So there I was on Monday night, lying in bed listening to Up All Night as I normally do. Then all of a sudden they began talking about me.

Once again it was the Pods and Blogs segment, and once again it was in the Britblog Roundup slot. The very same slot where I farted through my mouth precisely seven days earlier.

I was surprised by the attention that was attracted by my post about whether or not I should put my blogs on my CV. It was really intended as a warm-up post to the long list of skills that I have acquired as a blogger which was posted the following day. Compared to the “warm-up” post, the list bombed.

It just goes to show once again that I am terrible at working out which of my posts are better than others.

I have to admit, it was quite a strange experience lying in bed listening to Rhod Sharp mulling over my career prospects!

One thing though. I didn’t say that I was worried about my Facebook and MySpace accounts. My Facebook and MySpace accounts are impeccable (I hope)!

I don’t know if Matt Wardman will be providing the audio this week, but it is still available on the podcast — the relevant bit is around 27 minutes in.

Update: Matt Wardman has uploaded the audio here.

It was quite appropriate that when I was invited to appear on Radio 5 Live’s excellent Pods and Blogs segment it would be along with Mr Eugenides. Pods and Blogs is part of Up All Night, a radio programme that both Mr Eugenides and I are big fans of.

That’s not the only thing we have in common. It’s probably fair to say that neither of our pseudonyms lend themselves nicely to radio. At one point it was suggested that we could be referred to as Mr E and Dr V, but we wisely settled on using our real names.

I was on to talk about this week’s Scottish Blogging Roundup, and Mr Eugenides was this week’s editor of the Britblog Roundup, which has become a regular feature of Pods and Blogs in the past couple of months. If you’re interested in listening to it, the podcast is here (the relevant bit is around 27 minutes in, but I recommend listening to the whole thing) and show notes are here.

(Update: Matt Wardman has now uploaded the relevant bit on its own.)

Unfortunately, I was not on very good form, so I’m not sure if I did the Scottish Roundup justice. I had literally just got in from a tiring day at work and I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare (excuses, excuses! I know). Then I couldn’t work out how to use Skype, so that was even more last-minute rushing around. So I wasn’t very relaxed and to be honest I wasn’t really in the mood to talk much (which is why you hear a lot more of Mr Eugenides than you hear of me in the interview!).

When I did talk it was pretty nervy and rambling. I had to keep in mind that I was supposed to be brief and concise. At one point I was asked if I had an opinion on the story about the BBC, the media and bias. This is a bit like asking a fat drunkard to be sick, but just a little bit, and try to aim it in this cup. The result was a mess.

I even forgot to mention the name of the important blog that had the video of Brian Ashcroft! So many apologies to Pat Kane and Scottish Futures.

Also, in hindsight it might have been interesting to mention the time that I was kind of shot at by a kid with an airgun. I spent so long talking about airguns without remembering how close I was to the story in a way. But there you go.

After an astonishingly tinker-free summer, I have made a few changes on the blog.

Perhaps the most important is the reintroduction of the Best of page, which I hinted at a couple of months ago. This is just to attract attention to some of the notable posts I have written in the past. There is a huge number of archived posts here, so it is impossible for people to find the really good ones. Hopefully the Best of page will make it a bit easier.

The first section of the Best of page is what was there before I took it down. These are not posts that I have chosen, but posts that have attracted some kind of attention beyond what is normal. They have either been mentioned in the mainstream media, the Britblog Roundup (or a similarly prestigious blogging showcase) or used as a citation in Wikipedia. So if you’re a relatively new reader, why not check out some of these older posts?

If you scroll beyond that list, you will see something absolutely brand spanking new. After years of dithering about it, I have finally installed a post ratings plugin (WP-PostRatings).

I was looking for something a bit more like a thumbs-up / thumbs-down system, but I couldn’t find one, so we have a star ratings system (although I’m using squares because the stars look crap against the dark background). So please feel free to rate my posts as you read them — it only takes a click.

To encourage people, I have rated the posts on the front page, but I will probably step back from rating my own posts in the long term. If this system gives good results, I might place the list on the sidebar rather than in the middle of the Best of page.

The only problem with the ratings plugin is that it adds substantially to the clutter at the bottom of the post. I do make efforts to keep the clutter to a minimum in general, but I can’t think how else I can add the ratings system without cluttering it up.

