I’ve been up and running with this new website structure for about two weeks now and I’m still loving it. I don’t know if it’s just the novelty of it all or if the effort gone into simplifying everything has paid off, but I want to blog more and when I do, I write more too. The film and album review process is more immediate which means I have more thoughts and more to say.

It’s been a long time since I made any significant changes to my blog and the system it runs on, and now, seemingly overnight, everything has completely changed. This isn’t the work of a moment though. This is something I’ve been thinking about for at least three years. The problem I’ve used Wordpress for many, many moons now and whilst I’ve always thought it was functional in a way that would work for most people, it never quite fit my purposes.

I’ve been dreading this moment pretty much from the second I hit publish on last year’s round-up of my musical adventures. Now it’s time for me to pick not only my top five albums of the year just gone but also update my top ten albums of all time. Naturally, this only includes the ones I have listened to in the course of this album adventure nonsense, so it’s actually the top ten albums of all time out of 200 options.

When Emma Watson started up a new Goodreads book club that focused on works about feminism and equality, I immediately signed up. That was all I did though, and I’ve thoroughly ignored the email digests that have been emailed to me, and I have yet to buy the first book on the list let alone catch up to what the second one even is. That’s not to say I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Since writing about my desire to chronicle the connected life I’ve done a lot of playing around with gadgets but not so much reporting of my findings. One of the health and fitness gadgets I’ve been less keen on trying is the Fitbit fitness band, partly because it just doesn’t appeal to me and partly because of their refusal to embrace Apple’s HealthKit concept. (For those who missed it, HealthKit syncs all data from health apps to graph your progress in one handy place.

Credit: San Diego Shooter/Flickr Today is the 100th edition of Baby Panda Thursday, and, I’m afraid to say, the last. It’s been an absolute pleasure to scour through photos of pandas every week (give or take) for the last two and a half years, but I’m determined that Thursdays will not be bad days anymore, and they will not need the cuteness to cheer me up. Don’t think for a second that this is the last you’ll see of pandas on the site, though.

I’ve made lots and lots of New Year’s Resolutions before, both on the blog and in my head, and very few of them have worked out. This year, I changed the concept around completely and debuted the Life List - a long-term set of goals and things to aim at. Some are crazy, some are impossible, some are easy and most will take time. I figured a quick review for the year would be appropriate, with some thoughts on what is next.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon in August, and Mr C and I found ourselves sitting in a large back garden with a cup of tea. This is unusually civilised of us. We surveyed the extra-long grass, and discussed what size plot you would need to fit an underground bunker. Quite big, is the answer. We discussed the pros and cons of more than one storey, and the concept of bungalows being more expensive because they take up more land, and how this translates to the underground.

Recently, we found ourselves meeting up with some F1 fans - families of weary parents and gadget-hungry children - and we managed to sell several iPads to them. The kids just loved the iPad, whereas the parents were keen on the F1 Timing App - and it is pretty revolutionary. Selling the iPad is actually really easy to do. My mother is a notorious technophobe, but I left her alone with an iPad for five minutes, and she loved it.

I’ve spent a good few months now trying to consolidate all my writing into one or two spaces. Sidepodcast benefitted from the F1 related thoughts that used to appear here, plus the articles I wrote for BellaOnline. Meanwhile, this here space of the web suddenly found itself merging with the other blogs I used to write, plus a whole load of archived stuff that was without a home. Going through the archives was a fascinating business, and while I would usually discourage such behaviour, there were a few things I wanted to pick up on.