Six years ago today, I registered my first domain name and set up my first proper website. That domain name, which still belongs to me, was simonhoward.co.uk. I just thought that this was a significant enough milestone to mention. You can, of course, see older versions of this site (dating back to 2000) at archive.org, with archived versions of simonhoward.co.uk here, and those of sjhoward.co.uk here. Some of them were truly terrible…

Last month, I said a number of things… not least, that there wasn’t going to be a This Blogging Month post this month. Well, there is. I also announced some changes to site navigation which, to cut a long story short, have now been reversed, due to user comments. No more ‘Older’ and ‘Later’ posts links!

In terms of hits, they’re up slightly on last month, which comes as something of a surprise, given that I’ve not written that much – I’d really expected the hits to drop off, but clearly they haven’t. I now stand at just over 135,000 hits this month, and I also passed the million mark this month for hits since the site’s launch. Amazon revenues just about covered costs this month.

Towards the end of August, the site had a fairly big design tweak, with titles now in the current curvy-style things and basically all round reduction of the dotted lines that were beginning to take over the site. I’ve also slimmed the site to a standard width, with the aim of improving design and accessibility, and having the helpful side-effect of reducing line-length to the standard 9-10 words for maximum readability. And you thought this was just thrown together… Printing still works properly, and the print template has stayed the same. The website now looks a tad better in Firefox, thanks to some tidying of the CSS. As always, I’m open to suggestions on the site’s design, so feel free to contribute to the discussion. I ‘ve also made the upgrade from WordPress 1.5.1.3 to 1.5.2, which was made infinitely easier thanks to Swing as You are Dreaming‘s change log.

I think that’s about it for this month’s update – so a bit shorter than usual. Hopefully I’ll start to post a bit more regularly again now, as I’m back at uni with full internet access. Bet you can’t wait.

Once again, this month I’ve had more hits than ever before – more than 500 extra hits per day, taking me to just under 130,000 hits this month, from a total of sixteen different countries (one fewer than last month). Almost 10% of you are now using Firefox – up from 8% last month – and the proportion of IE users has fallen slightly. Just of 97% of you are running Windows.

Enough about you, now let’s talk about me! This month has seen quite a number of aesthetic changes to the site. These have been introduced to make the site easier to understand as well as easier on the eye, as shown particularly by the retirement of the little icons that used to symbolise ‘permalink’, ‘trackback’, and so on, and introduction of a more straightforward approach to printing content. You may also notice that the advertising on the site has moved about a bit, instead of being stuck in one big column in the sidebar. I’ve tried to make them look as unobtrusive as possible, whilst also trying not to hide them away where no-one clicks them, and many pages now have fewer adverts than before. Let me know whether or not you think I’ve got it right… I certainly think I’ve got it right, since the revenue from advertising is over twenty times greater than last month, which is astounding considering all that’s changed is the position of the ads, and reduced their number.

In order to reduce loading time, each archive page on the site now displays seven days’ worth of posts. Therefore, if you go into a monthly archive page, you will only see the posts for the most recent seven days on which posts were made – you can then take yourself to earlier posts using the appropriately titled ‘earlier posts’ link at the bottom of the page. Once there, you’ll be able to come back again using the ‘later posts’ link. Note, however, that these links will only navigate you through the subset of posts you’ve chosen – so if you’ve chosen April 2005, you’ll only be able to navigate through April 2005 posts – you can’t get to March 2005 posts by repeatedly clicking ‘earlier posts’. It’s really not as confusing as it sounds. Just give it a try, and appreciate the better loading times.

Also new this month is the ‘Possibly related posts’ feature on all posts’ individual permalink pages. This section highlights other posts which the computer thinks are about similar topics, and so may also be of interest if you liked the particular post you were reading. It’s not always perfect, but it’s often pretty good, so take a look.

In another major new feature, you can now access this site on the move via your WAP enabled mobile phone. Simply point your phone’s browser to sjhoward.co.uk/mobile, or text ‘sjh’ to 60300 and the link will be sent to you. Texts cost 25p.

