My list of links on the right-hand side was getting to be a bit unwieldy, so I’ve taken a note from Jim West and have relegated them to a google page. Google pages are free and easy to use. I remember when the internet was just opening up to popular use while I was in high school. My friend Matt and I did all kinds of crazy stuff with HTML and weird psychedelic backgrounds. Nowadays, you don’t have to know anything about anything to make a webpage. I guess the same goes for blogs! I hope I didn’t just indict myself there. Over time, I’ll work on organizing the links and adding comments to make it more helpful.

All of this to say that I want to make more space on the side for other things. I will only keep the blogs that I personally visit most often, especially the less publicized blogs, because I would like to give a tip of the hat to a few worthy links. Don’t be offended if you’re not on the list! Like Mark Goodacre, taking a glance at my Google reader “shared items” feed on the right gives you an idea of what I’m reading from a much larger list of blogs (some unrelated to biblical studies, but perhaps of interest to bibliobloggers among others). If you want to see more than what is displayed, you can wander over to the page dedicated to displaying all of my shared items. That’s right, I’m using Blogger (owned by Google), Google pages, and Google reader. Google owns more and more of my life every day.

For what am I making room? Two things. I would like to copy others who have links to their most popular posts (like Chris Tilling) or have helpfully categorized some of their own favorite posts (such as April DeConick under her “Weblog Archive Highlights”). That’s a longer term project I’ll have to put together as I have time. Second, I am also jealous of other blogging platforms that allow you to show recent comments on the side, like Wordpress (I’m particularly thinking of Shawn Anthony’s blog). A lot of interesting things happen in comment discussions and I don’t think you should have to click on every post to see where the latest comments are. I did notice that Blogger’s layout tool allows you to add a “feed.” If any other Blogger users are wondering, your comment feed should be “http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default”. The last five comments (including your own) will be shown with date and author. But it does not indicate the title of the post being commented on. I also noticed that Alan Knox uses a javascript widget created by hackosphere and modified by Beautiful Beta, which allows for all of these things, so I am giving that a whirl until Google perfects their tool for sharing comments.

[Incidentally, you know what would also be nice? If Google/Blogger told you all the comments that you left with your Blogger profile on other blogs. I can't keep track of all of them myself, so I don't always check back to see how the blog's author responded.]

This is all a work in progress. If any of you have suggestions for improvement, please let me know.