if anything dodgy is going on.

Talking of which, I should probably change the title of my post Things that get you in trouble in Dubai (yes, sex on the beach!), because when people Google ‘sex in Dubai’ they blaze a trail to yours truly.

The seedy side of the internet aside, the blog stats also tell me which are the most popular posts – and I have to admit, I’m fascinated to see which posts about desert living people are most interested in; which nugget of expat knowledge has been most valuable; which parenting challenge has struck a chord.

As it happens, none of the above.

My most popular post has nothing to do with expat life — or kids for that matter.

A half-mile-high skyscraper, known as the Burj Khalifa, is responsible for a whopping 6,340 hits, nearly half the hits on my blog.

Watch out: No job too big, or too small

The second-most popular post was Expat brats: The signs to look out for, closely followed by Happy 40th birthday UAE (thanks to the photo of the blinged-out BMW) and the Dubai driving post with tips on how to be a roadhog.

Of course it would be silly to spend far too long online looking for a good picture of the world’s tallest building just to get another peak in my blog stats. So jettisoning the image I just found, I’ll leave you with a photo of something I saw parked near us recently that made me laugh (and wonder if I should hide).

That’s it for 2011. I have to get ready now for the black-tie-do taking place tonight on board the Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2), moored here in Dubai, and I’m hoping they’ve filled the swimming pool with pink champagne.

Just kidding.

We don’t have a babysitter so we’ll be taking the kids up the road to a party in our compound – within stumbling distance home, so the perfect night out, if you ask me.

Thank you again for taking the time to read about us here in Dubai. Wishing you a very happy new year!