Yet another new feature for this month is audio posts – you can now access all posts filed after 12th July 2005 in mp3 format, simply by clicking the ‘audio’ link above them (or, on individual post pages, below them). A podcast of the most recent fifteen posts is available, so you can now take sjhoward.co.uk wherever you go, both on your mobile, with the new service described above, and on your mp3 player. Why not give it a try now, and listen to this post?

For more information on any of the changes and new features, you can look at the regularly updated site guide.

Looking forward to August… I’m going to be parted from the internet several times during August (the first of which begins tomorrow), so posts will be a little more sporadic than is usual. Normal service will be resumed at some point in September, though when in September will depend on how quickly internet access arrives in my student house. The next ‘This Blogging Month’ update is likely to come at the end of September, rather than August, because I’ll be away at the end of August. I’ll make September’s a double-edition extra special version for you. I can tell you’re looking forward to it already. Anyway, in the meantime, why not browse some old posts? Do check back for new posts, or subscribe to the RSS feed, and enjoy your summer.

Regular readers may be wondering where the symbol has disappeared to. The answer is simple: It has retired to somewhere suitably sunny, as it is no longer required. You can now print any page on the site much more easily: Simply use your browser’s ‘Print’ function. This will print a specially formatted version of the page, designed for printing – even including the full URIs of any links, which is a very handy feature when printing for future reference.

I hope that this makes the printing process a little more straightforward, and makes the resulting output a little more useful.

It’s been another busy month this month, particularly in terms of hits and visitors, where I’ve once again had more than ever before. In fact, I’ve experienced the biggest month-on-month increase since January to February, resulting in almost 110,000 hits – that’s more that 500 hits per day up on last month. Advertising revenues have been astounding this month, thanks in part to a number of people buying high-priced electrical goods through my Amazon links, earning me a a decent amount of commision. I’ve far more than covered my costs this month, which is helpful, since the traffic increases may mean that we have to move over to a more expensive server before long.

Visitors from a total of seventeen different countries have been perusing the site this month, with the most common being the US, the UK, and Australia, and the least common being Japan, Denmark, and India. The majority of visitors are using Internet Explorer 6, whilst just under eight percent are using one verison of Firefox or another – a percentage which seems to be rising all the time.

As for the website itself, I’ve played around with the left-sidebar a little bit to reintroduce Google web search, and I’ve set this so that your cursor will automatically gravitate to this box when the page loads, the idea being that you can set sjhoward.co.uk as your homepage, read the latest posts, then head off on the rest of your web journey with Google. You’ll also notice that Google now supplies the search function for this site. I’ve made this move because Google archives the entire site, where the inbuilt site funciton only searched the blog. We were getting to the stage where the lag in Google’s archving was smaller than the amount that the site search didn’t search. So, basically, Google was better. But it may not be able to find the very latest posts, so be aware of that when searching.

To tie in with this new functionality, I’ve cut the number of posts on the homepage to ten, which confers much quicker loading time. The original figure of twenty-five was set when I was posting four or five times per day. Now I’ve settled down into more of a routine of one or two longer posts per day, it’s no longer necessary to display as many on the homepage itself. Remember, you can always access all of the posts on the site through the archives, which can be browsed using the links on the left, or searched with the search function on the right.

You may also have noticed that the ‘Most Viewed’ feature has disappeared – this is simply because it wasn’t working properly, and seemed to have become stuck. I’m now using a completely different stats package for ‘instant’ readings (which I use to determine the popularity of the various things I write, as well as to assess day-to-day traffic), whereas I’m still sticking with my host’s statistics for the monthly output you see in these posts. So all of the public info will remain comparable, as it’s still on the same system. I may reinstate some kind of ‘Most Viewed’ feature at some point in the future, but it’s pretty pointless at the moment anyway, because the Sudoku posts are far and away the most viewed, and don’t look like being over taken any time soon!

In the past couple of days, I’ve made some aesthetic changes to the site thanks to some comments made by readers. As with the old-version blog, I’ve increased the line spacing, as this makes posts a little easier to read. I’ve also implemented better highlighting of quotations, by giving them a fetching purple background in addition to the line on the left. The pay-off, of course, is increased scrolling. But I think it’s better this way. You can give me your comments through the usual channels.

