A few weeks ago, we made a fairly major change at CourtListener.com to include ID numbers in all of our case URLs. This change meant that links that were previously like this:

http://courtlistener.com/scotus/Wong-v.-Smith/

Are now like this:

http://courtlistener.com/scotus/V5o/wong-v-smith/

Most of the old links should continue to work, but using the new links should be much faster and more reliable. The major difference between the two is the ID number, which is encoded as a set of numbers (in this case V5o). This ID corresponds directly with the ID number in our database, aiding us greatly in serving up cases quickly and accurately.

Around the same time as this change, we added social networking links to all of our case pages to make them easier to share with friends and colleagues. These links use our new tiny domain, http://crt.li/, and should thus be ideal for websites like Twitter or Reddit.

In the next few months we will be getting a major new server, and will be migrating our data to it. This will allow us to serve more data, and—drum roll please—will allow us to begin serving audio content on the site. That's right, in the next few months, we will begin getting oral arguments from the circuit courts, and will be serving it directly to you on the case pages.

We also have plans to revisit our search interface in order to add date filtering and query building so look for that soon.

As always, we welcome your feedback and support, so don't hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions or suggestions.

This summer I've been busy with a number of things. One of them has been teaching Web Architecture and Information Management at UC Berkeley with two other guys from the School of Information. It's been a TON of work for not a whole lot of pay, but it's been really interesting.

Since the three of us split up the work, I only have to do about four lectures, but the class is two and a half hours long three times a week, which is a lot of talking time. I imagine it's not easy for the students to be in the class that frequently either.

I'm giving lectures on the following topics:

• HTML
• Search
• Browsers
• Privacy

If you're interested, I've posted my slides for these in the projects and papers section of the site. It's definitely true that the best way to learn it to teach.

I've also been learning a little about how to get the class to participate and be involved, but that's probably the most challenging part. A lot of the students know a lot about the material, and are pretty bored, while others are seeing everything for the first time. It makes it pretty tricky, but it's working out as the class gets to know each other. We started doing student presentations this week, and that has helped everybody get a little more skin in the game.