Over the next seven days, I’ll be away from my computer. I will not, therefore, be in a position to blog on a daily basis. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a series of guest columnists who could come close to matching the daily quality you’ve come to expect from sjhoward.co.uk (), and so I’m afraid that not a lot will be happening for the coming week.

I can’t see into the future, and so can’t predict the news stories that will be breaking on each day of the next week (though it would probably be fun to try…). If I could, then I would’ve become a millionaire and probably not written this blog, so you should be grateful that I can’t.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the week, and I’ll be resuming normal service on Saturday 26th. See you then.

Another exciting blog update bulletin – this time for February.

First, the stats. I surpassed four hundred posts this month, which could be either exciting or depressing – I can’t decide which! I’ve had more hits and more unique visiters this month than ever before, so it really is a record-breaking month. I’ve had visitors from sixteen different countries, as diverse as Japan, Australia, Israel, and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The most popular post (according to the number of hits on the individual post parge) was my little observation about political party websites. Advertising and Amazon referrals have performed strongly this month, with a 29% profit over and above the cost of maintaining the site.

Now for what’s happened this month. First and foremost, I’ve had a major software upgrade. I’m still using WordPress, but I braved the upgrade to version 1.5. This creates no inherent changes to the ‘look’ of the site, but it means I can do a lot more behind the scenes – for example, you should notice that the ‘Beyond the Blog’ pages are now much more closely integrated with the main site.

In terms of changes that I’ve made to the look of the site, you’ll have noticed that we now have bilateral sidebars, which allow for easy access to more content, with the useful side effect (pun intended) of shortening the post line length slightly and thus (theoretically) making it easier to read. I’ve also tweaked the header bar, so that the design is slightly less abstract, which has also led to the colour scheme having the tiniest of tweaks. The picture in the header bar will probably be updated as time goes by, to keep the site design looking fresh without it looking disorientatingly different.

I’ve added a whole load of new links, including ones to lots of my favourite sites; I’ll be trying to add to these regularly.

I have made feeds of each post category available individually – just click the ‘RSS’ after the category name, and a count of the number of posts in each month or category has now been added next to the link as well. As with the individual post comment feeds, category feeds are only available in RSS 2.0 format; the whole site feed will continue to be made available in RSS 1.0 and Atom formats, in addition to RSS 2.0.

The MakePovertyHistory white band has been added to the site – see this post for more information on that, and so has the Red Nose Day button (see here).

In preparation for the upcoming General Election, you can now access all Election posts via a special page at sjhoward.co.uk/election2005. An RSS feed exclusively for election news is now available. You can also find a new Tsunami retrospective page (‘retrospective’ seems a poor choice of word, given the on-going crisis and potential for new posts, but I don’t know what else to call it) at sjhoward.co.uk/tsunami2004. You can find links to both of these new specials under ‘Special Coverage’ in the sidebar.

The Search function has been vastly improved, so that it outputs proper results instead of just a page of posts containing your selected term – unless, of course, only one post contains your terms, in which case you’ll be taken directly to it.

My Medical School work has been cut from the site this month – for more details as to why, please refer to the relevant page.

Finally, you should also find that using File -> Print on your browser now works properly again, too, instead of including the left-hand sidebar.

And that was February.

From today, I’m helping to turn the web red as part of the run-up to Red Nose Day. I hope that my readers will contribute to the campaign – contrary to how the top-right of the site looks at the moment, I don’t support every campaign going! I support Comic Relief as I believe they are experts at both raising lots of money and then distributing it wisely. I have supported them for many years, including on previous incarnations of this site. Don’t worry – everything will be back to blue again right after March 11th (except for the MakePovertyHistory ribbon, which is staying all year).

This is a new monthly feature, where I’ll summarise the site news and stats for the preceeding month.

January saw the highest number of unique visitors in the site’s history, and one of the highest numbers of hits in history – well over 40,000, compared with just 5,000 in January 2004. This takes the overall number of hits since Jul 2003 (when I moved to this domain) to just over 384,000. Advertising and Amazon referrals have performed very strongly this month, much better than usual and much better than expected, with a 131% profit over and above the cost of maintaining the site.

January was also the first month in my blogging life where I’ve managed to post every day. So there’s been plenty of stuff to read.

