There's been something of a drought of activity here on EU over the last 6 weeks. I can only apologise but sadly other commitments make it very difficult for me to find both the time and the connectivity to post, so it may not be rectified in the immediate future.

I'll just take this opportunity to thank everyone who's still reading and I'll do my best to get some more content posted soon.

This is a general plea for comments/tips/complaints on the layout of Everything Ulster and how you (yes, you!) use the site.

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Right, I'm torn about how best to display recent commenter activity at Evertyhing Ulster in the sidebar over to your right.

• The default way with b2Evolution is to display the "Recent Comments" where you get a list of who has posted and on what topic.
• I hacked that a little bit to display "Hot Topics" instead. Here, each individual post can't be listed more than once, so only the most recent comment is shown. It gives a more varied range of topics at the expense of clarity as to how many comments have been made recently.
• There's also the list of recent posts which doesn't bother at all with comments, but I think it's a related issue. Do we need it at all when you can just go to the Home page instead?

To illustrate what I mean, at the time of writing "Recent Comments" has 10 comments all emanating from the same 3 posts. On the other hand, although the post "Why Blog?" has 4 of the last 10 comments, Hot Topics only lists it once (linking to the most recent comment).

I don't think having all 3 is an option as it takes up too much space. Anyway, let me know what you think. Feel free to leave a comment if you think the choice is too straightforward or feel very strongly about it. People power and all that guff.

Edit

One other thing I should've pointed out is that, from a purely selfish PoV, other bloggers may prefer Recent Comments because their name will link to the URL they enter, whereas in Hot Topics it links to their comment. Don't rely on this staying the case though, if I keep Recent Comments I'll likely link the name to the comment and the title to the original blog post.

There seems to have been an awful lot of downtime here at EU lately (including most of today!). I am monitoring this and will move hosts if I have to to combat this should it recur. My hosts assure me, for the 3rd or 4th time, that they've found the source of the problem and corrected it (this time it was too much server load). Hopefully normal service will now have resumed, but I'll keep an eye on it. In the mean time I'm sorry for the hassle.

Update: I've moved the site to a new host. If you're reading this your ISP's DNS records have already updated, i.e. your ISP knows the site has moved (unfortunately as of an hour ago my own hadn't). The rest of the interwebs should catch up over the next 48 hours or so and normal service will then resume.

It's one of those times when life comes between me and my internet so I'll not be blogging for about a week or so; be good while I'm away!

I'm sure it didn't take anyone long to notice the tweaks made to Everything Ulster over the weekend. The blog software was updated to a new version with lots of funky new features, most of which will make life easier for me rather than affect the front-end too much (though the green links should be easier to distinguish from the black text than the navy ones were).

The upgrade would have meant a major re-work of the previous skin, so instead I decided to start from scratch a default skin and build a new one around that. There may be one or two finishing touches to come, but hopefully you're looking at a relatively finished product.

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Sorry I haven't had a chance to post too much; over the weekend I've been dosed with a severe bout of Manflu and as such, have been fending off the reaper with a combination of max-strength lemsip-like concoctions, hot soup, a duvet, and umpteen hankies.

Glad to say I'm feeling better now though and should be back to 100% soon. Sadly, having wished to no avail that I could only find the energy to open my laptop over the weekend to blog some things, now that I'm feeling up to it there's nothing that interesting to talk about.

There is one thing I should remark upon though. I've been looking to add a bit of variety to the contributions to this site for a while now and to that end, as the more observant of you will have noticed, Michael Shilliday (of Slugger and formerly Young Unionists blog fame) is now blogging here at Everything Ulster so I can now formally bid him welcome. I'm sure his more detailed knowledge of the nuances of political life here will be no small help in continuing to highlight some of the more interesting issues that may fly under the radar of the mainstream media.

While I recently mentioned that Everything Ulster had hit the big time, it came as something of a surprise to find that the site has been nominated for Best Political Blog in the 2008 Irish Blog Awards.

Being up against the likes of Slugger O'Toole, the Mac Daddy of Northern Irish (and probably Irish) blogs, the odds of actually winning are about equivalent to those on Limavady Utd. winning the premier league this year, but it's an honour just to make the long-list, so thanks to whoever saw fit to nominate this little site of mine.

The Irish Blog Awards 'ceremony' will take place on 1st March at the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

You know your successful when you start getting hate mail. It's a shame it's so piss-poor, but baby steps and all that.

While I've had messages sent from this site before, this is the first one filled with quite such obvious (and entertaining) rage.

Hello Beano...I have to admit that you sound claver enough but your an asshole! Northern Ireland is not britain or the united kingdom or great britain or wathever other little silly names you people use, its NORTHERN IRELAND emphasis on IRELAND because it is Irish soil after all. If u dont like how OUR country is run then leave simple as....You and your cronnies need to start waking up to the fact that you live in Ireland or as i like to call it Eire and if you want to be British then do us a favour and go to Britain!!!
nikki****@yahoo.co.uk

"Go to Britain!!!" Why didn't I think of that before!?

Where do you start?

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It would be hard not to notice that posting at EU have tailed off somewhat in the recent couple of months. I went on holiday for three weeks at the end of July/start of August and went straight into a new job on my return so sadly time has been a scarce commodity. Add to this the fact that I've had no motivation whatsoever to write and it quickly becomes clear that something's going to have to change.

It's not like there haven't been things to talk about either.

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