After holding my own in the non-aligned category of Iain Dale’s political blog rankings, I’m amused to see that overall I’ve dropped from being the 69th best political blog in the UK to, err, 198th. I guess you can’t win ’em all.

This week’s Gazette post was another eerily familiar one, though this one’s been reheated so many times now I fear it’s lost all nutritional value. Ah, well…

Last year, Iain Dale produced a Guide to Political Blogging, in which he ranked this esteemed organ as the 29th best non-aligned political blog in the UK.

This year, he’s repeated the exercise, with one crucial difference: Instead of a committee of one deciding which blogs to include and the rankings, he opted to employ hoi poloi – he allowed the public to vote and decide.

This fact, in combination with the fact that there are now many more political blogs about, has meant that there are some big changes to the list this time around – not least the fact that Nick Robinson, BBC Political Editor, has fallen out of the top 30.

I, however, remain at number 29.

Thanks to everyone who voted for me, and thanks to Iain Dale for compiling the list. It’s always nice to know that people like what I do. The Guide to Political Blogging in the UK 2007-8 is available to pre-order now, and would look particularly fetching on any shelf if nestled alongside Instant Opinion.

There are now more videos available through the site: As well as the video posts, you can also access the YouTube videos that I’ve marked as favourites. All of this excitement is available with a click of Videos in the menu at the top of every page. More new stuff is coming soon.

I’ve just made a tiny change to the mobile service: To get the link to the sjhoward.co.uk mobile edition send to your phone, you should now text ‘simon mobile’ to 60300, rather than ‘sjh’. Everything else remains exactly the same. This is just to make the service appear more consistent, since to send messages to the site you should continue to text ‘simon’ plus your message to 60300 – and it has the beneficial side effect of being much easier to type with predictive text. Full details of the mobile service are here.

My book, Instant Opinion, is now available from a number of bookshops, including the ever-reliable WHSmith and the Foyles group of sites. WHSmith is actually selling it cheaper than I am able, and that’s with free delivery to your local store and seven very exciting Clubcard points.

In a moment of wonderful irony, it isn’t yet available through sjhoward.co.uk/shop; it is, however, available through the links on this page in both printed and (exclusive) ebook formats. I’ll let you know when it becomes even more widely available.

For a long time, the Blogroll has been an important part of any blog – the place where writers link to other like-minded bloggers, or to sites they find interesting. But I’ve just done away with mine.

To have a pretty static list of sites I read is pretty pointless. It gives no idea of which ones I read every word of, it gives no idea of which particular posts I like, and no clue as to who I link to because I love them, and who I link to because I feel I should.

So I’ve replaced my traditional Blogroll with a new-fangled section called ‘Stuff I Read & Liked’. Basically, now I’ve permanently switched from Bloglines to Google Reader as my RSS reader of choice, I can mark posts I like with a single click – and then they appear on here. The most recent 15 items I’ve marked in this way appear in the sidebar, and the most recent 500 appear on a specially designed part of the site, here (always accessible from the ‘More stuff like this’ under the list in the sidebar). I’ve only just started doing this, so I’m not quite up to 500 yet!

I had previously been put off going doing this route because of the inflexibility of the ‘clip’ that Google provided, but with a little bit of lateral thinking and CSS coding, it was actually quite easy to style it and get it into a format I wanted. I think, overall, it provides a more logical and useful solution to crediting my influences.

I’d previously not been convinced by Google Reader, preferring Bloglines’ simplicity. But, finally, Google have won me over. Their product has improved immensely over the last few months, and there are now so many different ways of accessing your feeds that I hardly ever need to visit the main Google Reader interface. I’m definitely converted.

I hope that the new style Blogroll will encourage my readers to explore some of the other blogs I read, and allow you to get a better appreciation of my influences. I like it, and I hope that you do too.

As of yesterday, I’ve withdrawn this site’s “Subscribe by Email” option. The system needed a radical overhaul, and with the user numbers of this system dwindling thanks to the increasing popularity of RSS, I decided it was easier to just withdraw the service. All users of the old service have been contacted, and given information on alternatives – if you haven’t heard, you’re not affected.

Email notification of new comments is still available.

This blog is now running WordPress 2.2.1. Thanks to Mark, as ever, for the useful Changed Files ZIP 😉

For a short time yesterday, the site decreed that almost all the comments on the site were from me. This wasn’t because I’d developed a multiple personality, it was because I misplaced an exclamation mark in some of the coding behind the site, and then didn’t notice for a little while. I don’t know if anyone noticed, but this is just a quick note to apologise to those who did. All comments are now attributed correctly.

You can now read this stuff what I write in other places. Wooooo!

I’m now also writing for a collection of Gazette Community websites, which are linked in with the local Trinity Mirror’s Teesside local newspaper title, the Evening Gazette. I’m writing for several different ‘Communities’, under the title ‘Simon Says…’. I’ll post a quick link on this site every time I post something new on that one, just in case you happen to be interested enough to click through.