Maybe the time has come to give those date links a table of contents of their own. There are certainly lots of them out there already, but at present there's no way of getting from one to the next without first opening the "main" column.

Is there a reader out there who takes a greater interest in the date links than in the columns themselves? Sometimes I almost do that, and as I've admitted in the past, uncovering the stumbling, often sideways rather than forward, march of technology can be lots of fun.

So these astericks have become a sort of mini-column unto themselves, and sometimes, like this time, they converge into the topic of the "main" column as well.