Views from Medina Road

Despite the fact that, very occasionally, I get an irate email such as one that came over the weekend, set in pink font and reading in part
 

we are an aging population-that means that an evergrowing percent of the population is getting older and,consequently, not as interested in change for its' own beau self.if you are going to futz around endlessly with your emag's layout,give us some kind of a guide or template to your layout staff's latest little brain-fart,please! after spending 20 minutes deciphering the latest yellow brick road,i am usually pissed at you for weeks. [sic]

 
--Despite this rare kinda thing, I did in fact tweak the layout of the homepage yesterday and today. Partly I wanted to revive the 'highlights' box at the top of the center column, to keep visible substantial content that has scrolled down below more ordinary posts; and partly to try to clean up the clutter of various archive and info links that were accumulating at the top of various columns. You can compare the new layout to the previous layout on this now archived page.
 
Only the placement of various links has changed, not the underlying structure, so I hope it won't require 20 minutes for anyone to adjust to the change. I'm still not entirely happy with the placement of the Google search box, but I haven't been able to think of anywhere better to put it. (I moved it from the left column so that Future events and Blinks could remain as high as possible at all times.) One other change I made is to place my own name on the homepage, as a result of doing a recent Google ego-search and finding my ISFDB entry, and my own long-long-neglected Compuserve webpage, coming in at the top of the rankings; even a 2001 review I wrote for Locus magazine and reprinted on the website comes in ahead of any indication that I'm responsible for the entire Locus Online site itself. Ironically, the Locus Online homepage does turn up in the results, because of
 

King, Karen Joy Fowler, Ray Bradbury, R. Scott Bakker. ... H. Greenberg, Alexander Potter,and Mark Tier; novels by ... John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly, Larissa Lai

 
Isn't that funny?