As we’ve begun filling in tags to the thousands of posts, the “tag cloud” became less and less interesting and more and more distracting on the front page.  We’ve moved it to a back page and replaced it with three hand-made lists of tags:

• Categories, with tags roughly corresponding to the categories from the old website;
• Favorite topics, featuring tags corresponding to popular reader favorites from years past and today; and
• Good copy, attorneys and law firms you want to read about.

Are we leaving anything out in those tag lists you’d like to see there?

Don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail with a link if you see something that was improperly auto-tagged or is missing a tag that would be useful.

Continuing our WordPress site overhaul, we’ve added two new ways to navigate through Overlawyered to find relevant past material.

Our new browse by tag page lets you zero in quickly on posts that relate to your topic of interest or locality. We’ve assembled an uneasy mix of the old post categories, automatically generated new tags on old posts (e.g., “Detroit” will yield stories linking to the Detroit News even when there is no local angle) and tags newly selected by Ted and me, with the balance, we assume, gradually shifting toward the latter over time. We’ve tended to avoid autotagging the most common terms as well as the very largest cities and states; remember that you can still try our regular search function.

And here’s a neat trick: by tinkering with tag URLs, you can combine tags to find a subset of posts with overlapping tags. For example, the URL http://overlawyered.com/tag/illinois+family-law/ calls up all posts that are tagged with both “Illinois” and “family law”. (Note the required placement of the plus sign and hyphen(s).) Likewise with “Bill Lerach” + “politics” or whatever other combination of tags you like.

Finally, we’re experimenting on individual posts with suggested “Related posts”. These are auto-generated by the tag program based on shared tags, so they will inevitably be less than perfect, but may make a helpful place to start.

Yes, I’m working through this lovely Memorial Day holiday on this.

1) Thanks in part to a very helpful plugin from developer Alex King, most individual post URLs from the old site now redirect seamlessly to the new. (Some still don’t work properly, but we’re probably not going to be able to fix that).

2) URLs are shorter with the “index.php” now gone. Again, this should redirect seamlessly so it shouldn’t matter if you’ve bookmarked an address that uses the longer version.

3) The new crisis is that monthly archives in the new site are fritzed. At work on restoring them. Update 5:45 p.m.: back working now.

P.S. And now we have a site map too.

1) As part of our continuing WordPress transition and overhaul we’ve added those blue “Share/Save” buttons to the bottom of each post, but they seem to slow down the time needed for page loading, which had been so quick. On the other hand, we’d really like it if people used Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. to let more people know about us. Are any regular readers likely to use this feature? Is there some simpler method of achieving this goal?

2) We’ve lagged behind the technology curve when it comes to tagging our posts, and we’ve now got years’ worth of archives with no tagging whatsoever, which handicaps both our outreach to new readers and our internal ease of navigation. Any suggestions on speedy ways to rectify this? Are there “social” tagging methods in which we can take advantage of readers’ each doing pieces of the job? Or assuming we can handle the security aspects, are there readers who’d like to volunteer to tag posts from within WordPress for us?

Update: Since it’s awkward to keep two blogs going at once I’ve now switched the WordPress site to function as the “main” blog. Old post addresses generated by Movable Type (which lack the “php” suffix) still appear to work.

Earlier: Looks like I’ve fixed the problem of imported MT posts being misattributed to the wrong authors. I’m also trying out a new design “theme” (XMark by Lisa Sabin-Wilson) which fixes some glaring problems we had with the previous test theme (such as italics not rendering properly) and looks, in general, blog-friendly. At the moment it’s not a great fit for the accustomed look and feel of the site but it seems to be highly customizable, and should be considered a work in progress.

As an experiment, we’ve made commenting somewhat easier and you may notice that your comments appear immediately.

* Comments on the main site are still broken, sorry. Update: Comments now working since WordPress changeover.

* Yesterday was one of our biggest Instalanches ever, with about 7,000 Glenn Reynolds readers coming over to visit this post.

* You can see our rapidly evolving WordPress “sandbox” here. One vexing problem we’ll need to fix: most of the posts from guestbloggers are being attributed to the wrong contributors. That problem is evident in this recent post, which was really authored by Jim Copland; the case names don’t render properly either. The posts in the sandbox may accept comments (which may or may not survive in a reconstructed site) but any permalinks are not really permanent and are apt to break soon. Comments about the reconstruction itself are best added to this post. Update: Sandbox removed since WordPress version has gone live.

Given the vulnerabilities of Movable Type to attack — comments are down once again and I don’t know at this point when we can get them back up — it looks as if we’ll have to join the crowd in migrating over to WordPress. (And I had really wanted to spend the week on other projects.)

Those who might want to share relevant MT-to-WP conversion experience are welcome to check in through email (since comments are busted).

The site crashed under spammer attack this morning — I’m told the link from Instapundit with its resulting heavy traffic was just a coincidence — and we’ve had to shut down comments and search temporarily while we try to get back on our feet. Update 1:15 p.m. Eastern: search back up (although all old saved searches are broken, you’ll have to re-search on individual terms), comments still down.

