Outside the Beltway

Site Tweaks

James Joyner · Thursday, August 17, 2006 · 4 comments

Some of the more astute readers might have noticed that I’ve added some additional links to the left sidebar. I wanted to make the site navigation links more obvious to the reader, so put links to the About, Policies, and Contact pages (previously in the top navbar) over there. That consolidates the links to internal pages and features in a single location.

Replacing them in the top navbar are several new links: FRIENDLIES, OPPOSITION, SECURITY, and TRENDS. Taking a page from Taegan Goddard‘s playbook, these are collections of RSS feed aggregations that I am working on.

The pages created so far are:

• Friendly Forces: These are some of the best written right-of-center blogs. Even if you disagree with their worldview, you’ll learn something from them without being insulted in the process.
• Loyal Opposition: A quick look at what the smart, reasonable voices on the left side of the blogosphere are saying. We usually don’t agree with these views but they’re well worth reading.
• Security and Foreign Policy: Some of the best writing on international security, military affairs, and foreign policy on the Web.
• Trends: A collection of raw data and analysis on U.S. elections, especially that related to public opinion polling.

I’m still adding feeds to each of these lists and will likely add another collection or two. The intent, though, is to keep each of the lists to no more than 8-10 high quality, thoughtful sites. Most of them have a viewpoint but they’re seldom going to insult the other side’s integrity or their reader’s intelligence.

These are must-read sites that, regretably, I’m often not reading. Along with several other bloggers I’ve talked to, my reading habits have changed over the past year or so and I’m no longer reading other blogs nearly as much as I used to. With the advent of aggregators like Memorandum and RSS readers like Bloglines, I tend to parachute into other sites to read specific posts. I’m hoping to change that and also expose OTB’s readers to these sites by making them convenient.