Nothing new to report. Since my snowboarding trip, I’ve been playing catch up at work, and life, unfortunately, hasn’t been that exciting.

Of course, upon reading that sentence, my friend Allison will take offense. She’ll remind me that we’ve hung out since the trip, and insist that last Saturday, when a group of us went to dinner, got drunk, and went out on the town (a typical Saturday), was far from boring. I will acknowledge said excitement, after which she’ll - yet again - feed me a guilt trip about when I’ll finally mention her on this blog, an accomplishment that she and many of my friends seem to place somewhere between ‘get rich’ and ‘find the love of my life’ in the list of things they’d like to do before they die.

(I, however, insist that this accomplishment should be ranked much lower, closer to the ’steal candy from a kid’ or ‘take 5 dumps in a day’ section of the list. That was fun! But now I feel empty inside.)

(P.S. Happy, Allison?)

Anyway, I’m writing this post about some appearance changes I’ve made on this here blog. Perhaps the most obvious is the change in some of the coloring. I got extremely sick of the IN-YOUR-FACE-RED that was, well, in my face, so I made some temporary tweaks to link and title colors. I’m not 100% satisfied with them yet, so they’ll probably change some more, but let me know if you have any other suggestions.

A less noticeable, but more, nay, much, much more significant change is that I’ve TAKEN BACK MY SIDEBAR.

For a long time, I ran a ‘blogroll’ along the right side of the blog. Since inception, this ever-growing list reached the point where it consumed my entire sidebar, fueled by the ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ policy that seems to rule the blogosphere (at least the egocentric New York one). The unfortunate consequence of this policy was that this list is now nearly 40 links long, making every page on this site far lengthier than it needed to be, and more importantly, making quality blogs indistinguishable from those that suck.

Yes, there are blogs on this list that suck, ones whose content absolutely bores me, and ones I’ve abandoned reading altogether. Yes, I could remove those blogs from the list, but, as proven by this girl, many bloggers get their panties in a twist when you do that.

I’ve decided to remove the eyesore that was this blogroll from my sidebar, and instead move the whole list of links to a seperate page on this blog (also reachable via the ‘Links’ link at the top of any page). For now, the list is the same link dump that was on my sidebar, but I’ll probably modify it later to distinguish certain blogs from others.

So what will I do with my sidebar now?

I’m shifting the focus of the sidebar towards more meaningful content- things that I actually want you to see and read (which for now, also includes that hideous picture of me). A few months ago, I put up a ‘Recent Comments’ section, which shows a reverse-chronological list of excerpts of the most recent feedback I’ve received on this site. I love the comments I get here, and I’ve expanded the section to give you an easy way to stay current.

Even better than that (I know, how could anything possibly be better?!), I’ve added an ‘I’m Reading’ section to the sidebar. I actively monitor about 75 blogs right now, a feat only possible with the help of my third favorite site (GMail and this blog being first and second, respectively) on the internet, Google Reader, a site I would make sweet, gentle (and occasionally rough) love to were it physically possible (Don’t even get me started on what I would do to GMail, and as for my own site, well, let’s just say it does fine.)

Anyway, with the click of a button, I can now send information through a series of tubes and share with you things that I actually think you should read. This list contains blog posts from around the internets that I’ve actually read and that I find to be funny, interesting, thought-provoking, and in general, worth checking out. Check back often, because with 75 blogs, I’ll likely be adding stuff often.

If you’d prefer not to have to go to a bunch of different sites to read all of these, you can read them all at one place at my Google Reader Shared Page.

(Again, if I could make love to Google Reader, I would.)