Plus, we also taste-tested those special World Cup-themed crisps (except you’re not really allowed to call them that because of merchandising rights, and the like). Spanish Chicken Paella may, quite possible, be the most revolting thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.

Second off, as Ebbsfleet United and MyFootballClub.co.uk are one of of the few football issues I mention on here regularly, I thought I’d draw you attention to my post at twofootedtackle on The Five Pound Football Club.

I shouldn’t be surprised that these schemes keep popping up. Somebody, somewhere either thinks they can succeed or make money from it but until the solve the annual renewal issue, it’s just not feasible in my book.

My book also reckons they should start a club from scratch, but that’s a completely different post for a different time.

Finally, a few people have asked what I’ll be doing for the World Cup and the answer is sitting around, drinking beer and watching football. That and a few arbitrarily timed podcasts.

I’m probably not going to write much, if anything at all, about the World Cup, partly because there’ll be so many others fighting for your attention, and partly because I don’t feel international football is enough of a speciality of mine for me to bring anything different to the table. That may change if I get inspired, but I’d rather enjoy the tournament rather than worry about spouting the same lines as everybody else.

Besides, things like the unexplained disappearance of Grays Athletic from the footballing map are far more interesting.

What’s really impressive is the twofootedtackle podcast’s co-nominees. EPL Talk and World Soccer Daily are pretty good, but Football Ramble and especially the Guardian’s Football Weekly are the dons of the football podcasting world. I suspect anybody starting a footballing podcast has Football Weekly in their mind when they do so.

Essentially, Chris and I are two people who host a podcast in our spare time. Said pod is less than a year old and has a relatively modest number of regular listeners. To even be in the same company as those on the list is a real delight and one I think Chris and I are still a tad surprised by.

I know we’ve not won (and I don’t in a million years expect us to do so), but I’d like to say a few words of thanks to a few people as just getting to the list is an achievement. First off, to Chris for being a great co-host and always coming up with fresh ideas, to Porter Novelli for letting us borrow their studio each week, and, most importantly, to every single one of our guests on the podcast.

Seriously, it would be nothing without the variety of opinions we get from you all, and it’s genuinely enjoyable to head into the studio each week not knowing where we’ll be heading on our footballing chat journey.

At this stage you’re probably expecting me to jump up and down and implore you all to vote for us, but I find that all a bit embarrassing (and a tad egocentric. And frankly, I don’t need any extra help to sound like a tosser at the best of times).

What I will say, though, is if you listen to the show and really like it, then please do press the button next to our name. But only if you genuinely think we should win. The rest of the list is populated by great podcasts, so I seriously won’t be offended if you think they’re better (as they probably are).

Voting form is here.

First up: My take on the current situation at Notts County, which was already out of date about six hours after it was written. That’s Notts County for you.

Secondly, a quick thing from me at Soccerlens: Ten football league youngsters to watch out for in 2010.

Plus, there’s a hugely bumper and fun-filled Christmas edition of the twofootedtackle podcast, featuring the Sound Of Football team from Some People Are On The Pitch and The Onion Bag.

Funtimes.

Or, to put it less obliquely, I’m halting blogging. Indefinitely. I may resume a few months down the line. It may even be a few weeks. Or it may not. But, frankly, it’s probably better to write this than do a series of half-arsed posts, all of which that start with “apologies for the lack of updates…”, an opening that rapidly gets tedious by the fifth letter of the first word.

There’s no one particular reason for this, but if I had to point to one reason it would be a lack of time. That and being very busy at work. Yes, being busy at work, a lack of time and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope a lack of inspiration when the time is free.

Being busy, as Terry Duffelen said to me on Twitter earlier, comes and goes. But I’ve been hideously busy for around four months now, and I’ve been thinking about calling a temporary halt to blogging for about half that time.

It’s not just the amount of time that I don’t have – it’s the desire to do other things with this time when I’m free. I spend all day working with social media, reading blogs and other internet-related things, and I’m finding in the evenings I would rather not have to open my computer, but cook, watch TV, read, go to the cinema, go to the pub, go out for a meal, go to the gym. And when I look at that list, there’s not a great deal of that I’ve managed recently. Essentially, I need downtime to switch off. Blogging used to be that. It isn’t anymore.

Usually it’s only snatched time late at night anyway. As in common with most recent blog posts, this is being written after 11pm. Which means I don’t get as much sleep as I’d hoped. Which makes me a bit irritable the next day, which makes me less likely to blog. And so on.

There’s also a lack of time to cover topics, and cover them well. In the last two weeks I’ve had about half a dozen topics, both football and non-football I’ve wanted to write about. But I wouldn’t have had the time to do anything other than a few snatched words.

What about something like Posterous, you may say? What indeed. I like Posterous a lot. I’ve had a play and think it’s a very nifty little platform. If I were starting out or starting anew, I’d definitely consider it.

But I either write for other blogs or try and offer some form of analysis on here, that a shorter scrap-book post on Posterous wouldn’t have been able to do justice to, even if I could post it on the train into work.

The bottom line is when I write, I research first. For every post, I’d say the amount of research done is equal to the time spent writing the piece, more so with the football articles.

I know what you’re going to say now – how did you ever work in a busy newsroom? Well I did, and I could again, no problem. But this isn’t a newsroom, this is blogging; this is something I do in my spare time, and something I rarely get paid for (certainly not on this blog).

There are so many bad bloggers – and journalists – who will knock something together in the blink of an eye without having done any research or checking any facts. Fine, this approach may mean I take longer over my posts but I’d rather be right than first, especially as this blog (and others) carry my name. I refuse to compromise on quality and accuracy for the sake of being able to knock out a couple of extra posts.

