Blog Action Day is coming on October 15th and for 2008 the theme is about raising awareness of the issues of poverty. I’ve blogged about poverty in the past when I attended a meeting with the then Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn. Since that meeting I’ve subscribed to the departments Developments magazine to try and keep upto date with some of the things going on and the issues that still exist (of which there are many).

It’s encouraging to read in the latest issue of Developments magazine that Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander, the new Secretary of State are still firmly behind the Millenium Development Goals that were announced at the UN Millenium Summit in 2000. They both acknowledge that there is still much to be done and they require people to keep up the pressure on their politicians to ensure that these goals do not slip from the UN’s agenda. With that in mind there is another UN summit taking place in New York on September 25th and I urge anyone reading this to e-mail, write or meet their politicians to make sure that they are doing what they can to ensure that these goals are met. In the UK you can use the list at the Parliament website to contact your local MP.

I’ve decided to put the whole of wileysworld.org into WordPress and update the theme. I’m hoping that this might spur me into writing more posts to the blog and to keep the gallery upto date. I think this theme is quite good from Design Disease though I’d like to reduce the width of the first sidebar a little. The gallery is the NextGEN gallery plugin for wordpress which has lots of options for uploading images which makes the workflow relatively easy. Shame there isn’t a tool for importing from Gallery.

I’m still playing around with the theme and settings and will be slowly adding more recent pictures to the gallery before moving older pictures over. At some stage over this week I’ll move the whole thing to the top level directory. Any comments, please let me know.