To belatedly celebrate Russia’s Old New Year, Siberian Light has a new look.

Ditching the traditional blog layout of one post after another, newest at the top, I’ve decided to go with a magazine style design which, I hope will make Siberian Light much easier on the eye and much easier to navigate.

The magazine style format lends itself to featuring some articles more prominently than others. I plan to start writing a few more in depth articles over the coming weeks and months, interspersed with more traditional, shorter, blog posts, so I felt I needed a way to highlight those posts that would be of interest to readers for longer than the current day’s hot news story.

As far as I can see, most everything is working properly. However, I haven’t had chance to check the site in a few web-browsers, so if you spot any glitches, please do let me know.

Anyway, here’s a quick guide to the new features.

Featured Articles

The focus of the new Siberian Light homepage is the latest featured post. A big picture right in the middle of the page means you shouldn’t be able to miss it. And, just underneath the latest featured article, you’ll find a series of smaller pictures - click on these, and details of earlier featured articles will be brought to the fore.

Click on the title of any of these featured articles, or the ‘continue reading’ link, and you’ll be taken the article itself.

A few of Siberian Light’s older posts are already featured - keep an eye out for the next one in a few days.

Regular Blog Posts

Just because there will be more features at Siberian Light doesn’t mean there will be less regular blog posts. Right underneath the featured articles, you’ll find links to the 10 latest blog posts, with a brief introduction to each post.

The Sidebar

The sidebar on the right has been completely revamped. The big grey box you see is to help you navigate around the site. It contains details of the most popular recent posts (ranked by a behind the scenes formula), the posts with the most comments, a list of featured articles, and a tag cloud which you can use to navigate the site by topic.

Below the navigation box, you’ll find a more traditional sidebar, with links to other blogs about Russia, as well as links to the Siberian Light archives. These are sorted by both category and month - click on the title to reveal the links below.

Oh, and there are a few colourful ads rotating around the sidebar help to pay the hosting costs for Siberian Light.

Subscribe!

Did you know that you can subscribe to Siberian Light? You can either choose to receive a daily email digest of posts, straight to your inbox, or you can have every post delivered almost instantaneously to your RSS feed reader of choice. Subscription options are at the top right of the page, next to the big orange RSS button.

Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

Full details of how to apply for a microgrant are available on the Global Voices website.

Hooray for Siberian Light, which is currently sitting pretty at number 5 in Krusenstern’s Top 100 Russia Blogs list.

As always, it’s nice to be one of the top blogs about Russia, but because of the difficulty in estimating each blog’s traffic, it’s (sadly for me!) probably not all that accurate. I expect that, if accurate traffic figures were available for all the blogs on the list, Siberian Light would probably slip a few places down the rankings.

The list is, however, an excellent resource if you want to take a look around the Russian blogs that are out there. There are plenty of blogs on the list that I didn’t know about, plus a couple that I didn’t realise were still active.

Congratulations to Bob & his team - now go over and vote!

Apologies for the lack of posts over the past couple of weeks - I’ve just moved house and its taken a lot longer than I had thought to get the broaband sorted. 

A couple of weeks without broadband was actually oddly relaxing, although at the same time, unbelievably frustrating - you forget how much you rely on the internet these days for everything from phone numbers to recipes to maps.

Anyway, everything’s up and running now, so blogging should restart tomorrow morning.

In case you’ve missed it, Sean’s Russia Blog has a new home, and a very nice new look.

By the time you read this post, I’ll have already been lying on a sun-scorched beach in the Eastern Mediterranean for several days.  Then, following a few weeks in the sun, I plan on moving house (sadly, just to another place in London, rather than anywhere exotic, or sunny).

Once the new internet connection is up and running, in mid-September, I’ll be back to the regular blogging regime.  But in the meantime, I’ve set up a few posts on time delay to keep you, and the search engines entertained.

Yiamas!

One thousand posts, three thousand comments and three and a half years.

Here’s where it all began.

Thanks to all of you - especially those of you who found the time to write three times as many comments as I wrote posts.

Update: Congratulations are also due to Robert Amsterdam, who reached the same milestone on the same day as SL.  Admittedly, I did have a 2 year headstart on Robert…

A couple of months ago I picked up the russianelection2008.com domain name, intending to put together a mini-site related to next year’s Russian Presidential election.

Sadly, I don’t think I’m going to have the time to develop it properly.

So, if anyone is interested in taking the domain off my hands, please let me know.  Unless a bidding war kicks off, I’m happy to sell it for $10, to cover my costs in registering the domain name, plus you’ll need to find $6-7 to pay whoever transfers the domain into your name (GoDaddy are quite good).

Congratulations to neweurasia which held off a late challenge from Steady State to win the Best CIS Blog award this year by the narrowest of margins.  Both scored 21% of the vote, but I guess neweurasia got one or two extra votes to take it past the finish line ahead of its rival.

Anyway, an excellent day for Transitions Online, as both blogs are a part of its stable. 

Siberian Light finished a creditable fifth in the polling - a big thank you to everyone who took the time to vote.

Siberian Light has been nominated for Best CIS weblog at the Satin Pajama European Weblog awards. 

If you’ve enjoyed reading, please consider voting for Siberian Light.

The long awaited 3rd Annual Satin Pajama European weblog awards opened this morning, and I’m pleased to report that Siberian Light has been nominated in the Best CIS weblog category.

Some familiar faces have also been nominated, as have a few newer ones. All in all, it’s a bit of an eclectic list, but one full of blogs to grace anyone’s blogroll.

Anyway, enough waffle - time to go and do your democratic duty - go vote!

Following a heated debate which turned into a personal slanging match, I’ve decided to introduce a formal comments policy.

It’s a very simple policy, which reads as follows: Political views of all stripes are respect ed at Siberian Light, but play nice, don’t abuse my hospitality, and don’t throw personal insults around. 

Up until now, I’ve tried very hard to keep the comments on Siberian Light as lightly moderated as possible, hoping that this would encourage people with a wide range of views to engage in debate.  I had (and still have) no problem with those debates becoming heated - this is a politics blog, after all - but I draw the line when commenters start to post unsubstantiated personal insults instead.

I run Siberian Light in my own time, because it is something I enjoy doing.  I simply don’t have the time, or the inclination any more, to try to calm disputes between people who act like spoilt five year olds and are happy to hide behind the pseudo-anonymity of their computer screens.

Therefore, I reserve the right to delete any comment that I feel doesn’t meet the above criteria.

Anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable with this policy should consider posting comments on another blog.

Congratulations to La Russophobe, which is one year old today. It’s certainly been an eventful year…

Update: Another celebration - Very Russian Tochka Net celebrated its 100th post yesterday.

I’m happy to announce that one of my finest posts - about the practicalities of showering out of a kettle, no less - has been translated into Italian, thanks to Francesco.

If you have the good fortune to read Italian, you can find the article here, at Permalink magazine (load the pdf file - it’s on page 5).

If, on the other hand, you have the misfortune to be able to read in English, then click on the following link to find out what to do when the water runs cold.