It’s not that the joy isn’t there – I still love words, and I still love writing and genuinely wish I could do more of it, or spend my days thinking of witty asides to drop into finely-honed articles – but as was said to me the other day, it’s like I’m trying to do two jobs on top of other things.

And ultimately, my priority is to my job, because they pay me. And I work hard, so throw in an extra job on top of that… well, I can manage it if I really want, but in honesty, I’d rather recharge my batteries, unwind and be fresh for the next day of work. Shoot me for attempting a work-life balance.

As much as anything, I think I needed to put this down so that I didn’t have the spectre of an unwritten blog hanging over me. The guilt feels far less when you actually announce you’re not blogging any longer. And that way people cant go ‘this is a bad example of a blog, he only posts once a fortnight.’

So that’s it. Me and blogging are done for the time being. That’s here, and with football blogging as well. You may see a few pieces pop up from me though – these will be ones I’ve nearly finished or have already committed to. After that, no more.

Well, maybe not that final. I simply don’t know if I just need to abandon blogging for a couple of weeks to recharge my batteries, or six months, or if I just don’t want to come back. I just don’t know.

This blog will remain as it is – it’d be a shame to delete it and I may feel the urge to blog gets too strong.

Oh, and if anybody even thinks about trying to use this blog and announcement as an example of how blogging is drying, I’ll personally take that lazy one-blog assumption and stick it… well, you get the idea. I’m just a blog. I’m certainly not, and never have been, indicative of any trend.

I’ll probably need to change my bio now as well…

Lights. Off.

So, in case I disappear for days on end, here’s a couple of things you may have missed while I was away.

1. A small piece from me at Reputation Online about the general nature of my work and why it’s important to change things.

2. A truly bizarre story of two American girls who decided to hop across the Atlantic to watch Oldham Athletic. Away. At Millwall. I had a chat with them. Hopefully, they’ll be on the podcast next month, which should be entertaining!

Back to hermiting

Outta the country for a while. Ultra-strong comment moderation is on. Soz

What I really need is a wet Sunday where I’m doing absolutely nothing and have time to truly faff about.

In theory, changing themes shouldn’t take long. In practice, it’s a lot more difficult. It’s amazing how many of the free themes don’t work properly in Firefox or Safari. And even when you find one you like, there a lot of tweaking, which takes a lot longer than anticipated.

Plus it’s taken me ages to find a theme I actually like.

This is the end result, and I’m much happier than with the old one. As and when I get time to play around further there’ll be further changes, just in case you think things look different.

One day (hah!) I’d like to have a go at doing one myself, but that will involve learning CSS and that’s a whole new set o’problems. It’s been fun to learn as I go along though (and apologies if you’ve arrived here in the middle of something going horribly wrong for a few minutes). I’d even go as far as to say I’ve enjoyed this.

It was this form of terror I experienced at approximately 8.34pm this evening, while attempting to set up a domain redirect from my old wordpress blog to this place. I’d followed the instructions, but still wasn’t entirely sure I’d done everything correctly.

My blog was going to be, essentially, a version of Schrodinger’s cat.

*click*

The tension was too much. I sent a couple of emails instead. Then I looked back.

It worked. Thank whichever deity you pray to for that.

So, now I can get back on track. The redirect, to me, was always the most important thing of moving to my new domain. Otherwise, I had two blogs floating on the net, with the old one getting all the links and the traffic.

Now that’s done, I can worry about the design (ha! As if I’m going to get that right without breaking something).

Meanwhile, apologies again for waffling on about the maintenance of this place. It’s sort of fascinating to me, as, for all the time I’ve spent on the internet, I’ve never bothered to learn the technical stuff. Now, I’m realising that I really should have done while I had the opportunity.

Ah well. More terror up ahead.

[Incidentally, for anybody who's looking to redirect their old wordpress.com blog to a new domain built on wordpress.org, this PDF is a Godsend. It's writing for people hosting on GoDaddy, but I use Bluehosts and the method's pretty similar and easy to work out]

Yes, after years of blogging on wherever, I finally caved in and got my own domain name. And, er, this is it. It looks exactly like the last one doesn’t it.

Essentially, the plan is for this all to change. I’ve got plans to redesign the theme and split my feeds into at least two different topics, namely football and other stuff. And to make it look pretty.

The downside to this is I’ve never attempted to design a blog before.

“Get outta town,” I hear you say. “You’re all over teh internetz like a bad rash. How can YOU not know how to design a website?”

Um, well, I don’t. And I can’t. Seriously, I’ve no idea what I’m doing here. Blog designing lessons? CSS editing? Sorry miss, I must have been behind the bike sheds. Or doodling. Yes miss, sorry miss, won’t happen again.

But, like any good man with a wanton disregard for instructions I’m going to attempt to do much of the redesign myself. So if you see funny things go on over here you’ll know why. And I’ll be blogging here from now on. So update your RSS feeds and your bookmarks.

No doubt this will all end in tears and I’ll get somebody to do this professionally, but I at least feel I should have a go.

Like I say, tears before bedtime. Have you seen my attempts to put up shelves?

The short answer is no, not yet. But the long answer is also worth reading.

I’m in deepest, darkest Devon this week with limited net connectivity, so there may be no posts. Alternatively I may pass the time with long pieces on the future of media. It’s the uncertainly that keeps this place so exciting.

So, if it’s quiet on here until beyond Thursday, then Happy Christmas/Winterval/other to one and all.