This Blogger blog has now closed. I am still blogging, and under the same pseudonym, but on a Wordpress blog here.

If you have a link to this URL, please update it to the new one.

All of the posts and comments here have been copied over, so there is no loss of anything that has been written!

The RSS link should be the same. Please let me know if you are not receiving any of my posts on the new blog in your RSS reader!

ThunderDragon.

... running around Wembley Stadium, the scene of England's defeat two days ago.

So there'll most likely be no blogging today.

I just realised that this is to be my one thousandth post here on this blog.

It really doesn't seem all that long ago that I posted for the first time, and even less so when 100 posts was quite a number!

Since I started, this blog has been through a couple of template redesigns and a new domain name, and posts covering a wide number of political - and non-political - issues.

I have enjoyed writing the past thousand posts,and I hope you have enjoyed reading all of the ones which you have read - and I thank for doing so. I have enjoyed reading the comments which readers have posted, and long may it continue!

Hopefully you'll stick around for, and enjoy reading, my next thousand posts!

You can now access this blog through a brand new domain name - www.thethunderdragon.co.uk.

All old links will still work, however, and there is no need to change any links, since it should all be automatically forwarded to the new address.

I just thought it was about time, since neither the cost or effort are all that much!

I have installed a new widget in the sidebar on the right, called BlogRush.

It seems like it should be quite good, providing a way to find other blog posts and into advertise mine at the same time.

Click here to try it out!

via Shades of Grey

My second guest post over at the Wardman Wire isn’t really the next post in the series that I am writing whilst Matt is away on holiday [hence the "1.5"] but primarily to point to a couple of replies to my first post.

Good replies have been made by Graachi and Matt, which very cleverly picked up on the general thrust of the real Part 2, which I should [hopefully] be posting over at the Wardman Wire tomorrow morning.

If you do, then head over to the Wardman Wire. If you send Matt a 468x60 banner, he will add it to a rotating list which displays at the top of the blog. He says:

Have you ever looked through your stats and seen some rather dodgy search terms turn up? I did today, and came up with these two rather odd ones...

how many calories are lost masturbating

cartoonporn with dragons

sexual abuse is fun

This is the six hundredth post on my blog!

This is my list of my top 20 blogs for Iain Dale's 2007 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. My criteria for selecting these blogs is very simple: those I enjoy most. The list below is my top 20 UK political blogs, in alphabetical order:

A Conservative's Blog
Benedict Brogan's political blog
Caroline Hunt
ConservativeHome
Devil's Kitchen
Dizzy Thinks
Educational Conscription
Ellee Seymour
Iain Dale's Diary
The Last Ditch
Liberty's Requiem
mediocracy
Mr Eugenides
Norfolk Blogger
The Regalis Blog
Sinclair's Musings
The Spectator Coffeehouse Blog
Theo Spark
Tory Radio
The Wardman Wire

Recently I have been experimenting with reading blogs through an RSS reader rather than through visiting the blog directly. It certainly appears to have its positives and negatives, and I'm not sure whether all in all it is better or not.

Benefits include not missing any posts, being aware of posts faster and easier than going through the blog itself, and keeping up with blogs I may otherwise miss.

The downsides, however, include the lack of personalisation through the RSS reader, that some blogs do not provide a full feed and thus neceissitate a visit to the blog anyway, no knowledge of comments or ability to comment without visiting the blog, and the RSS reader screwing about with some formatting, making some hard to read in the reader.

I think what I shall probably do is continue to read blogs through the RSS reader, but use it more as a backdrop in order to ensure that I do not miss any posts in the blogs I read.

The RSS feed for this blog can be found here or by clicking on the RSS image on the top of the column to the right, or the image in this post.

It was one year ago today that I posted my first blog post. Even though it took a couple of months before I got into it and started posting at all regularly [my second post wasn't for an entire month after my first].

But why have I continued blogging for an entire year? Because I enjoy it. I enjoy writing posts and reading the comments I get on them, and reading other peoples blogs. Before I discovered blogs and began blogging myself, I had begun to grow bored with politics. But bloggers and blogging re-awoke my interest.

I find blogging great fun, and a liberating activity. I enjoy expressing my opinion on diverse subjects and receiving comments from others on what I have written.

Thank you for coming and reading my blog - I definitely intend to continue blogging, and I hope all of you continue visiting and commenting!

Chris.

Today I made a new template for this blog. I hadn't meant to spend all day on it, but the new blogger being how it is, that's how long it took.

But anyway, it is at least far prettier than the old one, which had sort of grown higgeldy-piggeldy, and really looked quite bad and loaded slowly.

I'm quite proud of how it turned out in the end, and especially of the new header.

I certainly prefer it to the old one, and I hope you do too! Please let me know what you think of it!