At first I put up two different solutions on the one page (lifestream). But that was still out of the way, and it wasn’t very good either.

So instead I have decided to sweep up the sidebar and put in what I’m calling a ’sideblog’. Note that if you’ve come here from an RSS reader, it only appears on the homepage.

The sidebar aggregates my content from all sorts of different places — my other blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Last.fm, Flickr and more. Comments that are posted on this blog also now reside there — although I haven’t yet worked out if this is a mistake or not. Everything else in the sideblog is ‘my’ content, but the comments are clearly not. So I might separate them out again later on. Any thoughts?

The sideblog is arranged in chronological order, but to save it from getting bombarded with content from one place (for instance, I uploaded 40-odd photographs to Flickr today), I’ve limited each site to having five entries at a time. The exceptions are Delicious which is limited to 10 and Last.fm which is limited to 1.

I built the sideblog using Yahoo! Pipes (which I found very difficult to get to grips with at first, but I eventually got it to do more or less what I wanted to do) and SimplePie. Some pretty desperate CSS magic got the icons appearing kind-of where I wanted them to.

Any thoughts on it? Hopefully it will be a good way of getting more fresh content here for the times when I am posting more at other places. I’ve kept a copy of the old sidebar though in case anyone is offended enough to want the old one back.

If this happened on the train I would probably be complaining quite vociferously. As it is, I lie between the Brian Taylor and Calum Cashley in Iain Dale’s top 40 Scottish political blogs, as voted for by readers.

More to the point, this list is definitive proof that this blog is the second best non-aligned non-MSM Scottish political blog (behind Ideas of Civilisation). I always knew it. (Any way to make the result sound more impressive, huh?)

Overall this blog is 16th, which is a dramatic fall of fourteen places from my previous position in this list. Still, I got off lightly. The person who was number 1 in that previous poll is nowhere to be seen in the top 40 now. Just goes to show what a fickle world this popularity malarkey can be.

I’m actually quite pleased for this blog to be up there still in 16th place given the increasingly sporadic nature of my blogging. I certainly can’t complain about the blogs above mine in the list, nor a few below mine. So thanks if you voted!

Another point to note is that Scottish Roundup is number 31 (in the week that it celebrates its 100th roundup too). Not bad for a blog that has next to no original content. Scottish Roundup is run by me, but it is a thoroughly collaborative effort with many people chipping in. So if you have contributed to Scottish Roundup before, give yourself a pat on the back.

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Last year, quite incredibly, this blog was named as the number 2 Scottish political blog thanks to Grant Thoms of Tartan Hero fame. Some will say that this blog is indeed a load of number 2, so the position is pretty apt. But I would be amazed if I repeated the feat this year.

So vote for me now!

As a few other bloggers have done, I will reveal my top ten political blogs. If nothing else, it fills a bit of space here. You might also be interested in my recent post on ten excellent blogs.

It’s not easy choosing just ten great blogs — and choosing the order of them is even harder. But you probably know that. I tend to go through love / hate (or at least ‘love / indifferent’) relationships with most blogs. No doubt this list would look very different if I compiled it next week.

1. Stumbling and Mumbling
2. SNP Tactical Voting
3. UK Polling Report
4. Political Betting
5. Mr Eugenides
6. J. Arthur MacNumpty
7. Ideas of Civilisation
8. Holyrood Chronicles
9. Freedom and Whisky
10. Liberal England

My upgrades went fairly smoothly, but I did notice an issue with .swf files not being installed. I saw that a couple of other people had the same problem.

It got me thinking about what might be causing the problem. The obvious candidate was that the Flashblock Firefox extension wasn’t playing nice with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

Flashblock, incidentally, is a must-have Firefox extension for me as it allows you to have complete control over Flash files. No more stupid adverts or autoplay or any of that other nonsense that comes with Flash. Meanwhile, WordPress Automatic Upgrade is slightly flaky, but at the end of the day it makes upgrading WordPress much less painful and much faster than it would be otherwise.

Anyway, I have three blogs. I had the problem with the .swf files on the first two blogs. So that gave me a perfect opportunity to see if my theory about Flashblock was right on my third blog. So I disabled Flashblock and ran WPAU. The upgrade went well, with all the files uploading.

