After some serious hardcore maintenance, including the slightly traumatic step-up to WordPress 2.5 some hard and fast recoding of parts of the site, and even a few tweaks to the graphics, I think I’m right in saying that everything is finally back to normal – if not better than ever.

Yet Sod’s Law says that as soon as I post this, something is certain to go wrong… I’d really rather like to get back to writing rather than coding!  🙂

There is little online that ‘we at sjhoward.co.uk’ find more irksome than individuals imitating multiplicity with a self-referential ‘we’. «

People can sometimes make life hellish, yet a hellish life can sometimes make people… I fear the former is more frequently true. «

Perhaps Charlotte Green’s joyful laughter should replace the dire ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 – It would certainly brighten my morning. «

How many people evangelise that ‘Code is Poetry’ without realising that the converse is at least equally true, if not moreso? «

Large parts of the site aren’t working at the moment, and are unlikely to be for much of the day. It’s all part of ongoing maintenance to improve the site’s efficiency and hence secure its long-term future. Apologies for any inconvenience.

As regular fans will have noticed, sjhoward.co.uk has been inaccessible for a couple of days. My hosting company decided that I was placing too much load on their servers thanks to the ever-increasing number of hits the site receives.

However, I’m now back. The site isn’t quite its usual self – the most noticeable effect being that the boxes on the right hand side are temporarily static – as I’ve taken measures to try and reduce server load by reducing PHP processing. Frankly, many of the edits I’ve made to the site recently have consisted of some pretty sloppy coding, and I’ll have to tighten that up a bit in order to keep things running.

I guess in the medium term, I’m going to have to start looking for a new host, and I’m open to suggestions.

Expect the site to be a bit buggy for a little while, at least until everything gets back online. At some point, a glut of back-dated Diary posts will probably appear, though you can check out the relevant content right now via my Twitter feed.

In the meantime, why not check out who called me the ‘Stephen Fry of independent blogging’? Now that’s a complement.

The usual suspects’ criticisms of David Cameron for minor cycling errors are mean-spirited, hypocritical, and – frankly – rather puerile. «

In today’s complex world, it can become difficult to know who’s supporting who, which way the political wind is blowing, and who to believe when it comes to news reportage. Take The Daily Mirror, for example.

It is often asked why The Mirror performs so relatively poorly compared to it’s long-time rival, The Sun, which is the most popular and far-and-away the most politically powerful paper in the UK. There’s not a person in Westminster who is unaware of what ‘The Sun Says’ on any given issue, yet The Mirror is largely ignored.

Before every general election, the politically complex Sun is fought over by Labour and the Conservatives, desperate to secure the support of Rupert Murdoch and hence the paper, thus receiving a huge boost to the electoral campaign. The Mirror is always left behind.

So, in these difficult times, it can be hard to follow quite who The Mirror is supporting at any one time.

Take today’s paper, for example. The front page story? A relatively extensive report on minor traffic violations by David Cameron on a bike. Frankly, not a dissimilar level of reportage to that when Tony Blair became the first serving Prime Minister to be interviewed by police, that time in relation to very serious charges.

And on the inside pages? Gordon Brown expresses his love for the ‘misunderstood’ Amy Winehouse, Coldplay, U2, and Leona Lewis: He’s really “down with the kids”. It’s Cool Britannia Mark II, and even less believable than the first time round.

I’m well aware that newspapers have always had political allegiances, but this particular juxtaposition struck me as so utterly ridiculous as to be worthy of comment.

» Image Credit: The Daily Mirror‘s front page, 21st March 2008.

One day – shortly before hell freezes over – the Daily Mail will say that travelling on a Bank Holiday will be easy, not ‘gridlock misery’. «

The technology behind the diary seems to be playing up at the moment… I wonder if this will ever appear? «

I’m very much of the Heat-reading generation, yet nothing could bore me more than the Mills/McCartney divorce. Get off my screen! «

The continuing economic turmoil in the US reaffirms my belief, in spite of polls, that Clinton is a safer bet than Obama in the elections. «

… Though I should make clear that I’m not sure Clinton would make the better President. «

The world is eagerly awaiting the release of WordPress 2.5, the OpenSource blogging platform I’ve been using for over three years.

When I first installed WordPress, I was sold primarily on the advantages of hosting everything on my own server space, and hence retaining much closer control of it, and on the advantage of using PHP over the old static HTML solution Blogger was providing at that time. I was so enthused by the change that I happily manually imported my posts over from both MoveableType and Blogger, which I’d been using previously.

WordPress has come a very long way since then, with automated out-of-the-box importing from other blogging platforms, and very much more besides. Yet, whilst being immensely more powerful, it’s still simple enough for me to customise to my very particular needs, from using fourteen plugins (mostly modified in their own right) to a completely custom theme, and even some changes to the WordPress engine itself.

A couple of years ago, when WordPress turned three years old, I wrote a comparison of the different blogging platforms I’d previously used. Any such comparison I could attempt to write now would be even more hopelessly out of date than that one was, and so I’m not going to try to repeat the exercise. I would, however, like to register my utter disbelief at the fact that I wrote that piece two years ago – it feels more like two weeks. And to think that I can get away with using the same image – that the backend of WordPress has been in what still feels like ‘shiny new’ mode for well over two years – is even more frightening.

However, I know that I’m incredibly loyal to WordPress. From its community full of incredibly helpful and friendly developers, to the way it just gets on and *does* most of the things I want it to do, WordPress simply sells itself to me through its everyday use.

With the launch of WordPress 2.5, the final few of my personal bugs about WordPress will be fixed, and that still-shiny interface is to be updated to something presumably even more radiant. Upgrades to software plugins will, we’re told, become ‘one-click’, removing possibly the final hurdle which prevents people from setting up WordPress on their own (as opposed to using the relatively new hosted solution, WordPress.com). Image galleries will be built-in. And importantly for you, dear readers, load times should be faster.

I guess what I’m struggling to articulate is that I’m proud to use WordPress, I’m happy to support it, and would happily recommend it to anyone. Long may it continue to develop, to version 2.5 and beyond!

» Image Credit: ‘Backstage’ image by SJ Howard, originally published here.

The Instant Opinion promotion has now ended. Thank you to all those who took part.