I needed something better than what I had before, which was the ‘most popular posts’ list. This is calculated mostly on page views (but also things like comments and trackbacks). Unfortunately, this means that far from highlighting the best posts, it actually merely shows the posts that Google likes the most. This means that some of the posts on the list are not only not-good, but they are actually actively bad. I will keep the feature there, but it’s not a very good list.

The same goes for the ‘most commented on’ posts. Comments are great, but any threads that get more than about 15 or 20 soon descend into crazy flame wars, loon magnetism, and generally generate more heat than light. It’s probably not the side of this blog that I should be putting out there.

I have also finally got round to redesigning the 404 page. Unfortunately it is cluttered with adverts, which I’m not sure about. I can’t really be bothered getting rid of them yet, so I might just leave it as it is. But at least now it actually matches with the rest of the pages on the blog!

I still have not got round to designing a theme for people who do not like the current one (I plan to let visitors choose which they prefer between two). I might not get round to it in the end.

I probably have not stopped tinkering, because tinkering is like eating Pringles and the itch that gets worse the more you scratch it. But I thought I would just point out what I have done so far because [moment of honesty coming up] I can’t be arsed writing about anything else at the moment.

Update: I knew there was something I forgot! A few weeks back I changed the links page so that it automatically contains every blog that I read in Google Reader. So if I’m reading your blog, it’s on the links page. It’s quite good to not have to worry about updating the links manually now. The internet truly is making us a bunch of lazy bastards.

If you’re wondering how it works and want to add it to your own blog, all of the information is here.

(Incidentally, if you are wondering about Scottish political blogs, I keep most of them in a separate folder for me to concentrate on for the roundup. So many of these blogs will not appear on my links page yet, even if I read them.)

In this week’s Scottish Roundup, Will P wrote:

Duncan… is still too modest (frustratingly so) to nominate his own posts when someone else is fronting the Roundup…

While I would like to boast about how awesome I am because of my modesty, the truth is that I never nominate any of my own posts for two reasons.

The first reason is just because of the way I nominate posts in general. During the week I read blogs using Google Reader, and I use the star feature to store posts that catch my eye. At the end of the week, I collect them all up and write the roundup or send my suggestions from there.

But because I do not subscribe to my blog’s feed, none of my own posts get starred. Besides, which posts of my own would I star? Which leads on to my next point.

I can never tell whether one of my own posts is going to be good. I have had my fingers burnt too often, writing what I thought would be awesomely popular crowd-pleasing posts only for many to sink like a brick in a pond.

This week, for instance, one of my posts has featured in the Britblog Roundup — for the first time in ages. When I saw this week’s Britblog Roundup appear on my Technorati watchlist, I thought I had a pretty good idea which post had made it.

I was certain that the featured post would be the one about the BBC. I was surprised to find out that it was actually the post about F1’s espionage malarkey. It also made James Higham’s excellent Blogfocus.

And there was me thinking that everybody just skipped the F1 posts! Goes to show what I know. And that’s the reason why I don’t nominate my own posts.

On a slightly related note, I am planning on resurrecting the ‘best of’ page. The page (which still exists in its old form here) always looked like a load of self-congratulatory wank, which is why I stopped updating it a year ago.

But those people that go around giving people tips on how to make loads of money by sitting on your arse blogging say it’s a good idea to draw attention to some of your older posts. Makes sense I guess, particularly since I often do not have the energy to blog as much as I used to.

These things take time though, as I will now have to try and remember or otherwise find out which of my posts have made it onto Britblog, Blogfocus and the like in the past year. But when I’m finished it will either appear in the sidebar or as a link at the top.

The first BritBlog Top of the British Blogs chart is out. It shows this blog in 14^th position — the 14^th most popular British blog! Err yeah right.

As much as I like to see this blog near the top of a chart such as this, I do find it rather embarassing. It’s not modesty though — it’s that it would give cynics far too much ammunition. “If your blog is in 14^th, how rubbish must all the other blogs be?”

Of course, this blog is only the 14^th most-read blog to have one of those special little spy-images that lets BritBlog know how many visitors this blog gets. So if you haven’t got one yet, why not grab it now, and see if you can knock me down a place.

Most things that try to measure the “blogosphere” (Technorati et al) break, but BritBlog has been a solid site so far, and this method is so simple enough that it shouldn’t be easy for things to go wrong. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Update: Marky moo comments on his new chart.