As of 26th June, the copyright of all work on the site is protected by a newly updated Creative Commons Licence. As well as the normal update in the legalese, you will also find that the terms of the licence have changed, to give increased freedom for you to use the information on this site – specifically, you can now create derviative works, subject to given conditions. See the licence itself for more information. If the terms of the licence get in the way of something you’d like to do, then please remember that any conditions can be waived if you obtain permission from the copyright holder – that’s me. Feel free to ask.

The coding behind the icon has been improved slightly, so that as well as the post itself you also get a numbered list of the URIs of the links within the post, so that the links on the blog are reflected in the print version. Therefore, if you are printing posts for future reference it might be a better idea to use the icon rather than printing the individual post page – though, of course, that won’t include any comments that have been left, so you’ll have to return to the post’s page to see those (the URI for the indivudal post is included in the version). This whole paragraph is now pants. Refer to this.

I’ve gone through another minor software upgrade – I’m now running WordPress 1.5.1.3, up from 1.5.1. The upgrade was relatively painful painless (oopsie!) once again, and only resulted in about two minutes of downtime, which is quite impressive. This upgrade’s main function is to improve security of the blog, and was online at this site within four hours of its release. Let’s hope it works!

I think that’s about all I have to tell you in this month’s update – so that, I suppose, was June!

I’m very excited to announce that you can now download an sjhoward.co.uk toolbar for Internet Explorer, which allows you to search the web, read and listen to the latest headlines, and have one-click access to lots of your favourite sites (including this one, of course). For more information, check out my toolbar page, or for more detail, check the page hosted by my partner in this exercise.

I’ve just shunned the Google Toolbar in favour of the sjhoward.co.uk toolbar, so it certainly proves useful to me. But that’s because I designed it with, erm, me in mind. If you do decide to give it a go, then it is (of course) completely free, and dead easy to uninstall should you choose to do so. And I think it goes without saying that it’s spyware and virus free.

Hope you find it useful!

I’ve surpassed 600 posts this month – another slightly disturbing milestone – and also celebrated my second year of posting. It’s beginning to seem like every month I’m reaching a milestone of some description at the moment – and long may it continue!

Behind the scenes, I upgraded from WordPress 1.5 to 1.5.1, and then up to 1.5.1.1 as well, and then up to 1.5.1.2. Each upgrade was completely painless – unlike the one up to 1.5, and for the second upgrade of the month I have to thank Aldoblog for making it that little bit easier by providing a list of updated files. The new version can be downloaded directly from WordPress. The necessary change to go from 1.5.1.1 to 1.5.1.2 is detailed here.

I’ve got round to fixing the search function, which was slightly buggy in that it didn’t work properly when searching from individual post pages. It’s now fully functional, and tastes great! I’ve also added two new features that allow you to subscribe to either the full site’s posts or a particular comments thread by email. For more information on those, please check this post. I’ve also made an RSS 2.0 feed of the comments left on this site available – you can access it using the link under ‘Subscriptions’ on the right, where you’ll also find a permanent link to the full site email subscription service.

The right sidebar has been tidied up a bit, with links to more posts than previously – the most recent (new), most viewed, most commented (new), and most random. I’ve also increased the number of adverts ever so slightly, and made them match the design of the site more closely so that they don’t stick out so much. I decided that it was sensible to increase the number of adverts following last month’s close call with respect to getting enough cash from advertising. I’m sure you’ll be as delighted as me to find out that this policy appears to have worked, with me reaching a record 278% profit this month – this isn’t quite as good as it seems, as it’s quite likely that the hosting fees will increase soon, since this site is starting to become ridiculously popular, now averaging almost 3,000 hits per day – only seven months ago, I was receiving less than twice that figure per month. I’ve also had quite a few emails this month, complementing the site – so thank you very much for those, they always make me smile.

The most popular post of the month was one that was actually published last month – My first missive on Su Doku. The most popular post actually posted this month was my brief history of Su Doku in the UK. I’m beginning to think that Su Doku might be quite popular…

And I think that’s all I can say to round up May!

Today, I’ve finally launched an oft-requested feature… you can now subscribe to this blog by email.

If you give me your email address here (or on the ‘Subscribe by Email’ link on the sidebar), the system will send you an email each time I write a new post, and I’ll even include the full text of the post for your perusal. I’ll throw in a link to the post, as well, so that you can see it complete with any formatting or pictures, and also comment on it or see any other comments that have been left. This is in addition to the recently-launched comments feed subscription options, which allow you to be notified each time a comment is left on a post which you have already comment on.

