The ever-shifting sidebar....

In accordance with prophecy my general tendency to keep moving things around, I'm shifting the sidebar about. Firstly, there are a few folks I want to add to the blogroll, but I'm trying to keep the blogroll that's actually maintained via Blogrolling.com at a certain length, because once it starts getting really long it tends to slow down the loading of the page. (Longtime readers of Brad DeLong's blog, for example, may recall some truly glacial load-times before he moved his titanic Blogrolling-powered blogroll to its own page some months back.)

So, what I'll do is move all LiveJournal users to their own section in the sidebar, titled "Pilgrims from a Strange Land". (This is because LiveJournals strike me as a bit odd. That whole "friends" thing is weird, and navigation of LJ archives tends to be a nightmarish affair.) Another new section is entitled "Mapmakers, Sages and Scribes"; this is where I'll list professional bloggers -- i.e., people who are either directly paid to blog or folks who are actual journalists for whom blogging is part of the whole package of their work. All this will open up a few spots in the main blogroll. Of course, blogs that are relocated from the Blogrolling-powered blogroll will no longer be marked as recently updated when they have new posts, but since not all blogs seem to respond to that service, this doesn't strike me as a problem.

These changes will be effective...right now. BOOM! There, that didn't hurt, did it?