Anyone know of any plug-ins or other fixes for the extremely irritating WordPress post writing machinery, which seems to randomly throw in paragraph or break marks, and to strip them out, and generally drive you crazy? (I’d be quite happy to go back to the old version, which was MUCH better!)

… but it is getting to be a rather large minority. The statistics are a little confused, but a report on one of the Daily Telegraph blogs (and who’d have thought I’d be writing that a year ago?) says “16 million people in Europe’s five biggest countries are regular blog readers. Of those, almost four million have created a blog or posted on one.”

The report also quotes a figure of 10 per cent of Europeans reading blogs. When you think about all of the language issues (are there many blogs in say Latvian? probably not a huge number I’d expect), then that is a huge figure. And 25 per cent of them actually participating is astonishing.

Perhaps it is not such a surprise that the Telegraph’s web front page (a nicely uncluttered design) gives about 10 per cent of the space to its blogs. (For non-UK readers, the Telegraph is traditionally the paper of “disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells”, the small “c” conservative, “Middle England”, change-resistant suburbanites of “a certain age” and above.)

I started the rearrangement of my blogroll about five hours ago (having done the history section yesterday), and have only just finished a continuous run.

It should now be entirely up-to-date, and it has been trimmed of blogs that seem to either have changed direction, or I must have been in a very odd mood indeed when I put them on there.

Since it started with the blog nearly two years ago now, it has just organically grown, but it was well overdue for a prune. Each category is now sorted alphabetically (more or less) and a lot of blogs have been reclassified.

One of the few pleasures of the mechanical job was redisovering blogs that had slid off my “visit regularly” radar, among them: Kiangardarup, from Albany, Western Australia, which frequently deals with Aboriginal issues; Sorrow at Sills Bend, which features a series on public sculpture that I keep meaning to imitate; Living for Disco, from a VSO worker in Namibia; and, Animated Stardust, life and living in Wales.

Probably no accident that these were in the still-huge “People at Home” category, which is my catch-all for personal-ish writings that don’t fit under any subject category. Somehow it seems wrong to split it geographically, as I’ve done with politics and feminism, but I can’t work out how else to do it.

Now, I’ve done the pruning, what I should do is go back through Friday Femmes Fatales and Feminist Carnivals and start building it up again … Well, some time soon.

And my lines for the evening? “I will keep my blogroll up-to-date. I will…”

I’ve just had a complaint from a reader using Explorer 6.0 who is seeing the main text of this site as an enormous size. That’s not what I’m seeing in Firefox, or in my version of IE 6.0, so I’m now thoroughly puzzled.

Does it look like a sensible size to you? (I’m aiming for a comfortable font size that on everyone’s “normal” settings gets an average of about 12 words a line, because I believe that makes for easy reading.)

This new site was flung up in something of a hurry as the recent election loomed, but I’ve finally found a bit of time to tinker with it. I’ve fixed the problem with the extra spacing on the blogroll – it wasn’t registering as a list because there was < p> at the start of each line instead of < li>.

I got rid of the listings of recent comments and recent posts, since I didn’t think this was adding much, and that’s created more space. I’ve also tinkered with the colour scheme, and added more space around the posts to hopefully make it less busy.

I started work on cleaing up the blogroll, but plan to do a lot more to sort it into a logical format, and add a great many great new blogs.
Criticisms (constructive) and suggestions welcome…