John Walker's Electronic House

So, a quick question.

Has the Sun really taken the photo of the Brit who was on board the missing Malaysian plane QZ8501, and massively photoshopped it? Tidied his earlobes, coloured his hair, and, well, whitened his skin? Because that would be… really bloody weird, right?

Or has the Mirror aged him? It’s really odd.

Mirror’s front page pic:

Sun’s front page pic:

Both seem to be reworked from the original from his LinkedIn page:

I’ve added a front page. What kind of person does this make me? Is it a bad thing? Does it imply the site is more than just a blog? Well, I kind of want that, ultimately – separate sections for different things. Plus it lets me link directly to Brian’s Guide for those nostalgic for two year old cartoons, to the TV writing, to the whole blog, and of course to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, without which I’d be as nothing.

Importantly, you can ignore it all by bookmarking this link instead. Or just RSS (top right) I guess. I’ll add one of those gadgets that links to the latest posts below, as soon as I figure it out.

What the blazes? What is this? Something new? Something that makes you want to touch my face? Yes, yes it is. It’s a whole new website, new in every conceivable way, apart from the bit where the content’s exactly the same as my previous site.

I’ve been at botherer.cream.org for six years last month. And it was a fine pleasure to be a part of the ice.cream.org empire. Ice, you need to know, was and likely still is the internet’s only 100% advertising-free server. Among the many great sites it hosts, none contain banner ads, flashing Flash monstrosities, or popping up demons. It’s the electronic child of my good friend Nick Mailer, and squats in the warm surroundings of the Positive Internet Company. They are, sincerely, the finest internet hosts you could hope to use.

I’m pleased to say this new address – www.botherer.org (doubleyous optional) – is also hosted at Positive, this time sneakily piggybacking on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the PC gaming site I’m so very proud to be a part of. And here I will stay, hopefully for at least another six years. I’m not a big fan of making people change their RSS feeds and bookmarks, so hopefully you’ll forgive me this one time. I shall be updating here from now on – botherer.cream.org is beautiful, but dead.

There are, inevitably, still a few bits and pieces to tweak on this site. For some reason the posts below are claiming they have no comments. They do, they’re all there. In fact, everything from the old site is here, including the untitled scraps from my blog-before-that. I also have ambitions of having a static front page for this site, with the blog on a link, but I cannot fathom a way of getting WordPress to let me do this. If anyone knows, I’d appreciate any tips Got this figured out now – will fix soon.

My reason for wanting a front page is to try and tidy up the ridiculously varied content I put up here. As my friend Kim pointed out the other day, it’s a strange place – there’s three angry rants about MMR, and then below that a snowman with his intestines hanging out. The excellent buttons at the top of the page go a long way toward at least letting people filter appropriately, and I will attempt to make more judicious use of ‘categories’ in future. If I can figure a front page, then it will be even more organised.

The last things to say are an enormous thank you to the lovely Richard Cobbett, who once again has patiently helped me to get my blog working. He is able to identify when I’ve somehow deleted the vital ‘>’ that keeps the entire internet online, and calmly tells me how to put it back. And to give an equally huge thank you to Johnathon at Posi, who is so ludicrously generous with his spare time, has rescued Rock, Paper, Shotgun at 4 in the morning too often, and so very kindly did the hard work arranging for this site and the blog to exist at all. People are so very often very awesome.