Blog housekeeping

First off, my thanks to Sullivan for keeping the wheels on the blog turning for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been unwell and not felt capable of writing more than fairly basic posts. I’m starting to feel better now so hopefully I’ll be back and fighting fit soon.

Secondly, if you cast your eyes to the right you’ll see a ‘Zazzle Gallery’. This is a gallery of products I’ve done (Zazzle is a better version of Cafepress). The reason I’ve done them is two-fold. First off, its quite fun to poke a bit of satire in the direction of certain people (the t-shirts have print on the back as well). Secondly, its getting towards that time of year again – the time of year when I need to start thinking about paying for the site and I thought this would give another option rather than simply asking people to donate to site costs.

Thirdly, if you cast your eyes downwards, you’ll see the video section. I’ve had it on place for a few weeks now and (duh) only just realised that I make money from it. So far, I’ve apparently made the princely sum of $3. However thats not the point, I want to apologise to anyone who clicked a video without realising that they sent me a few pence every time they did. I should’ve noticed this earlier.

Fourthly, I want to thank everyone who participates in the weekly polls. I have to say that they are fascinating (seems like Autism Speaks need a good PR person!).

LB/RB has changed beyond all recognition in the five years since it started. The subject matter has changed from the personal portfolio page of a jobbing web developer to a two-fold website comprised of a web development/autism blog and a tutorial site for standards based web development to a blog about my autistic child to a multi-author blog about autism news, science and opinion. When it shut last year and then re-opened again I envisaged a long period of quiet as all the people who used to comment would’ve moved on but that turns out not to be the case. My daily visitor stats are a little down (I now have about 3,500 unique visitors a day as oppose to nearly a thousand more than that this time last year) but the comment section of each post is now a haven of discussion and debate rather than endless ranting and flame wars. The commenting absence of certain people (but they still read, I can see their IP in my logs 🙂 ) has created a much easier to manage site.

So, thank you loyal readers, thank you new readers – here’s to another 5 years!