"And then he said..."

Quite the most bizarre day of my life, when I got up at four in the morning, drove to a frost-covered wood, and dug up a prize worth £100,000.

I remember sitting at home looking at the Cube I’d dug up - shiny, silvery and as heavy as two house bricks - walking away to do other things with the evening, but having to return to it again and again to check it was real.

And of course, at that moment in time, no-one knew it had been found except us and to everyone else the game - the first and, as it turned out, only season of Perplex City - was still on.

Well, anyway, that was a year ago and it’s old news now for most folk.

For a few, though, it’s still interesting enough for the anniversary to be marked with a series of interviews.

The first to be published was with me, and you can read it - and others - here.

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Look - it’s close, OK? Too close for the difference to be meaningful. And it may not actually be good news for Huhne anyway. But there has been a small but measurable swing to him from Clegg in the attention they’re both receiving among bloggers.

The turning point was the Calamity Clegg dossier, which rather underlines the potential downside of this - the mere fact he’s being written about doesn’t guarantee that nice things are being said about him. But didn’t Oscar Wilde once argue that it was better to be notorious than unknown?

If you feed both their names into the BlogPulse trends tool from Nielsen and ask it to compare what proportion of the chatter in the blogosphere is about each of them, the results are interesting. Here’s the graph:

You can see very clearly that, apart from the spike caused by the launch of Huhne’s campaign, marginally more attention was paid to Clegg during the first two thirds of the campaign. There wasn’t much clear air between them (compared with what you get if you add John Hemming to the mix, or even CK or Vince after the first ‘will they stand?’ flurry was over) but you could see a slight advantage.

And then came the day of the dossier - Huhne attracts more interest, for obvious reasons, but he managed to keep at least a marginal advantage for most of the time since then - although there’s a hint in the last couple of days that they may be even again.

So what does it mean? Not a great deal, probably, except that Huhne has once again managed to muscle his way into the forefront of people’s attention. How good a thing this is for him and the party depends on what they’re actually saying.

And, of course, neither are exactly setting the world apart compared with more important issues like Britney Spears:

If I type this really fast it may just sneak under the wire and count as a March post, thus keeping up my new average of a post a month in 2007. Pretty grim stuff, compared with the several a day I used to manage when writing this thing was fresh and new in late 2002.

It's not like I've been writing nothing at all, though - the anthology with my story in creeps ever closer to becoming reality. That's its cover over there, beside these words. Neat, huh?

Got an email from the publisher today - they've now got a MySpace page, heaven help us all. For those who are into that sort of thing, it's at myspace.com/norecordpress.

In other news there was this, which just felt like one of those things that needed to be done.

So, well, yes, it's been a while since I last posted. Quite a bit's happened, actually.

For starters, we're probably only a month or so away from the publication by a small San Francisco press of an anthology of short stories that includes one of mine. More on that when I have more, but right now I'm tremendously excited, because it's the first time in a very long time that any of my fiction will have been published.

Also taking a lot of my time is MyBathroomFinder.com, the first step in our fledgling business empire. It's starting to find its feet and generate traffic. Not a lot of income yet, but it's early days.

And the other big thing is Perplex City, the £100,000 / $200,000 treasure hunt and alternative reality game that's been running for the last two-and-a-half years. 50,000 players, 92 countries.

We won it.

If you're used to my usual writing style you're probably waiting for me to qualify it and say something like “well, what I actually mean is that 5000 of us were declared 'winners' but only one person got the prize and it wasn't us”.

Well, as it turned out it was us.

It's been a very weird couple of weeks, with a lot of nice messages of congratulations from people (including some of the ones who came closest to winning it themselves) and some emails and phone calls from friends I'd lost touch with and who saw it in the news.

There's an awful lot to say about it, so I built a small website with the story and a link to my Flickr photos. Go explore, Digg it or stick it on del.icio.us or whatever if that's your sort of thing - I'll still be here when you come back. And believe me, no matter how surprised you are at the news it's nothing to how stunned I am, as I look back at it.

Numerous things to write about - Christmas Day on the Cornish cliffs with Beloved Other Half, dashing across Heathrow Airport in the rain to meet Ali before her flight to LA, good books by Gordon Ramsay and Monty Don to review - but they can wait for another day.

