You (whoever you are) may notice things look different. Here's what happened: every time I logged onto Blogger for the past few weeks if not months, I saw a message saying that I have "followers". I would click on that to see what that means or who they are, and it tells me that in order to find out I have to upgrade my blog. I ignored that and went on with my business.

Today, though, I decided to make a change I've long thought of: moving defunct links. For years I've added links to the sidebar as I discover new blogs, webcomics, etc. that I find worth reading, and with very few exceptions I haven't deleted any even if I've stopped reading them or they've stopped being updated with new content, I've just left them there. That's partly because a lot of them might one day come back, and partly out of a mindless packrat instinct (but so what? Of all the things to be a packrat about, digital data is pretty much definitely the least problematic), and it's also part of out of historical interest. This is, after all, partially a diary, and it might be cool to keep a record of what once interested me even if it no longer does. I let old stuff like that accumulate, never sure of what to do about them (start an offline text file with the links? Update them all meticulously? Sort them better?), but today I finally decided to create a separate list of "old links" and display it below the rest. It wouldn't be sorted, but so what? My hypothetical reader, or myself after so much time has passed that I don't remember what is what, can have fun some lazy afternoon of figuring out which links became boring and which became infuriating and which became dead links.

And that was a big enough change to justify upgrading the template. But that was a bigger job than it looks like; the sidebar came through half-broken and a lot of features came in that I don't need. So I'll be spending more time than I expected today and this weekend updating and streamlining this...

And the ironic thing is I still haven't figured out yet who my followers are. Maybe I will once I work my way around the new template or upgrade it again, but maybe not, who knows. So if you're reading this (and if you actually exist and aren't just a scam to get me to start hosting ads for Google's benefit or something...) feel free to speak up here. No pressure either way, of course, this never was that kind of blog; I'm just curious.