Positively the last fawning note about my own site ever

It's been a quiet weekend around here retooling the site. You may have some questions about what you see. Yes, you at the back: What's that yellow Post-it note thingy to the right? So glad you asked. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my latest invention. I call it the blog-within-the-blog: a list of links to recent news stories and opinion pieces that for one reason or another I found noteworthy, but which didn't warrant a whole entry in the main blog. How is this possible, you ask? I have adapted Blogrolling's technology, which most people use simply to list other bloggers, into a kind of clipping service. With Blogrolling Gold, you can maintain multiple blogrolls. So in addition to my regular blogroll, I've set up one for headlines, one for comment, and so on. This saves enormous amounts of labour: I can post a story with about two clicks of the mouse. Talking of the mouse: I've adapted another Blogrolling feature to a very pleasing end. Roll your mouse over one of the headlines in the blog-within-the-blog, wait a moment, and up pops a line of text -- a sub-hed, a nugget from lower down in the story, a quick comment, or if nothing else, the story's URL. The effect is quite addictive: rather like consulting the old 8-Ball oracle ("Signs point to yes.") And as Blogrolling lets you empty the contents of any blogroll in a single click, it's easy enough to replenish with new content daily (or maybe every two or three days -- I haven't decided). I'd have preferred to put the most recently added links at the top, but there ran into one of Blogrolling's few limitations: it adds links at the bottom. Instead they appear in random order: every time you revisit the page, you get a different permutation. So there is at least the appearance of freshness. (I may add a news ticker if I can find one that fits.) There are still a couple of bugs to work out: For some reason, I can't get the text to wrap properly around it on Internet Explorer, though it works fine in Safari (the house browser at andrewcoyne.com) and Netscape-derived browsers. (At least, on Mac it does: I haven't checked Windows yet.) And I've had to resort (for now) to a crude approximation of the shadow effect around the box, not being able to get the more sophisticated model to work. (I've never had much success with sophisticated models.) My lame attempt at coding is in the Comments, if any of you want to take a crack at steering me right. Did I mention I don't actually know what I'm doing? UPDATE: You can also browse the same headines in the links browser -- read on. What about those ghostly white links in the title-bar, upper-right? I've gathered together links to other pages on this site from various points around the main page (don't worry: I've left the original links, as well) into one convenient, consistent navigation aid. Click on search to be taken to the keyword search page, with a list of saved searches arranged by topic that serves as a kind of table of contents for the site, including not only the blog and its associated archives, but also the million-word catalogue of my published writings going back nearly two decades. There's a good selection of categories there already, and more to come. If you're too impatient to go to another page to start your search, there's always the search box at lower-left. (Now if Google would only finish crawling the site -- I've noticed several pages that don't turn up in the results when they should -- everything will be jake.) Click on browse to browse through the same material by year and publication. The most recent material -- National Post columns from the last five years -- is the most "finished" in appearance, with headlines and dates attached. The columns I wrote for Southam News still need to be dated, and as there were no headlines on the originals, I've had to use the lead paragraphs as links (a la Arts & Letters Daily), which is useful but time-consuming: not yet finished there. Finally, my columns for the Globe and Mail and the old Financial Post, while complete with dates and headlines, have only the most rudimentary index pages for each year, in which the dates are shown arranged, following computer usage, in alphabetical order. This is uniquely unhelpful. Oh yes: My magazine pieces, essays and book reviews are all up on the site, but as yet uncatalogued. I'll get to them. Another new feature: Clink on links to go to a monstrous list of thousands of news, comment and policy-wonk links I've collected over the years, arranged in a way that's actually usable -- as nested directories, rather like Yahoo. It's laid out in the same intuitively appealing way as the search and browse pages, with an index-pane at left for the links, opening into a viewing pane at right. Some of the links need updating, and I'll be adding more later, but it's pretty much up and running. Again, to save precious milliseconds you can click on the links below the loadsalinks bar lower-left and go straight to the category of your choice. Finally, click on archives to go to my patented archive-browsing page, which makes it easy to catch up on previous weeks' worth of blogging. You get the same result by clicking on the index bar at right, which reminds me to tell those who are new to the page that by clicking on any link in the index, a list of the current week's posts, you can jump straight to the item you're interested in, without having to scroll all the way down the page. There you have it: check the latest headlines and opinion columns, search the site, browse through the back catalogue, surf the web, scroll through the archives, all from the comfort and convenience of this site. Indeed, it occurs to me that with all the features I've added, you need never leave this site all day. Oh, and it's a blog, too. POST-SCRIPT: Maybe you'd like to make this your home page. It's easy. Just click here and follow the instructions. Only wherever it says to put "globeandmail.com," put "andrewcoyne.com" instead.