Instead, here's a really easy way to make a difference to the lives of people in developing countries. It's not charity - all being well, you get your money back - and you can cough up as little as $25, which is not much more than a tenner for those of us on this side of the pond.

I came across Kiva on Heck's Kitchen, where Jenny Miller and her housemates have evidently been spreading their dollars around to good effect. What Kiva does is simple: it acts as one central partner for a whole raft of microfinance organisations around the globe, making it easy for the likes of you and me to send small sums of money via PayPal to help fund small businesses in cash-poor parts of the world.

You can choose to send your $25 (or more - I've loaned $300) to Ugandan seamstresses, Azeri taxi drivers, Ecuadorean farmers or electricians in the Gaza Strip. Other people around the world also chip in, and when the requested sum is raised the money is passed to the borrower. The microfinance organisation supervises the repayments. You don't get interest, but you do get a warm rosy glow.

I've split my fee for a day's work, more or less, between three African businesses:

• Justina Azamachi in Ghana sells frozen food to an established customer base, but lacks storage facilities to expand.
• Joseph Onyango in Kenya is a dressmaker with a large family, including a badly disabled son, to support. He has a full order book, but needs to invest in stock and equipment.
• Denise Tidatoa in Togo supports her family selling basic goods such as canned food and soap. She plans to lease a shop and increase her stock.

They seem such small ambitions when you look at the details - help with buying a sewing machine, a deep freezer, or some pasta - but at the same time they're huge. They represent an income, schooling or medical treatment for a family, independence.

They also represent an investment in the future of the countries involved. Bulgaria joined the EU a few days ago and the newspapers over here were full of dire predictions about how the UK would be swamped by swarthy economic migrants. Well, through Kiva, you can finance Bulgarian shopkeepers, printers, tradesmen and farmers who are trying to make a go of it in their home country. Repayments from businesses in Gaza have been a bit erratic recently, for obvious reasons, but surely the future in that troubled part of the world must in part depend on the establishment of a viable economy? And so it goes on, around the globe.

As schemes go, this one strikes me as a really good investment - of time (it's quick and easy) and of money too.

And so it's time to do my annual round-up of the year's highlights in this journal, just like in 2004 and 2005. Except, this year I've written so little that I'm not sure there are any.

Obviously, there was all that kerfuffle at the beginning of the year, during which I wrote a lot about the Liberal Democrat leadership election and achieved a small amount of notoriety, especially for a post entitled “Chris Huhne - just say 'no'“. Ultimately, I ended up taking part in the first-ever unmoderated Q&A session between bloggers and the leader of a British political party. But after that, I wrote no more about politics - the compulsion had faded and there were no words left. And if you're interested in that sort of stuff, you can find a round-up of it here, not here.

So why am I writing less? Well, there have been other projects taking time that I would otherwise have used - MyBathroomFinder chief among them. But a big, big part of it is that I now have four versions of this blog running, and that makes it such a bloody effort to update that it doesn't seem worth it most of the time. Which is a shame.

Next year I hope to find a way of concentrating on the version hosted at www.andthenhesaid.com, while still not losing touch with friends on DeadJournal, LiveJournal and JournalSpace. And after I've worked out how to do that, for an encore I plan to discover a cure for cancer, achieve world peace, and add 15 per cent to the Liberal Democrats' opinion poll ratings.

Anyway, here are a few bits and pieces worth remembering:

April 14: The house of discipline, and other photos

I can remember when products were built to last and didn't stop working just because they'd been thrown across the room in a cold fury a few times. I say this because my phone finally started malfunctioning beyond a level I was prepared to tolerate, so I had to replace it.

April 19: Fairey story

Life is full of strange moments: today I was followed in a traffic jam by a Fairey Swordfish.

May 21: A snog for Europe

Never let it be said that elections don't produce representative results. The voting in our household last night exactly reflected the UK Eurovision voting, in that the British 12 points went to the latex-covered Finnish rock Gods Lordi - Beloved Other Half's choice - and the 10 points went to my selection, the besuited and terribly direct Lithuanians whose song repeatedly chorused “We are the winners of Eurovision”.

