Beta site blues

Folks, I'm wiring up the remaining bits of the new site, since I think it's well past time that we bit the bullet and got it out there rather than having it slowly bitrotting behind a cookie. We've got a handful of remaining issues on the home page, though, and rather than changing it significantly myself this late in the piece, I'd like to gather some opinions so I have something in the ML archive to point at when people complain. :) — The sidebar is way, way long with our real user group and training events in there (at present we have 159 events in pregen-events.inc, which is just this month and next). This pushes the "Thanks to" sidebar element miles down the page, to the point where it's effectively invisible to the average user. Are we better off just displaying events in the country the user is in, using the same algorithm we currently use to bold those events on the old site? — Related to the above: the left column is very sparse if there's anything much in the right hand column (such as 159 events). Do we want to revisit having, say, the most recent two or three news items in full below the four box introduction? The new box is nice, but having more detail below the fold without requiring clicks on the news entries in the sidebar would be good. — Are there any massive objections to dropping PEAR from the lower left box and rewriting it to simply be about PECL? PECL is special, since it's the blessed extension repository, but PEAR doesn't really have much claim over competing repositories at this point (sorry, PEAR people) and it's probably better not to endorse one in particular. — Am I alone in really disliking the green background on the announcements box? Thanks, Adam