Freda Chorlton has been busy and the Hindley Cemetery indexes are complete.

There are now over 32,300 entries covering the period 10th June 1880 to 18th December 2012.

View the Hindley Cemetery Index.

Three new photo galleries have been added:-

Boer War Memorial Service in Mesnes Park Wigan.

The annual Gerry Cooper Memorial bike ride from Heaton Bridge to Wigan.

Latics fans on the way to the semis. Great win and great news to win the FA Cup, had a fantastic day!

Some devastating news regarding a Grade II listed building on Standishgate last week, number 118 collapsed and is now being demolished. Here is exclusive footage from CCTV showing the collapse as it happened! (External link to YouTube).

More updates soon, I have more photos, local art and an old Haigh Hall booklet to add.

Freda Chorlton has been busy updating the Hindley Cemetery indexes.

It is still a 'work in progress'  but another 6,000+ names have been added.

There are now over 26,500 entries covering the period 10th June 1880 to 17th August 1973.

View the Hindley Cemetery Index.

Rev David Long has taken some superb photos from the spire of St Catharine's Church in Scholes.

These exclusive shots have been shared on wiganworld by Rev David - Each photo can be viewed at a massive 4,000px wide, a first for the site. Comments and questions can also be left with any photo.

A vew from St Catharine's spire.

It's been an age since I last updated the blog.

Hope everyone has had a great Christmas and New Year. All the best for 2013.

A new section on wiganworld has been created, it's a detailed 5-day weather forecast for Wigan.

It's constantly updated throughout the day and has loads of stats every 3 hours for the next 5 days.

Click 'News' at the top, then 'Weather' on the left or go straight to the Wigan Weather page here.

Freda Chorlton has been busy updating the Hindley Cemetery indexes.

It is still a 'work in progress'  but another 10,000+ names have been added.

There are now over 20,500 entries covering the period 10th June 1880 to 13th January 1949.

View the Hindley Cemetery Index.

The Local Poetry section has also been updated.

Finally, membership to wiganworld has been re-opened. Full instructions can be found here, please read them as a few people have already tried to join from 'freebie' email accounts.

Wow!

The wiganworld album has reached a new milestone, over 20,000 photos!

A big thank you to everyone that has contributed and a big thank you to Freda Chorlton for suggesting the idea of the album and for contributing a couple of photos to get the ball rolling.

It's been an amazing journey. Long may it continue.

Visit the album to view and comment on the 20,000+ photos. To date, there are around 57,000 comments which are increasing daily.

wiganworld has a couple of new local sponsors, please show your support by taking a look. Firstly, CloudStix.com provide e-cigarette products at low prices and Easiirent.com provide cheap car and van hire in Wigan.

We've done 3 charity bike rides this year along the Leeds/Liverpool Canal. Photos can be viewed here:
June - in aid of Christies.
July - in aid of Steve Prescott Foundation.
August - in aid of Derian House.

A big thank you to Scholes Malc for arranging these as he does every year. Thanks to Malc and the crew, many thousands of pounds has been raised for local charities.

The wiganworld album is reaching another milestone! We're around 75 photos short of 20,000 - what an achievement! Thanks for all the contributions and please keep them coming. I will be adding more on behalf of visitors soon.

My son (Thomas) and I have walked another canal in full. Our third, the Lancaster Canal was brilliant and we enjoyed every step. We're thinking about the Huddersfield Canal next? Any other suggestions? The photos can be seen here.

Between updating wiganworld, I've been busy at work, had the family to look after and have been on trips to London (work related). Whilst in London I bumped into the legendary Sir Tom Jones! Whilst in Wigan on a weekly shop I took this photo in Tesco, lol.

Whilst I'm talking about work... We're moving premises in the next couple of weeks. On to bigger and better things so it's goodbye Standishgate! Will update more later.

Finally, Wigan Family & Local History Society deserve a big mention. They have been going for years but unfortunately, member numbers are declining. We need your support - why not join us? If you live locally please take a look at the website and think about coming to a meeting or two, thank you.

Firstly, what went wrong?

The server was under attack on Friday from Beijing and the Ukraine. As a quick and dirty fix I blocked the IP numbers using the .htaccess file. Unfortunately this didn't solve the problem as the requests kept coming in so the server was working overtime to deny the traffic. I then blocked them using iptables (a software firewall) and all was well again. On Saturday, the hard drives failed. All the sites went. Unlucky or what? The server was 5 years old so was probably at the end of its life.

Jubilee fun.

59 websites disappeared. Spent the Jubilee weekend frantically restoring them. Once restored I could concentrate on wiganworld. Had to restore the other 58 sites first as they're my bread and butter!

Thank you.

A big thank you for all of your support. Its been an overwhelming experience and I've even had offers of help from a couple of local businesses - fantastic.

Moving on...

If ever we disappear again, we'll be back. A full backup is taken nightly. Just need a way of relaying updates, maybe via Twitter? Or, another site? Suggestions/ideas welcome. Still need to complete the rewrite which I keep harping on about.

Freda Chorlton is busy again this time working on the Hindley Cemetery indexes.

It is a 'work in progress' and so far contains over 10,300 names covering the period 10th June 1880 to 13th April 1915.

View the Hindley Cemetery Index.

It's been a while since I updated (as usual) but all kinds of things are happening and are planned.

wiganworld has a new sponsor promoting classifieds where you can buy, sell and swap items - please take a look at Wiganbuyandsell.com.

I've had a few more enquiries on how to submit photos for the Photo-a-day section - simply email me the photo (the larger the better) along with a title, brief description and make/model of camera.

Updates have also been made to historyworld.co.uk and savewigan.co.uk as well as other personal sites.

Improvements are in the pipeline for the cemetery indexes as these sections are proving to be very popular. A 'big' project is scheduled shortly which will get under way as soon as the weather gets warmer.