If you already ran WPAU while using Flashblock, your WordPress upgrade may be incomplete. Check to see if the following files are missing and upload them manually.

• wp-includes/js/swfupload/swfupload_f9.swf
• wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/media/img/flv_player.swf

I’ve emailed the author of WPAU to let him know. He says he’ll work on a fix, but I thought I’d post it here to give people a heads-up.

Guilty as charged. A number of elements have conspired against me when it comes to updating this blog.

First of all, I set up a separate F1 blog — immediately robbing this place of around half its content! Then there was the fact that I was in my final year at university. I didn’t want to mess it up as the dissertation deadline passed, then essay deadlines, then the exams came along.

Even since the exams have finished, though, it hasn’t quite worked out. I always find the transition from busy (!) student to lazy summertime bum difficult for some reason that I can’t put my finger on. Blogging always takes a back seat for a week or two as I grab some rest and get those summer jobs dealt with. I have been — gasp — reading books for leisure (which I never get the time to do during term time). I have been listening to that pile of unlistened-to CDs that has built up since last summer. The pile is now down to six which is very exciting. I have also tidied my room from top to bottom, sorting through stuff to work out if I should chuck them out or not.

Then there is the small matter of finding a job. Or, more accurately, working out what my career is going to be. Now that university is over for good (and I doubt I will be darkening the doors of academia again), I can now — belatedly — devote more of my brain power towards researching careers. I have not got very far forward. Every time I seem to get closer to finding a path that I find acceptable, something comes along to put me off. For this and various other reasons, I still find myself running around Edinburgh from time to time.

Also, for the past seven or eight months I have routinely been taking daily walks round the park and suchlike. This was partly to get me out of the house and into the sun. It is also with one eye on my slowly-but-surely expanding belly. A good side-effect is that I spend the walks listening to podcasts that I would never otherwise manage to listen to. However, it’s possibly fair to assume that this time may otherwise have been spent blogging which is why things have been a lot quieter here over the past year or so.

Then, just when I was ready to get back into the swing of things, all of my websites were knocked out by that exploding transformer. Then a different issue put my websites out of action on Tuesday as well! All-in-all, I lost about three days of possible blogging activity.

And then I got some good news. I’ve got a degree, and it’s a 2:1. It was such a relief — I was genuinely worried that I was headed for a 2:2 which would have been seriously demoralising. I would really have kicked myself for a few things if that happened, but somehow I have escaped.

I still don’t know the marks for all of my courses yet, which is quite frustrating. Of the scores that I know, I was on course for a 2:2. And I am sure I muffed up one of the exams that I haven’t had back yet. I’d love to think it was my dissertation that pulled the whole lot up. Anyway, I shouldn’t worry about that now. What matters is that I’ll be doing the silly dressing up thing with the stupid hats and scroll things later this month. (Incidentally, does anyone know where the hell you get a white bow tie in this area? That is the rubbish I am being asked to wear for this thing.)

All of this is just a really long-winded way of saying: yes, I know, it’s quiet round here. Jeff said that the scarcity posts is made up for with thorough detail. That is really a side-effect of the fact that it takes me so bloody long to get round to writing anything. By the time I’ve reached this little screen my head has collected so many thoughts on the issue that I end up writing a bloomin’ essay. Even this post is probably about 2,000 words long now.

The thing is, just because I’m not posting much on this blog doesn’t mean I’m not posting much at all. There are four other major outlets of mine. Twitter is the main one where I post anything that will fit into the 140 character limit. Then there is Delicious where I post interesting links, often along with a pithy comment. Then there are the two other blogs, Scottish Roundup and vee8.

These all have a presence on the sidebar here, but I thought it would be good to have an area where all of these various updates are gathered on one page. I started with a lifestream (launched a few weeks ago, though I kept it quiet). But I wanted something a bit different so I spent a bit of time in Yahoo! Pipes to create what I have modestly called the “megafeed“. For the time being I’ve placed it just above the lifestream on… the lifestream page.

