Many apologies for my sustained absence – believe me, I wish it hadn’t been so long. Anyhoo, I have returned, with a temporary blog here to hold my pearls of wisdom until I finally get round to finishing the new-look version of my full site.

But, I hear you cry, why have I made such a sudden reappearance? Well, I’m going to be spending much of the next week in bed (more on that anon), and feel I may wish to vent my frustration in more than 140 characters. So I shall be publishing, with luck, longer form rants here once again.

So, yes, more blogging here again. Starting tomorrow, with a brief catchup of what’s going on with me and why.

Should be blogging more, but I’ve been awfully busy with work (yes, proper work, here) and haven’t really felt like it. More anon, though, I promise.

So, shiny new site. And a shiny new domain at dafydjon.es – see what I did there? (dafyd.me.uk/dafydjones.co.uk will continue to work, of course – I just have some ideas for the different domains that may come to something eventually.)

I’m quite a fan of my Snapshots pages, which presents all of my photos from Flickr in a new light. Sort of. (Geeky aside: there’s some heavy-duty PHP fu happening with the Flickr API pulling those photos in here – if you’re interested, I’d be happy to explain what’s happening.)

The Footprints page tracks what I’m doing elsewhere on the web, just in case you were bothered.

There will, inevitably, be broken links and files that no longer exist. If you’re looking for something in particular, give me a shout and I’ll hunt it out for you. Oh, comments on blog entries now work properly. Yay.

There are various things that I want to add, features that were on the old site that I’ll be bringing across as well as some super-duper new stuff.

For those who care, this is version 5 of my site. Version 4 was (more or less) alive for just over four years. Definitely time for an update.

So, more blogging to come shortly. Much has happened over the past few months, some of which I will be sharing.

Potentially, when/if I remember, I have a few things to blog about… but that’ll come as it comes.

This is a temporary measure – comments should be back working as soon as I get a chance to fiddle with the settings and install some additional security measures when I get home.

This applies to other blogs on my system as well – David, Jennie, etc… sorry about that.

Checked my emails, eventually, to be greeted with this:

Any guesses how many were spam?

448\. Nearly 500 spam emails in five days. Gah.

And of the others, just over 100 were about spam comments on the various blogs floating around here. So I’ve done some fiddling with them (everything should now be working, by the way) to try and stop the spam. It does mean one extra step when commenting (you have to preview the comment first), but it shouldn’t be too intrusive, I hope.

If you post a comment while signed in to the TypeKey service, you will see a rather large and scary error message. I have no idea what it means, and Six Apart’s technical support peeps are looking at it as we speak.

In fact, you comment will still be posted. It won’t appear immediately, but it is being stored in the database, so it will be published when I check them.

If you aren’t logged in, the commenting works fine. Typical.

This year – nay, this month – I’m going to be taking part in the Blogathon, a 24-hour sponsored blog to raise money for BookAid International, a jolly worthy organisation that helps promote literacy among those less well off than you or I, in places around the world considerably hotter and less fortunate than here (Nottingham, that is. If you are in Cairo, for example, you may need to adjust accordingly).

Anyhoo – I’m going to spend my 24 hour blog reviewing books. Mainly because that’s one of the things I like doing, but also because I want to share with the world which books I like, and which I think are fit only to be thrown at the poor people who work at WH Smith’s. And if I can help some children half way around the world at the same time – bonus!

So, to recap: July 29 2006, 24 hours. 48 book reviews. That means I need 48 books to review. I can get a fair few together, I reckon… but if there’s anything you want my opinion on, shout at me. I might even pay attention.

So I don’t clutter up this blog (nearly 50 posts in a day is an awful lot…) I’m going to be blogging in my brand spanking new books blog – which will, eventually, be where I put all my reviews.

What’s that you say? Sponsor me? Why, that’s jolly kind of you. You can pledge to sponsor me at the Blogathon site, and actually donate money to BookAid at their site. Thank you.

Oh – while you’re about it: Rob and Lemurgirl are going to be blogathonning too… why not head over and support them as well?

Good Booking is probably trademarked in some way by Penguin Books Ltd. No infringement or endorsement intended or implied.