Spring Cleaning

Lately I've been spending some afternoons in the backyard, enjoying the last cool afternoons before our dear River City turns into a sweaty, mosquito-infested furnace. The blue jays are getting territorial, there's a massive raccoon that crawls along the neighbor's fence, and I train the Nikon on a spot of daisy fleabane that seemingly popped up overnight. I assume that means it's time to break out the weed eater and lawn mower and begin grooming the grounds on a weekly basis.

This also means that it's time for spring cleaning at Casa de Benito as well as on the blog. Today I went through the links at the left, and thankfully, I only had to remove a couple of sites. I normally only remove a site when it hasn't updated for more than six months or has been turned into an Amway site or something more serious, like using a font that annoys me. Next up is scrubbing the list from Winebloggers In The South. I haven't found that many new sites recently, but I haven't been looking as hard. I'm certainly still interested, so if you're a... wineblogger in the south... feel free to let me know.

I'm not going to go back through all of my posts on this blog and update the links. There's a lot of dead ones back there, but some wineries change their website structure frequently, some have gone out of business or have been purchased by other companies or have other complications. In other instances I've linked to a recipe or a website that no longer exists. It happens, and if such a link is crucial to your particular needs, copy said link and learn how to use the Wayback Machine.

I've got some other fun backend stuff to deal with this weekend. There's some spaghetti code that needs to be cleaned up, I need to take a look at everything and see if I want to keep the same general layout, go with one of the new Blogger templates, or start learning how to utilize the power of HTML5 to make this site a more pleasant reading experience on everything from iPhones to massive widescreen monitors. So there might be a few coding glitches here and there, but at the end of spring cleaning we'll all be far happier.