Good evening, everyone! I thought some followers might like to know what goes into constructing our daily summary posts each morning.
On a normal day, with few weather or travel/traffic problems, those posts normally take me circa 30 minutes to construct.
The time consuming process is checking every possible source of information. I always check the following:
1. Red Funnel Live Status page for both vehicle ferry and Red Jet sailings.
2. WightLink Live Status page – this one is a bit more complicated and time consuming as they have more routes than Red Funnel, so if the status page is indicating problems (with the red tick at the top of the page) I have to go through all their routes and ferries (both vehicle and Fast Cat sailings) to see which ones are struggling and then post the results. Often some sailings are cancelled (or delayed) whilst others are not on the same route. On a bad day it can take over 30 minutes just to monitor WightLink’s sailings.
3. Hover Travel Live Status page.
4. Floating Bridge website.
5. Southern Vectis Buses – this is now more time consuming as the only updates are published on the phone app. They used to publish on Twitter, as did Red Funnel and Island Line Trains, none of whom now publish live updates on that platform.
6. Island Line Trains website.
7. Island Roads Twitter feed.
8. Island Echo to see if they’ve picked up on something we haven’t.
9. County Press to see if they’ve picked up on something we haven’t.
More often than not, I’ll have posted on here before the mainstream IOW media see it, as I tend to start earlier.
10. Various FaceBook groups I’m on.
11. FaceBook IOW Taxi Drivers group.
12. Friendly Cabs WhatsApp group that contains 6 trusted “5 Star” taxi companies that share overflow jobs and traffic/travel information with each other.
13. Met Office for weather report.
14. IW Met Service for a more accurate weather report but they tend to post their morning report too late for it to be included in our morning summary post, so I check it later to see if aligns with the Met Office report I’d published earlier.
15. I then upload the appropriate image to the post or make a new one in PhotoShop if the one required is not already in our image library.
I then have my laptop or iPad in the van during the day and will re-check the various statuses whenever I get a few minute break between jobs.
So there you go! Even the short morning posts, with zero problems to report, still take a while to check but it’s the only way to accurately report any problems to you. I hope you’re finding them useful.
Duncan
Friendly Cabs CEO