May 24: Shahbazalangadingdong

This year's Big Brother is, to all intents and purposes, already over - despite only six days of its 13-week run having passed.

May 27: Something going down on Upper Street

My vague potterings were interrupted last lunchtime by a cat's cradle of blue tape across the road in my path, cordoning off (among other things) the scene of a shooting the night before and the restaurant where I'd been planning on eating.

May 28: Who do you think you are?

There's still time - just - to get over the Passport Office's website and renew your passport before the end of the month. I did mine a couple of days ago.

May 31: DNA of London

In my household we tend towards the view that Douglas Adams wasn't, in fact, a novellist but instead a philosopher and a researcher of the infinite who chose to present his theories and conclusions in the form of radio scripts and sci-fi novels. He was also - despite most of his work being set on other planets - one of the most observant chroniclers of London since Dickens.

August 6: The Romans in Britain

A couple of weekends ago we combined two of our favourite interests - good books and archaeology - in one visit to the excavations at Silchester Roman Town. Every year, Reading University holds a dig for its students and stages a couple of open days - this year they did something extra: a visit from one of our favourite authors, Lindsey Davis, who gave a talk, read from one of her Falco novels, answered questions and signed autographs. A second, overlapping, post that's more about the author and less about the archaeology appears on MyWeeklyBook here.

October 4: Vegetable love

For anyone motivated by a passion for vegetable growing, Rosemoor - the RHS gardens near Torrington in Devon - are a 'must see' at this time of year. I said I'd write more about our recent weekend spent camping, but frankly I'm inclined to let the photos do the talking.

October 6: Oh Brother where art thou?

The third and final batch of photos from our camping weekend (a dim and distant memory now, I fear) comes from Cleeve Abbey, which was strictly second division in the pre-dissolution abbeys and monasteries league, but which now boasts some remarkably complete ruins and is therefore well worth a visit.

November 15: Viva la raza

Monday was the first anniversary of the death by heart failure of the wrestler Eddie Guerrero - and, to judge from the fresh set of comments that have appeared on YouTube tribute videos, his memory has lost none of its power to affect people.

November 19: Lions and tigers and bears, oh yes

Saturday saw us belatedly celebrating Beloved Other Half's birthday with a trip to Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, which I must surely have visited as a child, if only I could remember. Won't forget today in a hurry, though.

December 4: In search of the English Roswell

So, yesterday we went to have a potter around some woodland where, 26 years ago this month, an alien spaceship was seen to land. Possibly.

December 22: Clarity

This is nice. I'm sat with a cup of tea in the bright, airy garden room of a National Trust holiday cottage in the far south west of Cornwall, free from most of the cares of normal life and about as far as you can get from the barrage of Christmas commercialism.

Just to clear up any ambiguity caused by this post on Northern Irish uber-blog Slugger O'Toole, let me state clearly that I have no inside knowledge of whose hands have been delving into Lembit Opik's underpants, or for how long.

A few days ago, when the news broke that the Lib Dem MP had split up with fiancee Sian Lloyd and was now shagging a Cheeky Girl, I remembered a souvenir I still have of my days in student politics - one of Lembit's election leaflets for his unsuccessful run for President of the National Union of Students. Headlined Like it? You'll Lembit, it features a photo of him sitting in a rubbish skip, with the caption “I'll never be too proud to take a tip”. I thought, “I could give you a tip or two right now, matey”.

What I forgot, though, was a comment I'd posted on Paul Staines' / Guido Fawkes' blog, back in June, when he ran a caption competition with a photo of the Lib Dem candidate in the Bromley by-election surrounded by Cheeky Girls.

My entry? I'm just looking after them for Lembit.

Slugger O'Toole blogger Belfast Gonzo tries to spin this into a suggestion that I might have had insider knowledge that the Opik-Irimia relationship had been going on longer than anyone had officially admitted. He (she?) does quote the bit on my blog where I say I'm an ex journalist and former politician, which ought to suggest I'm no sort of insider at all, but seems to decide it means exactly the opposite - presumably on the grounds that all politicians and journos are lying bastards anyway, aren't they?

