…when it’s updated as seldom as this one?

No answer forthcoming from me, but I will be making some effort in the next little while to at least transcribe my Pod Delusion contributions to provide a sliver of nearly-new content.

My blogging has always gone through, erm, “dry spells”. I’m sure this site will spring back to life at some point in the not-too-distant future… And thanks to all the many thousands of visitors for keeping it going in the meantime – There is now far more user generated content on this site (via comments) than there is stuff written by me.

So I guess, in a very real sense, this is your site rather than mine.

Thanks for making it that way, thanks for supporting me, and thanks for your patience. New stuff is coming, I promise!

The recent update to the layout of this site means that it’s now effectively broken in Internet Explorer 6. Given that only a tiny proportion of my readers now use IE6, I’ve stopped trying to hack the code to make it work.

Previously, I’ve tried to make the site as widely accessible as possible, but the effort of making things work in an outdated, horrible browser has become greater than the reward it brings in terms of visitors.

The site is still viewable in IE6, but the design is a little messed up. IE6 visitors will see an advisory message in addition to the messed up site explaining that they are using a very outdated browser and pointing them in the direction of four good upgrade options.

I hope any IE6 users out there will understand the decision.

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.

sjhoward.co.uk must be feeling very neglected of late… And I haven’t done any freelancing in ages! Blame the NHS…! «

It’s just been pointed out to me that my nose-picking video is now the third result on a Google search for ‘Gordon Brown’. Blimey! «

Summer Books

The Summer Books series, which has hopefully kept both sjhoward.co.uk and Gazette Live readers entertained over the last three months, was an idea conceived back in June to stave off a summer of desperate, straw-clutching silly-season posts about random topics. I think it’s worked rather well.

But it’s also revealed some interesting things about my sjhoward.co.uk readers. For example, the most popular of the reviewed books from the point of view of orders placed through sjhoward.co.uk/shop has been Never Push When it Says Pull: Small Rules for Little Problems by Guy Browning. That single book has outsold its nearest Summer Books rival by a factor of almost ten-to-one, which certainly surprised me, considering the relative national best-sellers that have also featured.

So why should this be? Is it because people hadn’t previously heard of Never Push… and liked the sound of it, whereas they’d already read many of the others? Is it because many of my readers are Guardian fans, and have previously enjoyed Browning’s columns? Or is it because Never Push… was the only downright good fun book I reviewed?

Whatever it was, I’d like to thank everyone that’s supported the site by buying the reviewed books (and others!) through sjhoward.co.uk/shop. From the point of view of funding the site, the series has been a remarkable success, with profits from sales of the featured books actually outstripping the sjhoward.co.uk advertising revenue for the summer.

So thanks for your support over the summer – I hope you enjoyed the series, and I hope you’ll stick around and continue to read sjhoward.co.uk into the autumn and beyond.

As regular readers will already know, I’m celebrating… So expect little or no blogging for a little while. If you’re desperate to read something, why not browse the newly re-structured archive?

After five years, four homes, eleven housemates, seventy assessments, nine weeks in Canada, litres of sweat, countless tears, innumerable smiles, and a large dose of hard work, I was utterly overwhelmed today by receipt of the news that I’ve somehow successfully qualified as a doctor.

I guess the real work starts in August, when I take up my Foundation Doctor post.