Let me enter the guilty plea at the beginning. I could offer up a dozen excuses why this page hasn’t had a new entry for a couple of months, but that would be a waste of space. All I can offer is a promise to be more regular.

It's been nearly three weeks since Cricinfo’s new look was launched. Your feedback continues to pour in, and it is gratifying to us that it does. Most of you have liked what you have experienced, and many have offered constructive criticism about the things you haven’t liked. Some of you who have absolutely hated it have let us know in the most certain manner possible. But even the angriest feedback has been reassuring: a reflection of what Cricinfo means to you, and how much you care.

We have been listening. Not just listening, but acting on several of your suggestions.

The full scorecard is now full again, with all the innings presented in a single frame, as opposed to behind tabs.

The local time has been restored on the scorecard pages (that was an oversight), the typeface for the commentary has been changed, and only boundaries and dismissals are now displayed in bold in commentary.

The other significant revisions have been on the homepage. The news links looked slightly orphaned under the strong main panel. We have now lifted them by adding bold headlines and organising them the way they used to be in the old design. The page looks more balanced now.

Download speed has been matter of concern for many. We were aware of the issue while redesigning the site. It is a richer page now, it has a larger lead photo, and there are more thumbnails and more links, so inevitably the page is heavier. And no, the video player isn’t contributing to the load.

It¹s perhaps a much smaller issue on broadband to which standard the world is marching inexorably but we have been working on the problem and I am happy to report that the page is quite a few kilobytes lighter already, and it's going to shed more weight yet.

The black news module has divided opinion quite sharply at that. Like it was with Geoff Boycott and Sourav Ganguly, it’s either love or hate (I loved them both), with little middle ground. The idea of using a strong colour on top was to create a focal point for the homepage, and to that end, it has already served its purpose: it has got plenty of attention. But we are not
impervious to the matter of readability, and let me assure you that the matter is under consideration.

Keep writing, and we will keep listening.

And here's what you ought to have read on Cricinfo last week.

What does Kevin Pietersen really want? Andrew Miller goes to the heart of the question and finds a simple answer: like a lot of us, he merely wants to be loved.

The countdown to the English summer has begun and we warm up to the job by introducing a weekly column on county cricket, once the nursery for the world game, but now English cricket’s favourite scapegoat, by Lawrence Booth, who writes regularly in the Guardian and occasionally on Cricinfo. Booth starts with a lament about the diminishing coverage of domestic cricket in newspapers, but ends with hope. A new saviour is at hand: the web.

Topicality was the last thing on Sidharth Monga’s mind when he got Mark Greatbatch to chat about his monumental match-saving innings against Australia in Perth in 1988-89 (655 minutes, 435 balls, 146 not out). But the piece became instantly relevant when Gautam Gambhir put up his own marathon (643 minutes, 436 deliveries, 137 runs) to save India the Napier Test.

And here’s a piece that I wish had been published on Cricinfo. Apart from his intellect and rigour, the thing I find most remarkable about Mike Atherton is his ability to look at the time he spent as an English player with dispassionate objectivity. He writes here with candour about his own Lewis Hamilton moment in 1994, when he was fined for lying to the match referee.

It's only the second week and I am already running a day late. Apologies, and here's the recommended reading list from the last week or so.

Australia surprised most cricket followers, and perhaps themselves, by swiftly demolishing South Africa to keep the Test mace. After a series of pieces on depressing subjects, Gideon Haigh was delighted to be able to write one on the new boys
who made the feat possible.

And Christian Ryan, recently the author of a biography of Kim Hughes, the golden boy who presided over one of the lowest periods in Australian cricket, found the Australian win all the more rewarding because it involved struggle.

As South Africa lay in disarray, Brydon Coverdale, Cricinfo's man on the tour, reported on the tension and confusion in their camp with such clarity that one of the members of the home side's management team remarked on how accurately it captured the mood and the goings-on in the dressing room.

Of course there was no getting away from cricket's troubles. Peter Roebuck captured the feeling in this evocative piece that posed this question: what now for cricket?

Just to remind ourselves how beautiful it all once was and how beautiful it can be, I leave you with this one, an extract from Rahul Bhattacharya's Pundits from Pakistan.

This blog has been a long time in the making. It’s a lame excuse, but I can offer the explanation that I was looking for the right tone for this blog because I also write in the other areas of the site. I don’t claim to have found it, but I have been shamed into action by John Brewin and Graham Jenkins, my colleagues at Soccernet and Scrum, Cricinfo’s sister sites, who have started their editor's blogs.

So first things first: this will not be a column, nor a journal or a diary. Rather, I am hoping that it will develop into a conversation. Cricinfo’s primary duty has always been to its readers, and one of the great gifts of the internet, is the connection it allows between the reader and the writer.

This page will be a modest attempt to further that connection.

It will also feature random reflections and observations forgive me, and feel free to chastise me, if it occasionally veers towards self-indulgence but mainly it will aim to draw you into the world of Cricinfo. I am always curious about what goes into the making of things I like: movies, books,
gadgets, magazines, or even cocktails and pasta, and I hope it will be of
some interest to you to get a peek behind the scenes at Cricinfo. Alas, that
will not include what Andrew McGlashan is up to in the evenings at the St
Lawrence Gap in Barbados.