So “Sir Trevor McDonald” (it is illegal to say ‘Trevor McDonald’ without putting ‘Sir’ in front of it) has just completed his second gruelling week back at the helm of the resurrected News at Ten. It doesn’t seem to have worked for ITV.

They’ve made a big fuss about how they are bringing back an institution, even though they killed if off in the first place so that it wouldn’t get in the way of the football or something. And they are making a big deal about how Trevor McDonald is back presenting it while keeping quiet about the fact that they spent years shunting him around various scheduling back-alleys in the ignominious “News at When?” days.

I don’t even get all of the fuss about Trevor McDonald. Everyone goes on about how he’s the country’s favourite newsreader. I don’t get it. His delivery is wooden and robotic. His is like one of those voices that blind people have to put up with on their screen readers on their computers. And have you ever seen him smile? I haven’t.

So if it seemed like his heart wasn’t in it originally, imagine what it must be like now! He thought he had finished with all of these late nights. Now he is being paid £1,633 per minute to deliver the news in his odd staccato drawl.

And that brings up the next thing that’s wrong with News at Ten. It is so painfully obvious that he refused to come on board if he had to do all the heavy lifting. So the bulletin is shared with Julie Etchingham. Presumably they couldn’t use Mark Austin (how pissed off must he be about all this?) because having two male presenters would be, like, so gaaay or something. As if doing it (the bulletin, I mean) with someone young enough to be your daughter is any less perverse.

But since when was the “heavyweight” late-night bulletin double-headed? This must be the first time it’s happened. I thought the point of having two people presenting the news was so that you could have all of that cringeworthy banter during the light moments, which is why until recently they had two people presenting the Six O’Clock Tabloid News, which is all light moments apart from the faux Daily Mail-style scaremongering bits at the start.

But News at Ten is not meant to have banter, except for the ‘and finally’ bit, but there is only one ‘and finally’ story so there’s not much space for banter there. No, Julie Etchingham is just there so that poor Trevor McDonald can save his breath. He now only speaks for around three minutes per programme apparently.

Then there is this monstrosity.

“This is the news!”

All I can say is, it must have been fun to be that timpani player.

ITV seem to think that reviving News at Ten would give them credibility, gravitas and prestige. But it has actually highlighted many of its major weaknesses. It’s just quick fix after sticking plaster.

Throw money at a problem. Bring in a big name star. Remix the theme tune to the point that it becomes self-parodying. Use overly-flashy computer graphics which make it look more like the deck of the USS Enterprise than a newsroom.

The fact is that ITV News is still rotten. It is focussed too much on gimmicks and sensationalism. It doesn’t matter how much of an ‘institution’ the title of the programme and its main anchor are. If the programme is rubbish, people will not watch it.

That is why by the third day of the new run of News at Ten it had lost a third of its viewers and remained over 2 million behind the BBC Ten O’Clock News. Which has no gimmicks at all.

I couple of months back I added a feature on this blog that lets you rate posts. I said at the time that I would have preferred a Reddit-style “thumbs up” / “thumbs down” system, but I had to make do with a 5 stars system.

Well, the plugin that I use now has a thumbs up / thumbs down feature, and I have decided to implement it. Unfortunately, this means that all of the old ratings data has gone. (I tried to convert the old ratings into +1 / -1 scores, but it proved too difficult.)

I would have stuck with the 5 stars system, but it had one major problem. If somebody gave an obscure post 5 stars, it would rush straight to the top of the “most popular posts” chart because it had the highest average score. This +1 / -1 system will help prevent this, as the score relies heavily on the number of votes cast, not just on the average.

Also, I should apologise because this blog is a little bit rough around the edges following the upgrade to WordPress 2.3. I still haven’t ironed out all of the problems. Just typical because today is a particularly busy day after the post below was linked to by the Telegraph twice.

(That first Telegraph article comes close to blaming me for the Hamilton investigation… Steady on! Errr, it was their fault, yeah!)

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.)