The Blog Is Back In Town

We're back!

So here's the revamped blog in all its glory.

First things first, a MASSIVE thank you to all of you who took the time to enter the Renaming Competition. We had some great ideas but were really struck by Facing The Mountain suggested by Katie Machell.

Katie suggested it "with the double meaning of both describing where you live and alluding to the challenges of the work you do". We guess Katie was thinking of Table Mountain (which we can see from Somerset West) without knowing that we're actually surrounded by mountains with the Helderberg being so dominant it gives its name to the whole area. We were really taken with the simplicity of the name and the way that it works at so many levels. Enough explanation, you can work it out for yourselves!

To be honest, Dean had an idea of what he wanted to call the revamped blog so we weren't taking the competition too seriously as there wasn't going to be a winner. As such we gave no real thought to the prize, so we'll now put some thought into Katie's prize. In the meantime she gets a credit in the footer of the blog. sorry Katie!

We're really pleased with the results of the revamp and hope you'll enjoy the changes as well as the ongoing content of the blog. So here are some of the new features which we hope you'll enjoy and use.

We've aimed to keep the blog clean and simple in its look so the posts are kept to a minimum leaving you to click Read More for the full monty.

The sidebar is dramatically reduced in terms of clutter, most of which has been moved to the Links tab at the top of the page. Amongst the tabs there's the obligatory Home one to take you back to the main page. After that there are tabs for About, Archive, Labels, Links, Supporting, Photoblog and Contact. Rather than bore you with the details let us encourage you to check them out for yourselves.

We would love to encourage you to become a Follower of the blog and to subscribe to it via the email link at the bottom of the Sidebar. Whilst on the subject, the new animated RSS Feed button is now clearly located at the top right of the blog for your convenience.

Each post can be commented on as before but now you can also rate them from 1 to 5 stars, Like the post via Facebook (you must be logged in), tick a box to denote whether you thought it was a good or boring post. There are easy share buttons allowing you to share a post immediately via Email, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter or Google Buzz. Not enough for you? Then you could always share what you read via the share buttons at the top of the sidebar. These buttons include Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg and Stumble Upon. The heart will let you add the blog to your Bookmarks or Favourites and the last button will give you more options than you could possibly want!

We've also included a number of blogs written by friends, not all our friends blogs are here, rather just the regularly updated ones.

We've been writing this blog for over 6 years now and look forward to many many more years of blogging. Hope you'll stay with us and enjoy the adventure.

PS. The blog is optimized for Firefox 3.6 & Google Chrome 5. It works OK in IE8 but there is a problem with the Flash player. Another good reason to ditch IE and get a decent browser.

Apologies to Thin Lizzy!