This weekend, the Texas court system rolled out a new website design for the Texas Supreme Court. The old “supreme.courts.state.tx.us” domain has been retired, with the Court’s information now folded into the larger “txcourts.gov” domain that already handles the courts of appeals. The new page format is cleaner and more modern. It will be good for humans with taste.

The software scrapers that feed this blog are, unfortunately, still trained for the old website. I’ve shut down the scrapers for a short bit until I can re-train and re-test that software. That should freeze the data in place as things stand now.1

A compressed work schedule will prevent me from opening the code editor this week. My best estimate is that the blog will return to normal operation sometime the week of October 27th or the week of November 3rd.

Update 10:00am: Among the items that relocated were the Court’s previous slip opinions. Links that formerly went to a specific opinion now go to the Court’s main page.

I’ve written before about how entangled this blog is with my docket-tracking software. One side benefit is that, when there is some major change to the Court website, I can implement a change in one place and have the fix ripple through the blog archive. (This is not my first rodeo.)

Today’s payoff is this: I’ve written one quick fix for the opinion links in recent blog posts and some data tables. Those should now take you to my archived copy of the slip opinions, rather than to the Court website itself.2 This fix doesn’t make the scrapers any smarter. But it does make the blog a little more usable in the meantime.

  1. If you see some glitches that crept into the data pool before the shutdown — such as case names disappearing from old blog posts — those should naturally resolve themselves once the system is re-trained and the scrapers can reanalyze the pages. ↩
  2. This fix is not rolled out for posts older than mid-2012. The deeper archive can be fixed eventually, but not this morning. ↩