Tag: blog updates

Happy holidays from Pickled Wings

Posted on by Kevan V

The Last Post for 2022

As I always do, I’m taking this last post of 2022 to extend thanks and holiday greetings to the readership of Pickled Wings.

If you’ve followed me for several years already, thank you for your continued readership. If you’ve started following in 2022, thanks for coming on board and I hope you will stay for a long time to come.

Time to Reflect

The November/December timeframe of 2022 marked the tenth anniversary of Pickled Wings and my other website, Beyond Prague. I started building the websites at the urging of a friend and never imagined they’d become the long lasting and satisfying hobby that they have become.

Let’s take a look at where Pickled Wings is after ten years:

For most of the website’s existance, it was a free sub-domain of WordPress. A few years ago, I decided I’d put enough work into it and it had developed enough of a following for me to justify buying a top level domain name for it.

A few years ago, I decided to connect the website to social media via Facebook and Twitter. While Facebook works well enough, having Twitter really didn’t make any difference. In 2022, I shut down the Twitter connection and replaced it with Instagram. So far, Instagram is working better than Twitter did for bringing extra traffic to the website

After ten years, the top five most viewed pages on the site are:

    1. MIKOYAN-GUREVICH MIG-19 “FARMER” – THE FORGOTTEN MIG
    2. SUKHOI SU-7 “FITTER” – FAST AND FIENDISH
    3. LET L-13 BLANÍK – GLIDING GLOBALLY
    4. SCHNEIDER GRUNAU BABY – A SOARING SENSATION
    5. SAAB J-35 DRAKEN – THE SCANDINAVIAN SURPRISE

    The top five countries for vistors to the site are:

    1. United States
    2. Czech Republic
    3. United Kingdom
    4. Germany
    5. Canada

    The Way from Here

    I don’t plan any big changes to the way I do things on the website, the current formula works well to bring in a steady flow of visitors to keep things from stagnating.

    2022 saw me buy a new camera with better zoom capabilities than my previous one. Hopefully, that will translate into better and closer images of aircraft in flight.

    At that, I close the hangar doors on 2022 and thank you once again for your readership.

    Happy holidays and a joyous New Year!

    Sweeping Up in September

    Posted on by Kevan V

    A Bit of Houskeeping and Rebalancing the Load

    September of 2022 is coming to a close and it’s been a busy month at Pickled Wings. Three airshows across three weekends gave me lots of great new images to show you.

    Those same shows gave me lots of new images to accompany upcoming articles and to update existing ones. Here’s a list of existing articles that I’ve been able to update:

    My article on the Zeltweg Air Museum got the biggest facelift. At almost ten years old, it is one of the oldest articles on the site. Happily, the AirPower 2022 show in Zeltweg gave me the opportunity to visit the museum and take fresh pictures. As a result, the article received fully fresh photos, and extensive update and expansion to the text, and a full review of the links.

    The new photos I took at the Zeltweg museum, and the AirPower 2022 show, also allowed me to do partial refreshment of photos on my Saab J-29 Tunnan and Saab J-35 Draken articles. I also took the opportunity to review and refresh the links in both articles.

    The AirPower 2022 show itself, gave me opportunities to partially refresh the photographic content of the Pilatus PC-6 Porter and Panavia Tornado IDS articles. I also made some adjustments to the links in the Tornado article.

    Between the AirPower 2022 show and the NATO Days show later in the month, I was able to partially refresh the photographs in the Antonov An-2 “Colt” article. I also reviewed and updated the links in that article.

    AirPower 2022 and the Medlánky Oldtimers Weekend event gave me some fresh photos for the Let L-13 Blaník article.

    the Medlánky Oldtimers Weekend also gave me fresh photos for the Orličan L-40 Meta Sokol and Zlín/Let Z-37 Čmelák articles. Additionally, I made some updates to the links section of the Z-37 article.

    Aside of the above article updates, I have also taken some time to clean up the Pickled Wings homepage before adding more to it. I moved some articles to permanent spots in the menus and completely deleted some others.

    With the load lightened and adjusted, Pickled Wings is ready to fly into October and the rest of 2022.