For those who haven’t put the two and two together, my dad is Jack Stephen who can sometimes be found in the comments on this site. (I can tell you, it’s strange calling my dad ‘Jack’ just so that other people can follow the conversation properly.)

Over the weekend I set up a blog for him at which he posts as his science fiction writing alter-ego, Jack Deighton. It’s called A Son of the Rock.

I did the “gold” and black masthead because I thought he would appreciate that being a fan of Dumbarton Football Club. However, coming up with a complementary colour for the links was a tough job. Despite a plethora of suggestions I received on Twitter and Facebook (thank you all), nothing looked right to me. Perhaps that’s because I just don’t like the mustard colour. In the end I settled on the blue.

The eagle-eyed among you will spot that the theme is basically the one I use for Scottish Roundup but tweaked a bit (which, in fairness, is in turn just the default WordPress theme tweaked). That was part of the problem with the blue links. If it was scrolled down and I couldn’t see the masthead it reminded me far too much of Scottish Roundup. Hopefully I’ve tweaked it enough to keep it fresh and different.

Incidentally, my dad is now the third member of the family to have started blogging. He joins me (obviously) and my brother who blogs at Onebrow along with his girlfriend Laura.

Yesterday WordPress 2.6 came out which is pretty unbelievable because it feels like WP 2.5 just came out last month. Anyway, a new version of WordPress comes with the necessity to upgrade and the hair-pulling that comes with it.

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.

First things first. I have upgraded to WordPress 2.5. The new admin panel takes a bit of getting used to, and it is a little bit buggy for my liking. But then again that is probably because I am using so many plugins.

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.

I usually forget the anniversary of this blog. I think this is for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, at this time of year we usually have other festivities on our minds. Also this blog has two major anniversaries in my mind. Moving to doctorvee.co.uk was a watershed, and I am sometimes reluctant to even acknowledge what I did before. Yet my first blog post, back in the days when I used Blogger, was posted five years ago, on the 30^th of December 2002. What a thought.

Less than two years later I upped sticks, and the first post on this WordPress blog came on the 8^th of December 2004. Crazy stuff.

Even before I started posting on Blogger, I had a web presence (some rubbishy Geocities pages). The move to the blog was gradual, which is probably another reason why I often forget the bloggiversary. It’s amazing to see how the blog has evolved over the years from several pithy posts a day a few years ago to today’s much longer and more infrequent posts.

Happy New Year

By the time you read this the clock will have struck midnight and you might well be nursing a bad hangover. So Happy New Year to you. Have some coal.

I have a strange relationship with Hogmanay. I often think I prefer it to Christmas, although when it comes it is often a damp squib.

I think I grew up with different expectations to most people of what the new year was supposed to be like. I saw it as a time for family moreso than Christmas. You know, when I was younger Christmas was about the Sega MegaDrive and Hogmanay was when I got to stay up late with the family and drink some Irn Bru.

A few years ago I discovered that this attitude made me a heretic and that Hogmanay is for getting rat arsed with your friends. Friends I can live with. I like friends.

But the drink? I like a drink, but I never see the point in getting totally rat arsed, even at new year. A bad hangover isn’t any better just because it happens to fall on the 1^st of January. In fact, it might be worse to have a hangover on this day because I want to enjoy the big dinner my parents will be cooking!

I was working today which meant that I didn’t get any real input into the plans my friends were hatching. Needless to say — as I am sitting here writing this post with T minus 45 minutes until the bells — I baulked at the plans, which sound to me like an utter recipe for disaster. I am fragile and I like to sleep. I can make do without a bed, but preferably somewhere with people that I actually know, and failing that somewhere in the town where I actually live.

So I am now having a quiet night in, which is quite odd, but I’ve been getting stuff done which is good. Christmas Day itself was excellent, but the rest of the holidays have been such a massive disappointment — mostly because I have so much studying to do.

I have essays and a dissertation to write. They have been hanging over me the whole time and it’s been quite a bleak month — and it will be a bleak couple of months ahead as the big deadline looms. But I have allowed myself to take the 31^st and the 1^st off, which at least gets rid of the guilt I feel when I inevitably begin procrastinating.

Usually I don’t do new year’s resolutions. By my reckoning, if you were really that bothered about whatever vice you’re worried about, you would try to stop it regardless of whether it was the new year or not. That’s why new year’s resolutions are bound to fail.

