Been a bit quiet for a while, but with good reason as I’ve been working on giving the Ministry a bit of a makeover.

What I’ve tried to go for here is a bit more readability and cross-browser consistency. I’ve tested the new design – as best I can in a development setting – on Firefox, Opera, the Windoze version of Safari and, yes, on Internet Exploder (although only IE7 as I can’t be bothered with all the fannying around necessary to get IE6 & 7 co-existing on the same PC).

So what we’ve got here is a 900px wide layout – if you’re still running at 800×600 then boy is it time you got a new monitor – a revised and, hopefully, cleaner ‘look’ and one or two new features to go with the WP 2.61 upgrade.

There’s a new sideblog for ‘hey, have you seen this?’ type posts.

It should now be much easier to bookmark both the site and individual posts with the new social networking buttons, and while I’m still sorting out a decent comments preview, there’s now an Ajax-powered facility to edit your own comments for up to 15 minutes after posting, in case you spot any typos.

It all looks to be working nicely from this end, but if anyone is finding any problems then leave a comment – and please, if you do have any problems with the new layout, mention which browser, version and OS you’re using so I can more easily track down the problem.

That’s yer lot for the moment – back later with a few thoughts on the Olympics and so other bits and pieces…