Sidebar

This article describes the original sidebar (which appears for everyone), not the Recent Activity from Contacts sidebar (which only appears for logged in users).

There is a short sidebar visible on the front page of MetaFilter, Ask_MetaFilter, MetaTalk and IRL. This sidebar contains recent news, links and other information of interest to MetaFilter users, and it can only be updated by moderators.

There are a Twitter feed, archives, & feeds for your newsreader: Atom & RSS

Cortex: "Here's a brief walk through the history of the metafilter sidebar:

• 12/27/00: I had no idea that the sidebar used to be something you had to install. How odd. (July 20, 2011: pb installed it on a version of IE6 he uses for testing, and took a screenshot)
• 1/27/01: Matt got his CSS on
• 3/18/01: jessamyn asks just what the hell this sidebar thing people are talking about is. And then gluechunk links to this obsolete page.
• 7/6/01: sidebar woes in Opera...
• 10/12/01: ...are fixed!
• 10/23/01: Rendering miscellany.
• 3/9/02: Matt reaches out to Mac users.
• 10/6/03: Sidebar runs amok!
• 2/2/05: At long last, the sidebar is reborn via blogger.
• At some point around February 2009, Blogger quit allowing updating via whatever mechanism MeFi used and we switched to a homegrown solution.
• 4/24/13: Matt announces the Best Of Blog, which also populates the sidebar feed.