Welcome! Would You Like to See a Menu?
For a few hours today the Coffeehouse sidebar looked magnificent. The recent posts, the archives, and the blogroll were all snazzy drop-down menus thanks to Mirty's new blog CodeScripter in which she is teaching us to spiff up our blog code. Since I haven't written a line of code in over 15 years (I taught myself C++ in med school; I was a programming geek long before I was a medicine geek.) I've been jonesing for some code like … um … like someone who's really looking forward to something but can't come up with a good metaphor for it.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. So we had very nice looking drop-down menus and I had had a lot of fun fiddling with the code of the Coffeehouse template. (Still working on the routines that enable dispensing coffee out of your USB port.) Then Nomad brought up the very reasonable point that since search-bots don't crawl over drop-down menu links our archives would no longer be indexed by search engines, and our links to other sites wouldn't influence their page ranks. This may not sound like a big deal, but I sleep well knowing that if someone Googles "insurgents on the run in Fallujah" (with quotes) he'll find one of Oven's greatest posts of all time. With drop-down menus, that little bit of genius would be lost to the ages. So I restored our sidebar back to the traditional bulleted list of choices, but it gave me a chance to reorganize our blogroll and make some overdue additions.

In the "Personal Blog" category, please help me welcome Psychotoddler, who I can say with confidence is the person I know best of all those I've never been in the same State with. And also a round of applause to Mirty's Place, the well-written memoirs of a Texas IT support queen. Mirty's aforementioned CodeScripter is in the "Assorted Miscellany" category, as is Homestar Runner. Psychotoddler turned me on to Homestar many months ago. It is a site that must be experienced to be understood. I have wasted myriad hours there. It is the creation of two brothers that have created a cast of cartoon characters and have made some of the funniest animated shorts I've ever seen. They now make a living from the T shirts and bumper stickers they sell with they're newly-famous characters. Check it out.

Muffins are half off this week. - served up by Doctor Bean @ 12:08 AM