Nevertheless, over the Christmas holiday I have become even more worried than normal about my sleeping patterns. It’s quite bad when you are routinely spending 13, 14 hours in bed — the first few trying to get to sleep, then around ten hours actually being asleep, dead to the world. At this time of the year, I miss entire days.

It’s okay to be like this when you are a student bum like me, but given that I am in my final year at university I won’t be able to get away with it for much longer. So now is the time to sort it out and to dedicate some real energy to finding a proper solution to my sleep problems.

I will also try to publish one blog post per day, although I have been trying to do that anyway!

Yes, I’ve decided to give the blog a new look again. I couldn’t wait to get this up, but it’s not quite finished. I still need to do a few tweaks here and there. (Surprise surprise, it looks a bit guff in Internet Exploder.) But it’s quite late now and I can’t bring myself to switch it back to the old theme, so I’m throwing caution to the wind and leaving it up.

I’ll update this post later some time in the afternoon explaining the thinking behind it all. In the meantime, if you spot any problems or if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

Update: Okay, so now I have the time to post a bit about what I’ve done here.

Perhaps the first thing I should point out is the fact that, regrettably, some URLs have changed. Permalinks to posts and the like should still work perfectly. But you’ll notice that I’ve moved the pages in the navigation panel around a bit. I’ve also reorganised the categories (in fact, I haven’t quite finished that yet).

Speaking of categories, I have finally created a ‘media’ category. It never quite made sense for media posts to be listed under ‘entertainment’, particularly if I was writing about some kind of media coverage of a serious story. So I’ve gone ahead and separated them, and now television, radio and newspapers are listed under media. As such, some category URLs have also changed, so sorry about that if you had them bookmarked or something.

So why the change? Well, I am still very fond of the old design. It will probably make a reappearance somewhere — possibly on another blog. But perhaps I will release it as a WordPress theme for others to use — if I can find the time to make the appropriate tweaks to it.

Despite my pride though, I was always aware that a lot of people were not very keen on the previous design. And it has been there for almost a year. (Maybe this change will become an annual occurrence, a doctorvee Christmas tradition.)

Common complaints were about the dark background (apparently an acquired taste) and the bright links. So I’ve decided to swing back to a white background and rather more muted colours, if you can call green muted.

This is also the equivalent of growing a moustache to try and signify that you are growing up (not that many people grow moustaches these days, but you know what I mean). The previous design was deliberately jazzy and distinctive. But since then I have become a can’t-get-away-from-it adult. And in the next few months I will hopefully be finished with university.

So that means ditching the childish neon colours and adopting a serif font. I have spoken before about my devotion to Verdana, but I am afraid I have become rather tired of it. It is suffering from Times New Roman syndrome.

You know. It’s become a ubiquitous, default font. As such, it is used in so many pieces of ugly design. We have all stumbled upon badly thrown-together websites written in Verdana, just as we see too many passive aggressive notes written in Times New Roman.

I had become very keen on the recently redesigned websites for Times Online and Guardian Unlimited. Both use plenty of Georgia, so I was going to use that. Besides Times New Roman, it’s the only core serif font anyway.

But while I was designing I visited Modern Life which uses Cambria. It is basically the Vista version of Times New Roman, but lovely. I fell in love and decided to use the font on my blog. But as far as I know Cambria is only available on Vista, so for everyone else it is still Georgia.

A funny thing about Cambria is that it appears to be extraordinarily small, so the font size is rather large. But there’s nothing wrong with that I suppose.

Headings and some other bits and pieces are in Helvetica where possible, although Windows users (including me!) will have to make do with Arial. I know it’s a bit clichéd, and rather too ubiquitous, but you never grow tired of it. I do love Helvetica so I was keen to use it when I decided to give the blog a cleaner design.

I suppose now is a good time to talk about the general inspiration for the redesign. I was tempted to go back to a clinical, Helvetica-led design when I first saw screenshots for the new beta version of Delicious. Delicious is a very apt word. Mind you, the end result on this blog has ended up looking very little like the Delicious screenshots.

A more direct inspiration has been the beautifully-designed Lokesh Dhakar website. In fact, parts of this blog’s design have turned out to be embarrassingly similar. I first came across his blog when I read this guide to different kinds of coffee and it instantly struck me as an excellent design.

