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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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