I’d had the same theme for this blog for years, so I thought I’d mix it up.

Still working on this theme, which looks a little untidy in the header and for which I think the post titles are much too big relative to the body text, but I’ve used similar colours to the old theme to make it feel a little familiar.

The archives are missing as a menu but the categories are there, and the search is available.

While we’re talking meta stuff about the blog on the blog, I have a broken link checker running, and it tells me about new broken links just about every day. In most cases there’s not much I can do about it – it’s a link to an old page or news story and the page has just gone away. Short of deleting those old posts, which seems like deleting my own history, I think I just have to leave them there with the broken links.

Still writing here now and then, when I want to write something that fits this medium better than Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Any feedback on the theme very welcome, but I’m still tweaking it at the moment.

Guess I’ve been a bit remiss in following up on comments here: will try to make sure I do so, and continue discussions. I like the permanence here, vs the evanescence of Facebook discussions.

That’s my part: your part is posting more comments! Hopefully we can get a ‘critical mass’ of discussion happening, at least on the more interesting posts.

BTW, I added a new ‘Meta’ category, for post on this blog, about this blog. 😉

If you’re new around here, or it’s been a while, I thought I’d give a quick guide. The front page holds a dozen or so posts, and I don’t seem to have a helpful ‘older posts’ button at the bottom¹.

One way of navigating is to use the 16 or so ‘Category’ links at the top of the bar on the right. That should help you find older posts that are within your interests – the range here is pretty wide.

A second way is to search: there are two search boxes on the right of the page: I find the Google one more effective. I also find that the searches, frustratingly, don’t find everything… so a few adjacent search terms might be necessary.

Finally, there are links, further down the right bar, for every month in the nearly 8 years since I started this blog. The last year or so, with the exception of the last week or so, offers pretty slim pickings, but certainly the early years are pretty rich, and most months throughout will yield at least a few and probably many posts.

Hope this is helpful: there’s quite the archive, and while some of it is pretty trivial and ephemeral, I flatter myself that some of it is fairly thoughtful, and might have some lasting worth… if you can unearth it.

1. It’s not massively hard, but it’s non-trivial and I suspect will take a few hours of messing about. So after semester when there are no exams and assignments to make and mark, and after the immediate press of publications to be written and revised subsides a bit… and on a rainy afternoon when I can’t be cycling or swimming or kayaking… Well, looks like it might be a while… which makes this article more useful!