A few changes to the blog

I’ve decided to make a few changes to the blog, which I hope are improvements. Comments from regular readers most welcome. Incidentally, I checked Feedburner recently and was surprised to see there are 62 of you out there who subscribe by email. A bit of a ‘hello Mum!’ moment for me, but I hope you find this useful.

I’ve changed the ‘theme’, which is the pre-set format for the site. I’m not clever enough to design my own, and I do still have a life outside blogging. Free Movement now has three columns instead of two, and on the left hand column I have inserted two new update tools for readers. One is a compilation of immigration news from various news websites. The other is a list of recent immigration cases sourced from BAILII. Most will be profoundly uninterested in how this is done, but the boxes on the blog will automatically update themselves. I hope. The feeds behind them were created using Yahoo Pipes and those who are interested can subscribe to these feeds directly if they want to by clicking on the RSS icons on the blog.

The news is compiled from UKBA, the Beeb, The Guardian (of course!), The Indy, The Times and The Telegraph. It is filtered only to include articles which mention certain words, so it should include most if not all immigration stories. When there is a big story on, the stories in the box will be a bit repetitive, but it is always interesting to compare and contrast the coverage! I may change the sources and number of stories displayed once I’ve seen how well or otherwise this works over the next few days.

The cases are filtered in a similar way, so it is only Asylum and Immigration Tribunal cases plus other cases in other courts where the Secretary of State for the Home Department or Asylum and Immigration Tribunal is a party. That is most if not all immigration cases, but some non immigration cases will sometimes creep in.

I’ve had to lose the masthead, which was a picture of some asylum seekers playing football in the snow at Oakington Reception Centre one winter. It means the blog is even more text-heavy than before, but there’s not much that can be done about that.

Let me know what you think, and please tell me if there any problems or omissions.