Instant Opinion is the surprisingly popular sjhoward.co.uk spin-off book of political opinion available from all good bookshops, including sjhoward.co.uk/shop (£5.65), Tesco (£7.05), and Waterstones (£7.42).

The contents of the book are also available as a PDF document, usually selling for £3.49. However, for a very limited time, I am able to offer the eBook version for just 79p. That’s the same price as a single song on iTunes, yet provides over 200 pages of quality political content in easy-to-read PDF format.

This bargain price represents a massive 77% off the usual retail price of the eBook, or 89% off the usual retail price of the print edition.

The idea is that if you particularly enjoy the eBook edition, you may be more tempted to treat yourself to the print edition – yet there is absolutely no obligation to make any further purchases. If you don’t like it, you’ve wasted 79p. If you love it and go on to buy a print copy, you’ll have made me a little more happy.

For this very special offer, payment can only be made by PayPal, and only through the special (subtle) link at the bottom of this post. Thank you for your support!

Update: The offer has now expired, but the eBook is still available at the original price of £3.49.

Photo by Paul Watson, modified under licenceThe experiment in mini-posts seems to have worked well, and has received positive feedback from readers whilst being very easy for me to use. I therefore intend to continue with it.

As you may have already noticed, I’ve made some changes to the display of the posts to give them a more permanent identity, as I felt that having a screaming headline format didn’t really work for the mini-posts. For that reason, I’ve renamed them ‘My Diary’, and given them their own special design, which I feel works rather well – and I hope you do too.

Let me know what you think, keep commenting, and help the very discussion to thrive.

Photo by velorowdy, modified under licenceIn something of an experiment, I’m going to try something new for the blog.

Previously, I’ve made the occasional post from my mobile phone when I’ve something interesting and time sensitive to bring you. I’m now planning to expand that idea somewhat.

Given the fact that I’m struggling to find the time to write the longer position-piece type blog posts that take a bit of thought, I’m going to try and fill the gap with daily bursts from my mobile phone. Through a convoluted process from Twitter, a Daily Digest of my momentary fleeting political thoughts of the day will be posted right here.

Then, on the occasions when I find time, I’ll expand some of those ideas into more fulminant posts.

Hopefully, the ‘Daily Digest’ format will be a slightly less irritating solution than making lots of mini-posts. I haven’t extensively tested the technology, so I guess it will be a few days before we know if it really works.

The most likely outcome is that this will end up like Guest Posts and Liveblogging. But then, this whole blog was an experiment at first, and it’s still going… For now.

I’ve just past one million hits for the year-to-date: That happened in March last year, July in 2006, November in 2005, and not at all in 2004. Given the relative paucity of new posts this year, the archive must be driving much of the growth – which is great news.

Peter Hain’s resigned (finally), MPs are being bugged, political funding has become the watch-word of the week again, and your favourite political blog hasn’t had a peep to say about any of it – sorry about that.

The truth is simply that I’ve been busy with 101 other projects recently, from applying (successfully) for my first doctoring job, catching up with AQA, working on other bits of writing, planning for the site’s fifth birthday, to actually doing some medicine now and again. I’ve been too busy to read the news, let alone comment on it!

As I write, results are coming in from the various Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses… I’d dearly love to be live-blogging the action, but that’s not going to happen when I’m in work at 8am tomorrow – so try Iain Dale for that (or The Guardian).

I should tell you that I’m now running WordPress 2.3.3, and the site’s SMS and MMS messaging services are temporarily suspended due to technical problems, which will be fixed as soon as I get the chance.

I will post here again before long – but, in the meantime, feel free to enjoy over 1,200 posts from the archive.

I’ve just heard report from Amazon that more of you than ever before did some of your Christmas shopping through sjhoward.co.uk/shop – thank you for your support. You’ve provided enough cash to fund the upkeep of the site for several months.

I also wanted to point out that I’m making a concerted effort to credit all pictures published on the site from 2008 onwards – it’s a bit of a New Year’s resolution, I guess, and is really something I should’ve been doing for the past four-and-a-half years, but haven’t been consistently good at. I’m now making a renewed effort, as I hope you’ve been noticing.

Thanks to all of the people who licence their pictures so that I can feature them on the blog. Creative Commons is a great thing – something I believe in strongly enough for the material on this site to have been Creative Commons licensed from the start.

Regular visitors will, no doubt, have noticed by now that sjhoward.co.uk is a little wider than before. Frankly, this is because I felt that it was looking a bit weedy in comparison to the recently expanded Guardian Unlimited, Times Online, Telegraph.co.uk, and that bastion of quality journalism, Heat World.

I’d love to say it was peer pressure, but that seems a little big-headed, even for me.

Anyway, I felt that the site needed expanding. However, as previously explored, if the text columns are any wider then they become more difficult to read. Short lines are always best on a computer screen.

Other important considerations were keeping the posts top-left, as the focal point of the page, and not ending up with two bamboozling sidebars next to each other – a look which always fries my mind, on any site.

So, I decided to use the extra space to highlight other stuff on the site – when you’ve got a back-catalogue of well over 1,000 posts, it seems a shame that only one or two are highlighted on any particular page. Hopefully, the little pictorial promo-boxes will encourage you to explore the site more, as well as brightening things up a bit.

Initial feedback has consisted mainly of ‘Ooh, what’s that think about Graham Norton?’, and ‘Tyra Banks? Click that!’ which I judge something of a success. Hopefully, there are enough of them to stop you becoming sick of the sight of them too quickly, and of course, I’ll add more all the time.

So… what do you think of the tweaked look? Any major complaints?

If you haven’t yet succumbed to your no-doubt overwhelming desire to secure your copy of my fabulous book, Instant Opinion, you might be interested to know that Google Book Search now has a bigger than ever preview of what you might find inside it. View it here, then buy the book from sjhoward.co.uk/shop. In fact, why not get two? It makes a great Christmas present…

Just a quick note to say that this site has just registered its 10,000,000th hit – Ten Million! Over half of those have been registered this year alone, meaning that the year-to-date has generated well over twice as many hits as the whole of last year. In four-and-a-half years, I’ve generated as many hits as the BBC does in a couple of days or less… That puts it in some kind of perspective, I guess…

The incredibly popular sjhoward.co.uk toolbar has just been updated to a new version.

Still included are links to tens of the biggest national and international news sources, live-updating links to popular news websites and agencies, links to video reports from three major organisations, and the ability to search with many different search engine providers.

Added to this edition are links to hundreds of the biggest political blogs in the UK and Ireland (US blogs will be added soon), a whole new range of handy tools (including a calculator, a notepad, and a to-do list), and a few sneaky mini-games to play while your favourite websites load.

The toolbar also has a slicker new look, with better browser interface integration and new icons.

The new version will automatically cascade to current users shortly, if it has not already done so, and no action is required on their part. If you are not a current user, and wish to download the toolbar, you can now do so directly from the toolbar page.