I am very pleased to announce that Mike Poole has joined Shiny as a creative consultant . Over the next few months he will be overseeing a significant revamp of several of our key websites, advising the company on branding issues and probably boring us rigid about fonts.

Mike is a complete design/branding genius who worked with a huge number of companies while Creative Director at Publicis Blueprint including Debenhams, Toni&Guy and Asda.

I am very excited he has joined us.

Ashley

In spite of tempting her with piles of Owen Wilson DVDs, ASOS vouchers and front row seats at the Kidderminster and district fashion show Shiny's own Anna Wintour (though much nicer) Gemma Cartwright has decided the time is right to move on.

What can I say other than I am very sad she is going and that I wish her very well in her future role, which she'll tell you all about very soon if you follow her at Twitter @GemmaCartwright

Gemma played a massive role in the development of Shiny and is directly responsible for some of our most successful blogs. We will miss her like hell.

Good luck Gemma

Ashley

Those we regularly read our blogs may have noticed an interruption to their usual Shiny service on Thursday/Friday last week. That's because the servers finally collapsed under the weight of too much traffic. They've been running at peak capacity for some time now and finally decided they'd had enough of the stress and strain and downed tools - I know how they feel sometimes.

Thankfully the guys at Headshift were around to sort things out for us and we were back up and running Friday night, around 7.30pm GMT. Unfortunately while we get the new kit sorted out - hopefully in the next couple of weeks - some of the sites' functionality, such as commenting, is restricted. But we are working closely with Headshift to get it all sorted. Ironically, they had just installed MT 4.2 across the sites for us, and it was working pretty darned fine, but we have known we have needed to upgrade the remaining tech infrastructure for some time now. Now we just need to make the necessary investment!