This may be inside baseball for those who lack interest in blog mechanics, but since it is excellent news for Overlawyered and its readers, we’ll boast about it: volunteer Andrew Grossman has stepped forward to accomplish for us something we’d been dearly hoping to accomplish, namely installing redirects that will get several years’ worth of older (2003-2008) posts to display in current URL format. The underlying problem is that we’ve been through three iterations of Movable Type and each had a different way of creating the URL format for a post:

http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/001600.html (first method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr_didnt_warn_not_to_walk_on_t.html (same post, second method)
http://www.overlawyered.com/2004/11/rr-didnt-warn-not-to-walk-on-t.html (same post, current method — note use of hyphens instead of underscores)

Simply discontinuing the old versions would cause thousands of old links, both incoming and internal, to break. But the continued existence of the old versions led to several kinds of problems: they could no longer be formatted properly, so they looked ugly if not unreadable; moreover, users of Google and other search engines would encounter two (or, more recently, three) textually identical versions of the same post, which was confusing at best. Hence the need for redirects.

Aside from his having done us this service, another reason to commend Andrew Grossman to your attention is his day job as Senior Legal Policy Analyst, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. His writing interests there include “federal criminal law and the problem of ‘overcriminalization’ — the practice of turning minor civil offenses into serious criminal acts,” and other topics equally well matched with ours here, including the likely boon to litigation from Congress’s CPSC expansion, the ill-conceived ADA Restoration Act under consideration on the Hill, and Judge Posner’s summary approach to dubious expert witness testimony. We hope he’ll be guest blogging in this space before long.

As mentioned, I know very little about RSS, Atom, feeds, etc. but just try to take the minimum steps needed to make sure readers can follow the site that way if they wish. This note from a reader in Australia is not the first to indicate that our software upgrade and site redesign of recent weeks may have caused some disruption:

I hope you’ll accept my apology in advance, but it just occurred to me today that I hadn’t had any feeds from you for quite some time now. I use Bloglines as my newsreader. I tried to resubscribe to Overlawyered using a different type of feed and that seemed successful, but when I looked at what had been supplied with the different type of feed, all of the material was from mid-March. Are you able to throw any light on this? Is there some problem with Bloglines and Overlawyered? Is there something I can do to restore the feeds? Thanks for any assistance.

Knowledgeable comments welcome.

Site search, which has been broken for the past couple of days, is back working now. Pre-2003 archives are now broken, but I expect to get them reinstalled fairly soon. (Update: fixed now.)

Unfortunately, the inherent limitations of Movable Type and its upgrades are forcing a retreat from one of my long-held objectives, namely to provide this site’s archives with stable longterm URLs. The previous URL formats we used are not supported by MT 4, which means that after our upgrade-in-progress is finished, existing links to individual posts published before March 2008 will mostly break. With minor exceptions the material itself will not vanish from the site, but it will reside at new URLs and you will need to do more searching for it. Sorry.

An advisory about a few continuing issues arising from our Movable Type upgrade a week ago and the site redesign that it’s triggered:

* We’re experiencing a surge in comment spam which we’re trying to fix. In the past these attacks have sometimes forced us to close comments briefly or have even brought down the whole site.

* Relatedly, we’re suffering email disruptions which are affecting email addresses @ this domain name and at my personal domain walterolson dot com. If you have sent mail to me or Ted through these sites in the past week, it may not have gotten to us. Editor - at - pointoflaw - dot - com should reach me and is unaffected by the disruptions. Using comments on posts as a substitute for messaging is best saved for a last resort. Facebook messaging is another alternative to consider.

* A couple of readers have reported disruptions to Overlawyered’s RSS feeds. If this is happening to you, too, feel free to point it out in comments to this post. I don’t use feeds and rely on readers to let me know when they malfunction.

* I’m slowly moving up the learning curve on customizing display styles on things like font size and white space. The gavel icon is back on the front page address line. Don’t assume that this design is final as I’m by no means done tweaking it — I might even go back to the pink color scheme.

P.S. Prof. Bainbridge likes the new design. But does Ron Coleman? And QuizLaw favors the distinctive pink.

As you can see, I’ve embarked on a step-by-step redesign of the site, still very rough and unfinished, but I hope smoothing out as we get into next week. Reactions welcome, including whether readers would like to go back to the old pink-and-grey color scheme (widely disliked, but distinctive), which features are best included on the front page, etc. I think a three-column format is now fairly standard in sites of our type and should allow us to keep recent comments and posts high up for the benefit of frequent visitors, while also offering prominent navigation aids for newcomers and those using the site for research.

I expect to restore the blogroll and about-the-site soon, as well as a serif typeface.

Our new Movable Type upgrade finally allows us to add a feature we’ve wanted to add for a long time, a list of the most recent reader comments. Check out the right-left-hand sidebar.

With help from the Movable Type people we’ve restored site search, which had been broken for the past couple of days since our software upgrade. In coming weeks watch for some enhancements to the site that will be made possible by the new upgrade.

We’re scheduled for a software upgrade momentarily which might disrupt the availability of the site itself, comments, or other functions. Should we be knocked off for an unusual length of time, check my other site Point of Law for updates (bumped Tues. afternoon). 7:30 p.m. Tuesday: completed, if you had problems posting comments and the like, try again now.

10 p.m. Site search function is busted, we’re working on a fix.

We’re responding to ongoing comment-spam attacks (which knocked us offline for a while this morning) with some site maintenance. Comments will probably be down for a bit while we attempt to upgrade. Update 11:15 a.m. EST: Back up and running again; if you notice anything wrong, please drop us an email.

It seems Chicago attorney Raymond Niro has doubled the bounty to $10,000 for anyone who will bring him the identity of the blogger who’s often been critical of his courtroom activities. (Ameet Sachdev, “Patent licencers raising some ire”, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 22). Earlier: Dec. 10.