The service is (of course) completely free of charge, and your email address will be used for nothing other than sending you these updates.

I hope this feature proves useful to you!

Update: Link URI updated

This month has been busy in every sense of the word! I’ve surpassed 500 posts and 100,000 words, which makes me question what exactly it is I’m doing with my life! But the fact that I’ve once again had the highest number of hits ever – well over 75,000 – makes me feel a little happier. I’ve had visitors from as far afield as Japan, Thailand, Denmark, and Singapore. So hello to all of those people. I’ve made a slight loss in terms of advertising revenues this month, but given that I’ve been well-above target for the previous months of the year, it’s not a big problem. I actually made a 12% profit in the end (see the comment for more details).

The most popular post of the month was my comment on American patriotism.

I’ve finally got round to doing away completely with the awkward post footers, moving the icons (including a new comment one) up to the top, and adding a new ‘bug’ to the end of posts which have comments, which I feel is, all in all, a more satisfactory solution to the problem. I updated the site guide to reflect these changes, as well.

The sad death of the Pope was marked by the first use of my black website header, designed for such occasions, which stayed in place from the announcement of the death until after the funeral. It’s not a feature I want to be making particularly heavy use of, but I think it’s important that such a facility is available.

You may have noticed that on reviews I’ve written this month, the Amazon.co.uk link has become rather less subtle, with quite a big box showing you the current price and so forth as well as a picture of the cover. This isn’t so much a change in the policy of this site as it is a change in Amazon’s referral system, which now provides me with these boxes rather than cover-pictures. They do have certain advantages: Firstly, they’re much easier to get on the site, and secondly, they give you far more information (such as the price) in addition to the picture. Because they’re bigger, they also force me to be rather more verbose in my review style.

Earlier in the month I had a little bit of a tinker with the colour scheme, so as to make the site a bit more blue and purple (and less grey). I also reworked the individual post pages a little, to give greater prominence to your comments (they were in that silly little font before, which made me look even more self-important than I already appear through my style of writing). I hope you like the changes (if you were eagle-eyed enough to spot them), and I hope that giving the comments section greater prominence will encourage more people to engage in healthy debate about the drivel I so often spout.

I’ve tided the post categories up a touch, so that there is now a separate category for book reviews, and the LBSC and A-Level categories (which were non-sensical and virtually unpopulated respectively) have been removed. Some older posts have been re-categorised, too.

That’s pretty much all that’s gone on this month. There is, of course, a lot of on-going election posting, and don’t forget that you can access my election-only page at sjhoward.co.uk/election2005. And that’s April!

This month, given that I’ve had a week off, one would have expected that the stats would be down on previous months. But this is, apparently, not the case. Not only have we had the biggest number of hits in the site’s history (over 70,000), we’ve also had a record number of unique visitors. On top of that, we’ve reached the very signficant milestone of half-a-million hits since the launch of sjhoward.co.uk in July 2003. Despite this, we’ve not recorded a huge turnover: Just a 3% profit this month, thanks to our Google advertising and Amazon referrals: This could well be due to the fact that I haven’t written as many review this month, but I’m not about to change what I write just to fit in with the advertising model for the site.

I’ve sorted out the Comments feature which had gone somewhat awry: You can now actually leave comments without them disappearing into cyberspace. It was all down to me creating some kind of endless moderation loop. Oops. But, as I said, it’s all sorted now. You may also have noticed that the visitor counter got stuck and was eventually removed. I think it had trouble with counting tens-of-thousands of you! I’ll try and find a suitable replacement and get it up and running, but unitl then you can continue to get stats updates in these monthly posts.

You’ll have noticed that the archives are ordered back the way they used to be: Monthly archives are in chronological order, and the post categories are in reverse chronological order, so that you see the most recent post in a given category first. I hope that this seems logical to you, as it seems that way to me. You will also now find a complete index of all posts on one handy page – just click ‘Full Index’ in the archives column to the left.

So not many changes this month, but that’s to be expected as the lastest incarnation of the site finally beds down. And that, I suppose, is March.