Robert Hampton

This blog is feeling a bit neglected lately. That’s not because I’ve given up on web-based wibblings – far from it. It’s just that I’m having much more fun posting snarky asides on Twitter and writing about backwater railway stations.

But what of here, where I blog about “about anything that interests me: mainly culture, Liverpool, politics, trains and a whole lot more besides”? I’m finding it hard to write stuff on this blog because, frankly, who cares? Well, I’m sure some people do, but I’m not sure I do any more.

The BBC blog from a couple of days ago is a case in point. I was angry and wanted to say something, but when I tried to express myself, it didn’t translate well and I had trouble coming up with something vaguely readable. For me to get satisfaction from blogging, it’s got to be either (a) amusing or (b) well-argued and coherent, otherwise I’m just another semi-literate person mashing the keyboard with his fists. That would be good enough for RightMinds, but not for me.

This may be just a temporary blip. In any event, I’ve just paid to renew my web hosting, so I’m stuck with this until October 2013 at least!

Yesterday marked 107 years of electric train services between Liverpool and Southport, but I missed an even more important anniversary: my first post on this blog (which annoyingly is numbered 2 in the archives for some reason).

Yes, it was eight years ago yesterday that I first mashed the keyboard with my fists to send my thoughts over the internet. Over the years my audience has steadily grown, to the point where at least three or four people are reading regularly. I hope you are enjoying my frothy mix of trains, comments on the news, snippets from my life, trains, a smattering of gay issues, stupid jokes, trains and trains. Oh, and there’s stuff about trains.

Since I joined Twitter, the blog has changed a bit. Some subjects, about which I would have written a short blog post, are instead being dealt with in Tweet form. That means that the volume of blog posts has decreased, but hopefully the quality of what I am writing is still good. I’m also thinking about whether I should make more use of YouTube and start videoblogging.

So to my regular readers, what do you want to see me write about in the blog? Silly stuff? Trains? Gay rights? Stories from my life? Incredulous rants about the news? Stuff about the telly?

Should I focus on one area rather than the mish-mash which is on here at the moment? Should I tweet less and blog more? Would you like to see my big fat face on YouTube? I want to know what you think, so leave a comment.

Well, there we go, the new design is now live. If you’re reading via the RSS site feed or Facebook, click through to the site proper to see it.

I think it’s beyond doubt that the site needed a revamp. Frankly, the yellow was starting to hurt my eyes. The last redesign was over six years ago – I found references to Movable Type, the blogging software I ditched in 2005, in the templates.

Some pages buried deep in dusty corners of the site still have the old design and I will get to them… eventually.

There will probably be lots of tweaks and adjustments to be made over the coming weeks. Overall, though, I think it’s a big improvement. What do you think? Comments are, of course, welcome.

If you hate the new look, bear in mind that it can never look as shit as this short-lived effort from 2004.

It appears that most of the web site (this one, that you’re reading right now) has broken. The blog appears to be OK, but everything else is throwing up PHP errors. Please bear with me while I try to fix it.

Not a good idea to upgrade WordPress at half past midnight when you’re tired and already fed up. I kept getting errors about unexpected T_ENDIFs, whatever they are. For some reason, it only worked when I switched to the Iyonix and uploaded the files again using FTPc. Score 1 for RISC OS!

And the clocks have just gone forward, so it’s now 2am, not 1am! I’m going to get even less sleep than I normally do.

I missed the fifth anniversary of my first blog post. I was going to do something to commemorate, but then… forgot. Ahem.

Oh well. No April Fool joke this year, either

Can you tell I’ve lost interest? Never mind; have a look at this slightly disturbing BBC news story instead.

OK, so that didn’t last long. I’ve put the robots.txt file back the way it was, after a quick glance at my stats showed that people are stumbling across various bits and bobs via search engines, and presumably finding them useful.

I’m still thinking about the long-term direction for the blog. I’ll probably work it out just after I find a long-term direction for my life. Don’t hold your breath, people!

For the longest time I was somewhat desperate for people to visit me and shower me with hits. This is an obsession that dates all the way back to 1997 and the other site. Apart from one brief blaze of glory, it all came to nought (which, in retrospect, was probably just as well).

When I launched this blog back in 2003 (5th anniversary in a couple of months’ time? Eek!) I fully intended it to be a full functioning web site. I wanted to have comments and trackbacks and pings and RSS feeds and all the other stuff that Movable Type installs by default.

Now though, the wonderful shininess of blogging and all things Web 2.0 has worn off, and right now, I don’t really want to be a part of it. I’m not stopping blogging entirely, but I’ve added a robots.txt file to block out search engines. This may be a bit extreme, but for now I think it’s better that only the right people know about this site.

Hosting Problems. Will try and get them sorted out ASAP.

The 4th anniversary of my first blog entry sailed past without any official celebration from me.

So, er… yay! Four years! Here’s to four more (not likely), eh?