Actually, I was just making a vague allusion to the Popbitch rumour about the un-named high-flying MP who was generously rewarded for driving two female party colleagues to conference, and had no idea what was in the stars for the asteroid-fearing, gravitationally-challenged Parliamentarian.

But now a horrible thought has gripped me.

What if he saw the caption?

What if it was me who put the idea in his head?

I may give up this blogging business altogether - it's obviously too bloody dangerous…

Here's a really cool thing: mini business cards with your Flickr photos on the back. They're from a London company called moo.com (you can guess the web address, I think…) and they're a) cheap and b) exceptionally high quality. I got a free sample of 10 cards as part of their launch, and will certainly be ordering a pack of 100. Only problem is, I'm not sure I'll be able to bring myself to give any of 'em away ;o)

These days I spend most of my working life as a web designer, often while wearing a look of genuine bafflement that anyone will actually pay me to do anything that's so much fun. I specialise in CSS-based design and web standards - if that means anything to you - although inevitably my professional site fails to meet the standards I set myself when working on clients' sites. It looks pretty, but the code is antediluvian and it's accessible as a bramble thicket. So much to do, so little coding time!

It was a rambling, meandering route that took me here and most of what I know is self-taught, so I'm a voracious reader of anything that will teach me new stuff. Tips and tricks are great, but what I really crave are overviews and guides that give structure and shape to the whole issue of accessible web design.

All of which is a build-up to linking to one of the best I've read in a long time - read it if you build websites and either find yourself daunted by the prospect of re-learning everything you once knew to conform to web standards, or are being driven mad on the project from hell.

Lesson No. 9: In the real world, stylesheet hacks will get your project across the finish line

Yes, stylesheet hacks are mildly disrespectful to the intentions behind the underlying technology. Yes, stylesheet hacks introduce the possibility of nightmares in the wake of a major change…such as the one that will take place when Internet Explorer 7 is released. Yes, the whole subject is an uproar waiting to happen.

This writer takes an unambiguous attitude on the subject. Given a choice between making excuses to a client about why something looks lousy in their browser or just fixing it, the latter decision settles up a pending invoice with far less pain and delay. When used wisely and with the appropriate caveats, stylesheet hacks make life a lot easier!

It also refers to a Zeldman piece about the price of compromises that's worth a read - puts things in perspective a bit…

We hold most of these truths

The version [of the US Declaration of Independence] in Thomas Jefferson's own hand is fascinating not only because it's in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, but also because it contains passages that would have ended slavery at the birth of the American nation. But those passages had to be deleted before the Declaration could be signed by representatives of states where slavery was practiced.

Put another way, the client bought a document intended to liberate all humanity, but demanded changes that kept part of humanity in chains.

So the next time a client requests changes that make your work less beautiful, less usable, or less smart, remember that greater people than you have lost bigger battles over far more important matters.

I'm not wholly surprised that this letter wasn't published in Lib Dem News - there must have been a backlog building up while the paper was “off the air”, so to speak. But since I was cross enough to write it, I reckon I'm cross enough to post it here…

I note with some dismay that the reception for Parliamentary candidates at conference in Brighton will be sponsored by Tesco. Would this be the same Tesco that is busy destroying jobs and small local shops across Britain, siphoning money from local communities to its shareholders, clogging roads with traffic and filling landfills with excess packaging materials, and bullying farmers and suppliers into accepting ever-decreasing prices? The Tesco whose planning applications are being opposed by Lib Dem activists in Focuses up and down the country? If this is what constitutes professionalising the party, I'd rather stay an amateur.

I also spotted with a fit of giggles that Iain Dale has selected this as the 35th best Lib Dem blog in the country - apparently not noticing that until a day or two ago I had gone a month without updating it, and that in the almost four years it's existed in its various forms I've spent about six months in total writing about politics.

But, hey, it was still a nice thing to discover - because, you know, my life was so hollow without validation from the man whose commitment to liberalism is so great that he was able to transform a Lib Dem majority of 483 into one of 10,606, just by standing there for the Conservatives.

Tesco and Iain Dale - it's like being back at school, where the greedy fat kid and the spotty loser always follow you and your mates around in the hope they'll look cool too.