Neither of them is exactly perfect. The lifestream just contains the headlines of each item. It incorporates Last.fm as well, but it’s pretty rough and ready really. Meanwhile, the megafeed just looks like a big list of stuff. There’s no way to tell whether it’s a Twitter update, a blog post or what. I tried to make it more obvious, but either there isn’t a way to do it in Yahoo! Pipes or I am too much of a n00b to work out how to do it. Just thought I’d mention it since I spent a bit of time on it. Think of it as a stalking opportunity.

Now that I have sorted that out, it is time to post not just in the four other places but here as well. Now I have drawn up a little list of posts I want to write. My calendar for this week looks fairly empty. I should probably be looking for a job but I will try to get some stuff up here too.

Apparently the outage has affected thousands of websites. A couple of high-profile casualties include Statcounter and B3ta so I was in good company. We should have organised a little meet up so that we could hug each other and tell us it was okay. If only we had a way of communicating with the outside world…

Incidentally, B3ta is still not back up while I am. That’s obviously a reflection of the importance of my website. The downage of B3ta means means that, on this Monday, in offices across the land, there is the threat that some work might actually get done.

Anyway, it’s a good test along the lines of those thought experiments: “could you survive a day without blogging? Har har har.” “Could you survive a day without email? Ho ho!” The answer is yes and yes. This is probably helped a lot by the fact that I can’t actually be bothered to blog every day any more anyway.

However, it did mean that this week’s Scottish Roundup had to be delayed by over a day. I was writing the post when the explosion happened. I knew something was awry because WordPress’s autosaves weren’t happening. I was hoping that it would be a temporary outrage. Stayed up a bit. Gave up to try again in the morning. I was most peeved when it still wasn’t there in the morning. But I lived, and it’s better late than never.

As for email, I don’t know whether that was working or not. I assume not. I sent myself a test email last night from a different account and it came through this morning. But I don’t know if there is other mail floating around waiting for me to receive. My ego will not allow myself to believe that the only email sent to me yesterday was by myself. So anyway, if you have sent me an email since around 10 or 11pm on Saturday night, I haven’t received it. Just so you know.

For the first time I upgraded using the astonishing WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I’ve been meaning to use it for a while, but forgot about it until James O’Malley reminded me. So thanks for that James. Upgrading vee8 and doctorvee was flawless, although something funny happened to Scottish Roundup. Fixed it in the end (I hope), but it did make me scratch my head, especially as the other two upgrades went so smoothly.

Another thing to point out is that I have finally got that OpenID plugin installed. It doesn’t work exactly how I’d like it to, but it will do. Don’t be freaked out by it if you leave a comment and you don’t know what OpenID is. You can leave the OpenID field blank.

You might be wondering if it was even worth me upgrading this blog. It is rather shit of me to have posted next to nothing for the past three weeks and come back with a dull admin post. Well here’s what’s happening.

Last week in the comments of this increasingly quiet blog, a very public sociologist wrote:

Looks like F1 has stolen you away from us.

It’s kind of true. When I launched vee8, originally I had every intention of posting here (almost) as often as before.

What I was forgetting was that because of my mad hectic busy important 24/7 lifestyle and / or laziness, I was blogging less and less here anyway. In all seriousness, I am in my final year at university. And while I still have luxuries such as not having to get up before lunchtime, it does mean that I get shards of guilt searing through my conscience every time I write a blog post or open Google Reader. After all, I should be studying.

For around — ooh, let’s see — the past year, I have had hardly any time to blog, or indeed read blogs. Google Reader always has 1000+ items for me to read. I think I’ve only got it down to zero about twice in the past year.

Plainly, even pretending that I can keep on top of all my RSS feeds is a nonsense. I have come to realise that I don’t have the time to read blogs in the same way as I used to. I have probably gone for weeks without even reading blogs actually (excepting Scottish blogs which I have to read for the Roundup). And the thing is that I don’t really miss the blogosphere — especially the politics blogs. (My years at university studying politics have ironically made me deeply apathetic.)

“Boo, hiss,” I hear you cry. But that’s the way it is. Once I got fed up with Guido et al, it was just the start of the ball rolling and reading hundreds of posts like this is no longer my idea of fun.

This is not to say that I will retreat from politics or political blogging — and definitely not blogging as a whole — altogether. But I have to face up to the fact that as a student I have increasingly found that I do not have enough time to engage in it properly.

