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Welcome to the new site. This has been in the offing for a while, but the start of a new year seemed the ideal time to launch it. The plan is for this place to serve as the home base for all of my endeavours – as well as publishing original content here, I will provide links and pointers to the things I do elsewhere.

If you don’t already know much about me, I won’t say too much by way of introduction here – other content on these pages will fill you in about who I am. A short list of terms should suffice: a researcher and lecturer; a writer and blogger; a political analyst and communicator; a father and friend.

A few notes about this site. There will end up being a few posts that display publication dates earlier than this launch post – they are items of work I had published or accepted for publication in 2010. I would like readers to be able to locate them, but I also want the posts here to match up with the timing of the actual published work.

The appearance of the site is a work in progress. To get the site online and allow me to begin writing and publishing, I have launched the site using a child theme I built for Justin Tadlock’s Prototype theme for WordPress. One of my plans for 2011 is to extend my web design and development skills, with the aim of producing a new theme for this site that makes full use of emerging web standards (e.g., HTML5 and CSS3), has a distinctive but functional design and is accessible. In the meanwhile, I expect to continue tweaking the current theme, so that the look and feel may change from time to time in some (hopefully) subtle ways.

The subsidiary information on these pages covers some things that may well be obvious but are best made explicit. When I express an opinion on this site, it should not be taken as representing the views of anyone I work for or with. I welcome open discussion and robust debate, but I am the publisher of this site and the judgments about which comments or commenters are unacceptable are mine. Pseudonymous commenters are welcome; anonymous comments and sockpuppetry are not.

In the sidebar sections you will also find links to help you find what you’re interested in on this site, and to communicate or connect with me online and across social media. I hope you will take some time to check this site out, come back to visit, and I look forward to getting the opportunity to discuss with you all the things I am writing about and working on.