I haven’t been writing much on here of late, as you will no doubt have noticed. In fact, in the first half of this year I composed a mere nine pieces – this is the tenth of 2009.

But the site is not yet dead! In fact, in some ways, as of this week it is newly invigorated, as I’ve relaunched the mobile version of the site. Visit m.sjhoward.co.uk, and you’ll find a mini mobile verison of sjhoward.co.uk – available on any mobile with an internet connection, but with a special version for the iPhone, and a downloadable shortcut for BlackBerries. You’re also able to read my Twitter feed on there, which is updated somewhat more often than the main site.

I’ve also done a little tidying on the site itself – I’ve fixed the post headers, which had gone a bit wrong for reasons I still don’t really understand, and picked about with a couple of other things – including upgrading the software that powers the site to WordPress 2.8… just a little later than most!

I also have some new stuff to stick on here some time, but haven’t found the time yet. And when I do find the time, I’ll get round to writing some actual content too… I promise!

I’ve been blogging for six years as of today – albeit only the last few of those on this site. Regardless, in an homage to the original post, here’s some stats about this site’s five-ish year history…

Since its inception, this site’s seen:
19,428,276 hits
1,226,728 spam comments nuked by Akismet
6,081 genuine comments
1,394 posts
195 Twitter Updates
53 reviews
30 post categories
3 different straplines
2 books
1 author
1 competitive award
0 posts in the last month

Thanks for sticking with me for six years – I know some of you have read my trash since the very beginning – even before the LBSC and the start of blogging proper.

Once I have the time, energy, and will, I’ll start writing for the site again more regularly. At the moment, the most I can muster most of the time is the occasional tweet…

I hope you don’t hold it against me, and will stick with me for another six! 😉

It’s been two months since I last wrote anything of any substance for this site. As I said a little while ago, you should blame the NHS for that.

But, really, when you think about it, has anything of political significance happened in the last couple of months? Only an unprecedented economic crisis, the election of the first black President of the United States, the political return of Peter Mandleson, and a few other trifles. It’s not as if I’ve missed anything of any real significance, is it?

Yet, in what’s likely to be the most sensational political story for months, I’ve given this site a minor refresh, to feature much more of my childlike scrawl. I hope it makes the site look modern and friendly. After all, there’s no point going for an overly professional image when making predictions like this and this.

You’ll also notice the disappearance of the word ‘political’ from the title of the site… with good reason. Heck, when someone like Peter Mandleson can make his seventy-second political comeback, it’s getting beyond satire – it’s too depressing to be fun to write about. So expect some more ecclectic stuff, more like the good old days. I’m talking Eurovision, funerals, nosepicking and amphibian genitalia. Frankly, that stuff was always more popular anyway, and if that last link doesn’t guarantee hits from Google, I don’t know what will.

Of course, there will still be the odd bit of politics – how could I help myself – but I’m hoping the wider coverage will better reflect the fact that I now find myself reading heatworld.com more often than totalpolitics.com… though whether that’s good for my sanity remains to be seen.

Yesterday, somewhat rashly, I promised more coverage of the fact that I’ve now been blogging continuously for five years.

On reflection, I’m not sure there’s so much more to say: Five years, 1324 posts in the (newly redesigned) archive, a full spin-off site of academic stuff, and a book. Oh, and around 2000 comments – from considered to the hilarious, from the misguided to the insulting, and from the inspiring to the bizarre – from you, dear readers. Thank you for all of them.

Looking back at the last five years, much about the site has changed: I just wouldn’t write this today, but then neither would I write this – I hope that the site has progressed over the last few years, but I know there are some who would prefer the latter kind of content to that which I produce today. I guess that progress is relative and dependent on point of view. All I know for sure is that sjhoward.co.uk now reaches far more eyeballs than it ever has before, and has registered more than 3.2 million hits for 2008 so far.

Thank you to those who have stuck with me over the last five years, and thank you too to the relative newcomers who enjoy the site. There will be much more to come from sjhoward.co.uk over the next five years, so I hope you’ll all stick around.

» Image Credit: Original photograph by Daniel Catt, modified under licence.

Over the past week or so, along with some simple design tweaks, much of sjhoward.co.uk has been restructured. The old design of the archive, for example, was appropriate for when the blog had 250 posts, but not for the 1,300+ posts of today. The new structure shouldn’t feel like too much of a change (I’m hoping most visitors won’t have noticed), and should be a more future-proof solution. Here’s hoping.

Long-time readers will know that I’ve wrestled with the question of whether to carry advertising on the site several times over the past few years. Adverts have come and gone in many different forms, from the Amazon Product Links to successful periods with Google Adsense, and from flirtations with hand-picked advertisers to the Amazon-affiliated shop.

My last epiphany on the subject came after I wrote a negative review about one of the site’s advertisers. I’ve always maintained that advertising does not affect editorial, but I felt that it was difficult to carry adverts for a poor service. This whole incident is now referred to rather euphemistically on the site, as it lead to a legal dispute with the advertiser concerned, but essentially I took the decision to withdraw all general adverts from the site, keeping only hand-picked ads relevant to particular posts.

Now I’m wavering on that decision. A number of high profile companies have actively sought advertising spots on the site, and at a time when it’s likely my web hosting costs are to increase, it’s difficult to refuse.

Therefore, I’ve instituted a beta programme of advertising on the site. A dynamically chosen random third of pages will carry advertising, and I will monitor the response, so that I can do a more accurate cost-benefit analysis of the advertising model. Those who block ads will see a suitably designed alternative, rather than a big white space. Fear not: This place has never been, and will never be, covered with ads, and editorial will continue to be entirely independent of advertising – though, naturally, advertising will not necessarily be independent of the editorial.

I’m genuinely unsure as to which way I’ll go on this, so I’d be interested to hear your opinions through any of the usual routes.

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!  🙂

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.

This is your last chance to buy Instant Opinion for just 79p – The offer officially closes at midnight tonight, and will be removed from the site shortly thereafter. You’ve been warned!