Do not adjust your monitors....

Eagle-eyed readers may notice that the layout has changed a bit around here. I think that Earthlink has reduced the data transfer allowance for people using their bare-bones, free webspace that comes with basic membership, because I've been using up my allowed bandwidth in about ten or eleven days since I've returned to blogging, which is odd because my traffic is still roughly two-thirds of what it once was (and my traffic was never high to begin with), and I used to get through an entire month with no problem. I've reduced the use of images as backgrounds on the blog in favor of solid colors, which I hope helps the problem along.

I've also made a couple of other changes, such as my use of a new picture of the American flag for the sidebar. (I'd link the site where I got that flag picture for credit, but the site I got it from no longer exists; the pic comes up on Google's image search, but the site is an expired domain name default page. Oh well.) Finally, I ditched the Technorati widget that was attached to each post. It allowed, supposedly, the viewing of posts on other blogs linking to the individual posts here, but [a] I don't get many links, [b] I never used that tool anyway, and finally, [c] if Technorati was working slowly -- which seems to usually be the case with them -- the whole blog seemed to load glacially. I made the change a while back to switch the columns so the content would at least appear first if the sidebar was taking forever, but the last few days, that Technorati widget has been causing the sidebar itself to take forever to appear. So out it goes.

Enjoy! Or not.

(BTW, not that anyone cares, but I've stopped using BlogLines entirely for following those blogs I follow via RSS, in favor of Google Reader. For one thing, on Google Reader, posts that you've read don't disappear entirely, so I can go back an re-read them for a time.)