As you will have noticed by now, this blog has a new look.

I hope you like it. The old template was getting pretty old and I think this one is very neat and easy on the eye. Thanks to MUKI space for making a great template.

What you may not have noticed is that I also have a new home page.

Feel free to leave a comment hear and tell me what you think.

I had started work on a portfolio section of the site but wasn’t happy with it so decided to just get the new site up there without the portfolio. The portfolio will come with time.

I’ve also decided to start using tags.

(PS it seems access to my site is a bit patchy at the moment. It’s BlueHost’s fault. They are aware of the issue and are apparently working on it. For what it is worth, it’s not just my site playing up, it’s everyone’s site on this server.

I’ve decided of late that I don’t give enough money. So, to remedy this I’ve decided to donate $50 a month to different organisations whose work I admire and wish to support.

Then I thought that I’d like to encourage others to do the same. I’m also teaching myself php.

These things combined have lead me to my first wordpress plugin. You can see it in my side bar, the “organisations I donate to” bit is a plug in.

It’s still probably not even an alpha release and I’ve got to figure out how to do the back end for it but as soon as I do, I’ll make it available for all of you to use. Hopefully this will encourage you to give a little more and promote the great work of the groups you are giving to.

Also, please be patient with me, this site has had a range of weird errors lately as I experiment.

I’ve updated my blog roll a bit. Mostly I’ve removed a couple of webcomics that just weren’t doing it for me.

However I’m going all the way back through the xkcd archives at the moment and love it.

The other thing I’m loving at the moment is the FAIL Blog. It’s probably my favourite blog at the moment. Get on board before they become main stream and sell out.

I’d say I get between 30 and 100 spam posts on this site a day.

Needless to say this makes me mad and I’m pretty sure a few genuine comments have gone astray as a result.

However, I have just uncovered the Captcha plugin so you will now have to enter a code to make a post.

Here’s hoping that it works!

Life is a little out of control at the moment.

Between the Melbourne Social Forum, the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice and adjusting to full time work again, I’ve got about 1.3 seconds spare until April 22 when the MSF finishes. I have something on everyday for the next fortnight and I suspect the rest of my time up to the 22nd will soon be fully booked. Hopefully there will be the occasional social interaction in there

Moreover, a rather serious illness in the family has be particularly concerned.

So I suspect blogging will be even more sparse for the next month or so. Of course there’s nothing quite like a post like this to bring a person out of blogging hibernation.

Sorry, the blog doesn’t seem to be displaying correctly in Internet Explorer. I don’t have time to figure out why, but I’m guessing it is because IE is Shit.

Use Firefox – make everyone’s life easier.

Well, I’ve been figuring out this CSS stuff and am certainly getting better at it. So I’ve stylised this blog a bit so it looks more like the general Goonanism site.

Please let me know what you think. It’s not 100% finished as I’ve still go a few things I want to tweek but it’s well on its way.

It was 2 years ago today that Goonanism was born.

Please join in with me:

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Goonanism
Happy birthday to you

It started off as a blog to track the development of my thesis, now it’s a full blown website with its own hosting and all.

I’ve finished my masters and launched the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice.

‘Tis a wonderful thing and, 510 posts later, a time for reflection on the fate of this blog. Rest assured it’s not going anywhere. It will become a travel blog sooner rather than later I hope (I’m thinking late June).

So thanks for popping by over the years. Please stay for cheese and wine (Dinny Goonan Family Estate of course).

Though some of you might be humoured to know that I was on the receiving end of this search.

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2 and my, what an attractive back end it has (pitty you can’t see it!).

If you notice any problems please leave a comment or email me at hammy[at]goonanism.com and I’ll do my best to fix it.

Now, listen to this.