… of how we do the Popehat Signal:

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7639/is-a-spotlight-like-the-bat-signal-possible

We're rethinking and reworking the blogroll to your left. It's a work in progress. Right now the categories are utterly borked. I'll post more when I'm closer to done.

It's been more than six months since we re-launched Popehat and I decided to make a more serious effort at it by making blogging my primary hobby. I would have enjoyed it even if we had gotten no traffic; the daily writing exercise is fun and challenging (with occasional exceptions when it seems like a chore) and good training. The camaraderie with my co-bloggers is also well worth the effort.

However, we have substantially increased traffic. This weekend we passed 1000 people who had signed up for our RSS feed. More than 500 of those have signed up in the last two months alone. I have no idea how many of those are actually reading the damn thing, but the could if they wanted. We're routinely getting 500 – 800 visits per day on weekdays and 300 – 400 on weekends. Some of those are people visiting multiple times and not filtered by our software, but it's still well more than a handful. Our visitors have come from 82 different countries in the last month. An increasing number are coming here for the first time through referring links from a wider variety of blogs and forums, and more and more are coming through varied and increasingly bizarre searches.

Why does this matter? That's a good question. There's certainly a strong element of ego. It's easier to stay up another hour at night making sure you have a few posts in the can for the next day if you know hundreds of people will be checking to see if you wrote anything new. But there's also a community element. Incoming links lead me to new sites that will provide fodder for interesting posts in the future. New people bring interesting new perspectives, both on the front page and in the forums. And as more people read, more people send us links and stories for the front page, which are always appreciated.

In short, I think we're making a real go of it, and growing from a personal blog that only a dozen people read to a modest blog with a community. I appreciate the contributions of my co-bloggers, which include both front page posts and substantial help on the technical side of things.

This post is intended to act as a sort of sonar ping into the web rather than to provide substantive information, but members of the Octopus Overlords forum and community who are interested in its fate should visit the site.  It isn't back up yet, but there is an update on the front page which is highly encouraging of a return to operation in a very short time.  It appears Rip has resolved his server problems, and only database transfer remains.

More encouraging news comes from Zack in our forum, who had sites with the same provider.  Zack informs us that both of his sites are back online.

Now and again Ken runs a feature in which he documents the search engine terms and keywords which bring people to this site.  Through this feature, we know that our readers care about penguins, whether Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is a freemason, and 60s television actress Barbara Eden.  We design this site's content accordingly.

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There's a link to this information in the little-used Popehat forum, but the most current information we have is documented in this thread at Gamingtrend, which has a fine forum for gaming and general discussion in its own right.  This is not a repeat of what happened to the Gone Gold forum.

Apparently Rip's servers have taken a broadside, and I'm sure his weekend is shot, but he expects to get them back up and running in the near future.  We're sending good vibes his way.

Of course, anyone who wishes is welcome to use our forum.  Currently we have a thread concerning my incredible disappointment with the progress of the UNC-Kansas basketball game.  And other stuff.

As frequent readers know, we pay close attention to what Google searches bring people to this site, and often blog about the funny and/or frightening results. (My favorite for March: "moral lesson about that [sic] we learned in jeepers creepers 2").

At first, penguins ruled the search engine logs — people looking for penguins came here like angsty kids to a Hot Topic. Then it was people searching for evidence that Mike Huckabee is a freemason who predominated. But, as Patrick pointed out in the last episode of "The Winding Road to Popehat," it's people looking for the famous pirate resignation letter. That's funny, because Patrick's post triggering the searches made an oblique reference to the pirate letter in the title, but didn't set it forth.

This cannot stand.

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The cool new site logo of a miter is courtesy of the talented Roger Kirk, a.k.a. Quipp, who is a wizard with numerous types of computer artistry, from drawings like this to hilarious-if-it's-not-done-to-you photoshops. You might want to keep your picture out of his hands, though, unless you want to log on one day and discover he has depicted you like this:

I am very grateful to my co-bloggers David and Grandy, who have put a lot of work into improvements to the design of the site, including this one.

Please note I added the Sociable plugin below. You can now email a post to someone by clicking the icon on the far left — to report one of Patrick's posts to the appropriate authorities, for instance, or if you are my wife to send one of my posts to my therapist to support an argument regarding adjustment of medications. I've also adjusted the social networking tabs, if you are into that sort of think.

Technical problems. Blog fixed soon.

UPDATE: Yes, some things have reverted to an old style. We're working on it.

Upgrading tonight. There may be blood. There will be disruptions in site formatting. See you soon.

UPDATE: 2.5 installed. Now re-activating plugins. Please let me know if you are having new problems reading in your browser. (For instance, it appears too wide on my home monitor right now).

Edit:  So far, so good.  I think that I have all of the plugins reactivated.  Again, please post a comment if anything strange is happening.

Since we are finally getting links up, I wanted to say a few words about linking. Some of these points should be self-evident, but experience teaches that they are not.

• Linking another site does not represent endorsement of its content or proprietors. I routinely read sites with which I disagree 90% of the time and whose proprietors I consider to be irritating and/or abominable. Reading such sites is useful because it exposes me to competing ideas and informs me about the prevailing talking points among groups with whom I disagree. And sometimes they're right about something. Some of the sites linked here are linked because they are people with whom I generally agree. Some are linked because, though I generally agree with them, I consider them thoughtful. Some I consider crass propagandists, but ones whose propaganda I expect to encounter and would like to be informed about. Then there's the stuff that Patrick links, which is inexplicable.
• You certainly shouldn't assume that because a blog is linked here, that all our bloggers think it is worth linking, even under the theory I have just explained.
• We like to link friends who are blog hobbyists like us. Have we left you off? Don't pout. Send an email. A reciprocal link would be appreciated.

It's time for the Winding Road to Popehat, one of my favorite features, in which we discuss the bizarre ways some of you get here and what it says about your suitability to participate in polite society.

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Now, after about two months of life at this new site, we're starting to get some interesting search engine hits. So it's time to revive one of my favorite features, "The Road To Popehat," in which I review the bizarre search engine queries that some of you use to get here.

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One of my favorite traditions at the last incarnation of Popehat was the occasional "How You Got to Popehat" feature, in which I listed and commented upon some of the strange searches that people used to get to the version of Popehat that ran over on Squarespace.  I've been waiting for this new version — now up only about a month — to attract some interesting searches, but so far Google Analytics has revealed them to be fairly mundane.

Mundane, but not entirely explicable.  Here I refer to penguins.

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