At the suggestion of Charles Johnson, I've done something even more nefarious.

You will no longer have to check the asterisks to see if you should bother to click on blogspotties. If Blogspot is down, the Blogspot links will simply...vanish. They will return when the server is back up.

This should make life easier for my faithful readers.

Don't make them vanish-- gray them out and pull the "a href" tags so they are no longer links. Or replace the corrent link with a general purpose "down for the count" page.

That would be a little more sophisticated, but I like it. I'll have to think about how to implement it...

That vanishing thing was something I was thinking of attempting myself. But hell, if you can do it, I'm glad to give you the credit and the link. I'm over here enough every day anyway -- I have no problem sending other folks your way.

I think you've done a fine thing here, by the way. A fine thing.

I've done what Raoul suggested. The names of the blogs stay up, but the links disappear. We'll see how it works next time blogspot.com goes down, which shouldn't take long, based on history...