Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘about the site’

LawLine.com blog of the week

LawLine.com (“Celebrating 10 Years of Online CLE”) has begun a new weekly series that “will recognize some of the most notable legal blogs on the web”, and is kind enough to begin it with this one. Christie LaBarca says she enjoys running across “unique” and even sometimes “outlandish” stories that other law blogs don’t pick up on. She quotes me on a couple of theories that might explain the blog’s longevity (as I’ve mentioned, it’s coming up on its tenth anniversary in just a month and a half).

Speaking of kind things people say about us, I don’t think there’s any way I’m going to live up to the headline on Brandon Martin’s generous column at Daily Uprising.

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Traffic secret? Chimp attacks

If I took advertising here at Overlawyered, I might worry more about how and whether to pursue higher traffic. In the mean time, columnist Alex Beam got me to come clean about what kind of subject matter seems to work best in getting droves of new visitors to notice the site. (It’s not class-action reform). [Boston Globe] (& welcome Virginia Postrel, Bob Trebilcock/Modern Materials Handling readers).

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Site disruptions

I upgraded last night to the latest version of WordPress, and whether relatedly or not, a couple of strange things went wrong this morning with recent entries: in particular, the short post from over the weekend on the Phoenix police blogger disappeared and was replaced by a draft post on a different subject. I’m working to fix and restore things. If you notice other aspects of the site that aren’t behaving as they should, drop me a line. P.S. Post restored with its comments; most broken links should be back working.

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Caching glitch resolved?

After tinkering with some of the file and cache issues I should have handled more carefully during the WordPress upgrade, I may have succeeded in solving the problem reported by many users of a front page frozen at Jan. 3. It may be necessary to do a forced-refresh (SHIFT click reload page) to produce the current page. If this still doesn’t work for you, please let me know in comments or email.

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Site maintenance

I expect to be doing a little upgrading to the site in coming days, so don’t be surprised if it becomes unavailable for short periods (or even longer periods, if something goes wrong).

Update late Saturday evening: looks like the upgrade to WordPress 2.7 has been successful, with only about half an hour of downtime. If you notice problems in the way the site runs, by all means let me know.

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Comments policies

Overlawyered is lucky to have a valued set of commenters from whom I often learn things, and it’s been quite a while since our comments section has suffered from any outbreak of bad commenter behavior, flame wars, or that sort of thing. I was reminded of our good fortune since several bloggers have recently added guidelines on comments moderation or otherwise outlined their views. At Volokh Conspiracy, known for its busy and high-quality comments section, Orin Kerr has posted a “Clarified Comments Policy” which with perhaps a slight change here or there could also serve as a comments policy for this site. Meanwhile, the site I helped launch a couple of weeks ago, Secular Right, from almost its first day attracted a high comments volume (more than 2,000 comments in the first two weeks) including more than a few that were contentious or uncivil — not an unexpected consequence when there are sharp disagreements on the topic of religion. After one blowup I noted the following:
Read On…

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Welcome Law.com readers

In an article for Law.com on legal blogging (“How to Build a Better Law Blog”, Dec. 8) C.C. Holland is kind enough to quote me and discuss this site:

…Walter Olson imagined that his Overlawyered blog would pull an audience of his friends and acquaintances and a cadre of legal policy wonks.

“But you don’t know who your audience really is until you start writing and find out,” he notes. “My readership has a large following among lawyers, but I’ve been surprised to find that a lot of doctors are reading it, as are a lot of people from other countries.” …

Olson, who has been writing Overlawyered since July 1, 1999, knows a thing or two about longevity. His blog is widely considered to be the oldest legal blog and is also one of the most popular, regularly surpassing 9,000 unique daily visitors.

“People who force themselves to blog, it’s a sad spectacle,” he says. “You can tell reading it that it’s painful to them.” The key is to find a topic that will sustain you. “You have to think, ‘Boy, there’s so much to write about I can’t imagine getting tired of it anytime soon,'” he says.

And I still can’t.

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Technical disruptions continue

1) Email to me and to this site has been hit with big delays and disruptions today and is still not working well. If you sent me something important, consider re-sending it.

2) One effect of the disruptions is that the “microblog” (Twitter) plugin has stopped working, hence no scroll of new Twitter posts in the right column. I’ll try to restore it, and in the mean time may try a “homemade” microblog post of highlights.

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