Did you know there are dozens of audio files for you to listen to on thisisplymouth? Back in the days before we sent reporters out with video cameras, we sent them out with digital audio recorders – and they captured some key moments in the history of the city.

There’s an interview with city artist Beryl Cook on her 80th birthday, captured in The Dolphin pub on The Barbican where she was so well known.

We had popular Argyle chants translated into Japanese when Far East investors ploughed their cash into Home Park.

We interviewed experts and got your views on important developments such as Drake Circus opening and South yard wall being demolished.

There are also audio files detailing plans for the Life Centrre and the revamp of Colin Campbell car park, Fitz leaving South Hams radio and interviews with stars including Bowling for Soup and Ronnie James Dio.

You can also listen to interviews with everyone from Bobby Davro to Tom Daley’s mum, from Argyle keeper Romain Larrieu to Tonia Couch, throw in the odd defence minister, a bit of Tony Blair, a cure for autism and a whole bunch of fascinating Plymouth stories and there has to be something there you’ll find interesting.

Check out the archive here

The slideshow section on thisisplymouth is now up, running and stocked with galleries of images from some of the big recent events.

Among those getting a showing are the Plymouth Half Marathon and,  from this weekend, Race for Life and the 175th Saltash Regatta.

Enjoy!

Vuvuzela

On another note, have you ever wondered how to get a tune out of a vuvuzela? If so check out our video featuring a Plymouth jazz band, five droning horns and a variety of “music”.

Everyone and his dog seems to have been painted white with a red cross in the last few days, if it’s nailed down, stick a flag of St George on it.

The World Cup has come to town and while thisisplymouth hasn’t had a patriotic redesign, you can keep up with all the latest World Cup news in our dedicated channel.

Closer to home, there are two fiercely fought contests now under way, one for beautiful people and one for beautiful music.

You can keep up to date with the Face of Plymouth 2010 here, and follow the South West battle of the Bands 2010 here.

There are plenty of background updates being added to the site, with more next week and again later in the month – all designed to make everything more stable, easier to find and easier to use.

Stand by for more visible upgrades in the days ahead. We’re about to sit down and decide on what we can get ready for launching on the site by the nmiddle of July – I’ll keep you in the loop.

Plymouth’s new town crier is now blogging in association with thisisplymouth as is Plymouth mum Morven Maclean – who is coming up with a bunch of ideas for living life without breaking the bank.

As well as that, a lot of technical background changes have been made to the site in the last few days. These include the way links work (some external link settings weren’t working), the display of images, some new logos, changes in the events section, fixing some cross browser issues to do with registration and a whole lot more.

We’ve also launched a new minisite for Face of Plymouth 2010 and the old minisite for Her is back due to popular demand.

Also a new contest has been launched through the site which could bag you £50 of camera equipment vouchers. All you have to do is take a picture of a Plymouth Summer Festival event and uploaded it to this group on iHerald.

Coming up soon will be new sections for Battle of the Bands, the return of a popular public vote, another of our popular live debates and the possibility of channels to show the latest entry from some popular Herald columnists. Doesn’t popular sound odd when you say it a lot?

As promised, the new blogs are coming online.

William Telford is going to blog through the World Cup and Gillian Adams is writing from Plymouth with all the latest beauty and fashion news.

Waiting in the wings we have a new railway blog and a dog blog – with a few more ‘under construction’.

More details as and when…

Here’s a Kraken story for you…The Royal Navy does not keep a central database of sea monsters.

OK, who thought they did? Granted, Godzilla and the Loch Ness Monster are sleeping a little easier this morning, but the rest of us probably presumed the Senior Service had better things to do with their time than keeping a list of mermaid sightings off the Isle of Wight.

The story is the most recent added to a new channel on thisisplymouth, packed with odd news from across the city and the surrounding region. You can read all five pages of the weirdest news the city has produced in the last few months by clicking here.

In there you will find everything from shaved cats and the dog that swallowed an alphabet to Nazi supercows and a 400-year-old mummified moggy found in a bathroom.

There is also the tale of the pub getting a final warning after a drunk man was taped to a chair and left in the car park, in February, and the 90-year-old woman’s birthday wish coming true. What’s odd about that I hear you cry – she wished for a birthday meal of fish and chips served up by a man wearing only a thong.

Throw in the odd bit of deliberate child splashing, paracetamol jam, a bizarre bum-sniffing incident and more UFOs than you can shake a stick at and it has to be worth a few minutes of anyone’s time.

One of the key projects of the week has been to go through the blogs and weed out those which haven’t been upated for a while.

Those blogs are still there, but no longer get a prominent position on the site.

The blog hub (the page that shows you the thisisplymouth blogs) has also had an overhaul.

In the next few days/weeks I hope to launch a raft of new blogs on the site, including one to take us through the world cup, one looking at fashion and one looking at the world through a Plymouth dog’s eyes (no, seriously!)

The tech I’ve used for the blog hub (Wix) has also been used to drag in new content for the news and Argyle channels. We’ll see how that works – hopefully will prove a useful addition to the site.

A new fix was unleashed on thisisplymouth last night which (fingers crossed) means all content is now flowing where it should when it should.

This means that, by hitting ‘more’ on the homepage or going straight to channels such as News you can now see all the content of the day’s newspaper, plus anything else that has been added through the day.

Not only does this make managing the site easier for us behind the scenes, hopefully it means all the content is easier for you to find.

As before, you can also find everything by searching as well and next on the agenda is topic pages which will add another way to get all your content.

One of the most difficult things about launching the site over the last few weeks has been not having much time to focus on the General Election.

I worried the site wasn’t doing enough, where in previous years we’d have put together a minisite, maybe thrown in some short-term blogs and Twitters, some interactive debates and video, this year there just wasn’t time, but looking back this morning that seems to have been a good thing.

Last night was very frustrating, trawling from site to site to site trying to find the best, most accurate, simplest, most up to date result. I was impressed by the shiny graphics, they span and whirled and glittered in all manner of ways – but didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.

This has been the first internet election, but many seemed to have become impressed by their own genius and forgot they were supposed to be telling us what was going on.

Last night and this morning I did get to ‘play’ with the election, using live blogging to open up a debate on the results and cover them live as they came in.

More than 3,000 people took part in the events, and the comments at the end were almost entirely positive – providing great information and putting the fun back into politics.

Hopefully this will be the mantra of the site in weeks and months ahead, using technology as a means to make the best of content, rather than as an end in itself.

So after all that – the launch, the bank holiday, the election – I’m looking forward to the first ‘normal’ week of running the new-look site.

The tech team will get a good run at slaying some of the gremlins that are making my life difficult, and I will get a good run at bringing you all the best Plymouth content in the best possible way.

One week in and the system seems to be working well. Plenty of you have been poking around in the site, reading what’s there and reporting back on your findings.

There’s a team of people analysing feedback on the sites as I type but, anecdotally, feedback is generally positive.

You seem to like the modern, clean design. Complaints have focussed on font size being too small, and other sites in the group have had people complaining about there being ‘less content’ on the site than there used to be.

In fact, almost all the content that was there before should still be there. We’re working to make it all easier to find, and we’re working to make sure all the new content is as easy to find as it used to be.

Where you’ve said content is now harder to find, we’ve added new channels and buttons to try to flag it up.

As we settle in to the new system, you should see constant improvements in the service on offer. So keep the feedback coming and you can help shape the way the site works, looks and feels in the future.