Warning! Wet Paint! Flying Spanners! Falling Pianos!


Regular visitors will notice that I'm doing some painting and decorating on the website this week. I'm also moving some of the furniture around, so you might bump into, or trip over, a few things, if you're wandering around the site. ("Yuk, I've stepped in a poem.") My apologies for any inconveniences...

Explanation: I run this website all on my lonesome ownsome, using a lovely, simple interface from Squarespace.

And Squarespace have just brought out Version 5 of their... thingy, service, interface, whatever you call it. Which has some fun new features, and has made some old stuff easier to do, thus my slightly distracted look, as I poke around in far off corners of the site, finding spiderwebs and the crust of a sandwich, remembering that plumbing job I meant to do last year... Hey look! There's those photos from Burning Man I never added comments to! Which reminds me, I must scan and upload  those paper photos I found in the attic in Galway last month...

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was going to say, if you have any suggestions, please make them. I'll be up a ladder, faffing around with the site for weeks, so join in, help me make it better.

Some questions I'm wrestling with myself are: what colour should the hypertext links be? What colour scheme in general? Should the navigation bar be on the left, or the right, of the screen? What links should be in the top (horizontal) navigation bar?

And on a more macro scale, what do you like (if anything) about this site? What else would you like to see? Or see more of? Or less of? What brilliant things are other people doing on their sites that I should nick? What crushingly stupid thing does this site do that I've never noticed? What is the meaning of life?

Be nice, be nasty, be honest, I won't mind.

Meanwhile, there's a nice mention of this blog in the Irish Times this week, halfway through an article about the noble 99, high king of icecreams. It quotes from my piece on the Lisbon Treaty, and from some of your comments.