Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...

This post was published more than 15 years ago

I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.

I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 15 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and write about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.

So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:

• My views may well have changed in the last 15 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find cringeworthy today.
• This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
• Factual information might be outdated.
• Links might be broken, and embedded material might not appear properly.

Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...

Over the last week or so, you may have noticed a few changes on the site. First off, and perhaps most noticeably, the site’s ‘masthead’ has changed. The main aim of this exercise was to get rid of the old ‘design’, which was only ever really intended as a placeholder until I converted the original sjhoward.co.uk logo into something a little more respectable. What I’ve now ended up with is an amalgamation of features of both designs, which I think works quite well. As ever, your thoughts are also appreciated.

I’ve also tidied up the post title and information thingy, so that they’re now connected, and made some subtle positional changes with the sidebar and paragraph lines to make the posts stand out a bit more, and look clearer and less cluttered. Blockquotes have become rather lighter in every sense of the word, too.

The way comments are displayed has been tweaked, to make things a little clearer, and the sidebar has been lengthened with a few more things added, and archives fully expanded instead of hidden in a drop-down.

The changes are pretty small, but I think they generally improve the appearance of the site. If you think otherwise, then feel free to get in touch through commenting or email, and I’ll try my best to respond to your concerns.

Update
In other good news, thanks to more advanced spam filtering, you now don’t need to enter any graphically displayed security code to post a comment on the site. This provides a major improvement for our visually impaired readers who use screenreaders, which makes commenting rather tricky since they can’t read the graphic. Hurrah!