So many of the posts I have written over the past few months have been about topics that were lingering in my head for weeks or even months. For instance, the one about road tolls was written in my head in December as a response to Calum Cashley. I didn’t get the chance to actually write it until March. See if you can spot more (a fun game for long journeys, I’m sure)!

And that’s what it’s like when I am a lazy student bum! So what on earth is it going to be like when I actually get a proper job?!

At the same time, last month I launched vee8, a dedicated Formula 1 blog. The original intention was to spare the many readers here who do not like F1 from having to read what can at some points during the year become a blog almost exclusively about F1.

But in its first month I think vee8 has quite unexpectedly taken a life of its own. I am enjoying every minute of it. It is such a refreshing feeling to be blogging about something that actually matters rather than that politics nonsense! Seriously though, I have been staggered by how much fun I am having with it and how successful it has been.

I try to avoid talking about stats because inevitably someone takes offence at the showing off. So I’ll say this up-front. The following may be a reflection of how bad this blog is. Readership here has, after all, stagnated over the past 2 or 3 years which shouldn’t really happen (as someone once told me, telling me off for showing off my stats, “it’s a viral thing”).

But at vee8 — which, I remind you, is little over a month old — I am already getting as more “returning visitors” than I am on this blog. As I say, that is probably partly down to the fact that I post here far less often than I used to, while there is usually daily content at vee8. But I’m still amazed at how quickly it has got a solid readership. Obviously it helps that I had plenty of F1 fans reading here originally, but boy — if only I found it this easy to get readers the first time round!

Long story short. I am now running three major blogs. Scottish Roundup has to have a new post every Sunday, so a lot of my Fridays and Saturdays are spent making sure that happens. vee8 is fresh, new and exciting and this season looks like it’s going to be a corker, so a lot of my attention is now focussed there. This one is my personal blog, so I don’t feel like I owe it much attention.

Just two years ago this was my only blog. Now it is just part of my wider blogging activity. With that fact along with impending adulthood, I am having to steer a new path for this blog.

I am probably being melodramatic (it is 4am), so I will say that probably not much will change. In fact, the changes have already happened and I just need to adapt to it.

I stopped being part of the conversation in the wider blogosphere a long time ago without ever meaning that to happen. I just don’t have the time to follow it. So that probably means writing fewer, more in depth posts on a miscellany of subjects.

You might well have noticed that already. The previous five posts here were about coffee, Autechre, income tax, Freeview and Radio 5 Live — quite a mixture. And that takes us practically to the beginning of March. To think that I used to write an average of six pithy posts per day about the day’s current subjects!

It won’t pick up any time soon. Those shards of guilt will be extra painful as it’s exam time. But I have just three exams, and then it will all be over! The difficult part comes after that — looking for a job. (My status as a person, incidentally, is another thing that it making me more reluctant to blog here… Google and all.)

I just remembered that almost a year ago I hilariously joked about giving up blogging. Now I am looking back on the past year thinking it was actually quite prescient.

Anyway, please forgive the navel gazing. I am planning to return tomorrow with another post here, but whether it will interest you is a different matter.

If you are coming here looking for posts about Formula 1, then I should let you know that I have set up a separate F1 blog at vee8.

The same goes for Twitter and Delicious — F1 stuff is now completely separate.

For those of you who were using the non-F1 RSS feed for this blog, you can now go back to the normal feed if you want because this place is now an F1-free zone.

I’m quite quiet on this blog at the moment because it’s the start of the season so there is a lot of focus on the F1 stuff at the moment.

In the end I have decided that it would do no harm to set up a new blog. So I have gone ahead and launched it at vee8. Check out the introductory post here for a full explanation of my plans for the blog.

You won’t find me mentioning Formula 1 here very often from now on. So for the F1 fans among you, I encourage you to keep on reading here — but check out vee8 for my Formula 1 posts from now on.

I should be able to get everything back up more or less as it was — certainly the posts anyway, and probably the comments as well. But at the moment a few things are not quite working the way I expect them to, so I’m trying to get to the bottom of it all.

By the way, thanks to Chris for letting me know about the original problem.

Update: I’ve managed to get all of the posts and most of the comments back up. I had to manually re-submit everything, so a few comments might be missing.

Incidentally, the way I got everything back was by looking in Google Reader. It’s a good technique!