Blog House Keeping

I've done some blog house keeping.

* I tweaked the font colors, because the links within the body text were sometimes hard to locate in the old font colors.

* I removed some links from the sidebar that I didn't use very often or that could easily access from other links. For example, I almost always go to the U.S. Supreme Court's website via SCOTUS blog, so I deleted the U.S. Supreme Court link.

* I added a link to The Volokh Conspiracy, as I read it irregularly and sometimes cite to it in my posts. I don't subscribe to the prevailing libertarian ideology of the blog, nor am I a Jewish neo-conservative as some of the Volokh Conspiracy crew appear to be (I am a politically left leaning secular humanist). But, that blog often mentions wonkish/law blog topics that other sources miss, and raise issues that are interesting to discuss, whether or not I agree with the take that those issues get in that forum. The discussion at the Volokh Conspiracy isn't always perfectly civil, and even the main posts are sometimes a bit wingnuttish, but there is often some civil discussion of the posts in comments, unlike many conservative blogs.

* The links in the sidebar were previously arranged into five different categories: my blogs, courts, other blogs, government, and media. These links were not always arranged in a clearly defined order within each category. Now, there are two categories: non-government, and government. Ideologically, this ends the distinction between blog and non-blog media, which is blurring. It is also simpler.

The non-government links are arranged alphabetical according to the Blockbuster rule, in which numerals go first, rather than in the order in which they would appear if spelled out. The government links are arranged systematically. First they are arranged by level of government: federal government, state government, and then local government. Within each level of government they are arranged by branch: excutive branch, legislative branch, and then judicial branch. The judicial branch links for each level of government are arranged in the order of their hierachy within the judiciary.

* I removed the statement that I am the author of a post from the post footer, along with some other extraneous material. I am the author of all posts on the blog.

* I removed some redundant headers from the sidebar.

* I've stripped out some of the tags I use less often (except for proper nouns), and sometimes changed a few early tags that were inconsistent with the way that I've been using those tags more recently, or replaced stripped out tags with the tags I would have used now. Post tagging is still not entirely consistent and is still entirely absent from most pre-2007 posts.