Since my last update, I think I’ve finally finished tweaking the design of the site by adding a few icons in place of text links, one of which is for a new ‘Printable Version’ feature. I’ve also added a tool whereby you can subscribe to Comments sections for a particular post – that is, once you’ve posted a comment, you can tick a box to say that you’d like to be informed of any further comments on that post. You can now also see some stats in the ‘About this Blog’ section of the sidebar.

I think that’s about all I’ve got to tell you for this month’s update. Keep reading the blog!

Following repeated requests, I’ve now ordered the monthly archives in chronological order, which really makes a lot more sense than reverse chronological order. The category archives remain in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post in a given category appears at the top of the page. I’ve also tidied up the Permalink structure a little, though old-style links still work too.

Because of comment spam, I’ve implemented a system whereby a security code will be randomly generated and shown in an image. In order to post a comment, you must type in this security code. I realise that this adds an extra barrier to the commenting process, but I do hope that it will prevent the blog becoming flooded with spam, as it has been on a couple of occasions recently.

I’ve also corrected the minor error that meant that Permalinks for the old system weren’t working on this system – they were bringing up a ‘Page not Found’ error. You should now find that all Permalinks, whether generated from the new or old system, will always take you to the same page on the new system. Using old-style Permalinks, the page will take a little longer to load due to the increased processing time taken to find the equivalent new page, but all of my TrackBacks that I left under the old system will now work with the new system. So it’s a good thing.

I hope you like the changes – if you have any other comments or suggestions, feel free to get in touch in the usual way.

As even the least observant of my readers must have noticed, I’ve moved over to a new blogging system (WordPress). There were a number of reasons for the change, the foremost being the ability to host absolutely everything on my own server.

The new design has now finished being implemented (though not through the static part of the site, only as far as the blog itself), and the whole post archive has now been uploaded. There should, therefore, be no major interruptions to service from this point onwards. Touch wood.

But notice all the advatanges of the new system – the search engine automatically searches every single post (no more waiting for re-indexing), and posts appear instantly instead of being delayed by a couple of minutes. This version also has better cross-browser compatability, and built-in Trackback.

I hope you enjoy the new system, and will keep on visiting the site regularly; if you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch in the usual way.

Update: 29th January 2005
The new design is now implemented on the static pages as well as the blog.

I’ve changed the archives to the Weekly sort, as the monthly sort were becoming somewhat overloaded of late, and difficult to navigate because of their size. The downside to this is that some archive pages now only contain one post, which looks rather strange. But at least you can more easily find what you’re looking for in the archives.

And, on the subject of finding what you’re looking for, I’ve tweaked the search engine so that’s it now reindexes the site rather more often (it’s now indexed most days – at around 2am – whereas it was previously done weekly), and will only produce the individual post pages as results (so you won’t get two results for each post any more – one for the weekly archive page, and one for the actual post page). I’ve adjusted the weightings, too, so that the ‘Work’ sections of the site are likely to come near the top of your results, and any of these blog postings are likely to come nearer the bottom.

There are other tweaks here and there too, but those are fairly self-explanatory, such as the “Email this Post” link, and the greater range of Feed formats.

I hope you find the changes useful! If you think I could do anything else to improve the organisation of this place, then please let me know.

After being continually pestered to put my ‘hilarious’ lecture notes on the web, I’ve put a couple of lectures on here. They’re on as posts for the days we had the lectures, and are also directly linked to under “My Med-School Work” in the bar on the right. Note that these were never intended to be particularly funny, just to amuse me when I was bored, and that I wouldn’t have put them on here if they hadn’t found their way around most of my year group. Enjoy.

Update: Tuesday, 25th January 2005
You can now find the lecture notes under the Med-School work section – they no longer appear in the blog itself.

I’ve now uploaded all of my LBSC posts to this blog. You will see these posts marked with the following logo, just above the footline:

Originally posted on The LBSC

In the event that The LBSC ever recovers from its current crippled state, then any posts I author on there will be copied over to here, and marked as shown above. I hope that you will find it helpful to have all my blogging activity archived in one place – I know I will!

You will also notice that I’ve added a search feature to the site, so that you can find the particular post you’re looking for. The site will be re-indexed every Friday, so the Search Engine will not be able to find anything posted since the previous Friday.

And, on a completely unrelated note, I’ve updated my sig with five new images, though still based on the same ‘real world’ theme. You can see a randomly selected one in the bottom-right hand corner of this page.

I’ve updated the CSS for the rest of the site to fit in better with this new blog-cum-homepage. Hope you like it!