Layout-wise, I very much went for the ‘less is more’ approach. This has meant compromises in places, but I’ll go on to that. The main change is that I’ve moved away from a three column layout to two columns. I had read somewhere that multiple columns just confuse people, which makes sense. So it’s back to one sidebar.

I was keen to get everything lined up nicely with each other. This does make it look quite neat, but one problem is that the main column is quite close to the sidebar. The solution was to have a neat line running along the left of the sidebar, although I’m still not sure if it is enough. I toyed with using full justification, but decided in the end that the cons outweighed the pros.

Despite the intimate position of the main column and the sidebar, the page is wider than before. Making good use of the space available and all that. As such, the design only really works if your screen is at least 1024 pixels wide. But the same was true of the previous design. And people with smaller screens make up around 3% of this blog’s visitors. Sorry to those 3%, but the rest of us just get masses of white space.

On to the content. One thing you’ll notice is that categories are now taking pride of place above every single post. They used to be hidden away, only appearing in the sidebar of single post pages.

The reason I’ve made them more prominent is because over the years I have become more and more guilty about the fact that this blog is a bit of a ragbag of different topics. And the Formula 1 posts in particular are beginning to overshadow everything else. So having the category as the first thing of every post is just a heads-up for everyone, so that you know what the post is about and you can easily skip the posts you aren’t interested in.

Another new addition is subtitles. I saw this on a few other blogs and really liked the idea, so I’m going to give it a go. Inspired by this article, I did it using custom fields, a feature of WordPress that I have never really explored before.

Gone from the top of the post, however, are the date and the comments link. The date still appears there on single posts, but I am thinking of including them everywhere again. I already feel a bit lost without them (although I didn’t use dates much on any of the designs I used before the previous one).

I am also open to putting the comments link back up there, although the link still appears at the bottom of the post as expected. Any comments on this would be appreciated.

I have also taken the plunge and decided to add a ShareThis button, despite what I wrote about it a few months ago. I’m still experimenting with the position of this, so any ideas would be welcome.

Over to the sidebar. I’ve reduced the amount of stuff that’s there to a bare minimum. The latest comment is still there as I like to highlight the great discussions that go on in the comments, which is really what blogging is all about.

Twitter is still there, although I’ve reduced it to just the latest update rather than the last three. Delicious too has been reduced to just the five most recent links. I normally post to Delicious more often than five times a day, so this might be a bit odd. But there is method to my madness.

I made a decision a short while ago that this blog should concentrate mainly on original content. That’s just the way the blog has evolved, and I don’t really like to fob people off with YouTube clips all the time.

But it’s good to highlight interesting websites and videos. After all, that was the original meaning of the word ‘weblog’, celebrating its tenth anniversary this week. So I will create another home for them. Probably a tumblelog, but I will get round to that later.

The other prominent feature on the main page (and, indeed, every page, the big whore that I am) is adverts. An early version of this design had the adverts appearing in a garish green colour scheme, but I screwed my head on enough to revert to a more sane grey version. I am ridiculously proud of having the idea of paying homage to Associated-Rediffusion, which wouldn’t really have worked with the green scheme.

The part of the design I am most worried about is the comments. For some reason, I always find the comments section the most difficult to design, and this time was no different.

I decided to move the comment author information to the left of the comment rather than above. Part of this was to get the full size of the Gravatar displayed, which would take up too much room if you have it above. It is also a layout familiar to message board users, so no real issue there.

There is a problem, however, if somebody has quite a long word in their name. In a recent example, Bellgrovebelle is cut off, although there are worse examples. Thankfully, these are quite rare and hopefully not too distracting.

As has already been noted by Ollie in the comments to this post, there is an inconsistency between the sizes of the Gravatars and the Identicons. I’ve not worked too hard on this yet, although my attempts so far have only produced pixellated-looking Identicons. I am working on it though.

Other features I’m thinking about adding to the comments section are favicons and OpenID.

In the pages (about, archives, etc.) I have also removed a lot of stuff that I didn’t really consider important any more. I’m thinking of completely uninstalling the post popularity plugin as this blog now has a post ratings system which I prefer. As for the other stuff, see if you can work out what’s gone. I doubt anyone will be too upset.

One last thing. I am using some icons from the Silk set by Fam Fam Fam. I’ve still not quite finished this aspect of the design, as I’m not sure which bits should have icons and which shouldn’t.

I think that just about covers it. Sorry this post went on for so long. I would be grateful to hear any comments or ideas. And of course, if something seems broken then please let me know about it!