Avalanche.

I always wondered what it would be like to suddenly have tons of people hit my blog because of something I'd written. In a year and a half of blogging I didn't have that problem; virtually no one was interested in anything I'd written. Well, yesterday I got to find out. The final tally was 346 hits. My old record for one day was something like 70-something, I think. The typical daily average is around 30 hits.

It started when J-Walk linked to my Monkey Grip (AKA "the correct way to hold a pencil") post from April. He's linked to me several times before, but I never got a bunch of hits as a result. Then, appropriately, I started getting hits from Monkeyfilter, who'd linked the same post. (But without crediting J-Walk. Bad monkey!)

And the hits just keep on coming. Today I had over 60 a little after 9 AM.

This morning I also noticed I was getting hits from Diamond Geezer. He used to link to me, but took the link down after I went inactive. But why multiple hits all of a sudden? I found out that today he's going to see if he can leave a comment in a hundred different blogs he reads. You can actually track his progress. At last count he was only about halfway, but considering how insanely industrious he is, I don't doubt he'll finish.

Blogger Pop-Ups?

I've been testing out various new Blogger features over the past couple of days and decided to finally try out the Blog This! thing that's included with the excellent Google toolbar. It worked just great, but oddly, when I opened up the blog (not this one, my R&D blog where I do my experiments first so as not to screw up this one), the Google toolbar informed me that it was blocking a pop-up. I unblocked the pop-up to see what it was and it was a typical stupid ad telling me I'd won something. But why was it on my blog?

I rarely see pop-ups anymore because I use Firefox and on IE I have the pop-up blocker that's built into the aforementioned Google toolbar.

So what's the deal? Does Blogger now feature pop-ups or was it somehow connected to the Blog This! thingy? Has anyone else seen pop-ups on Blogger sites, or am I just going insane?

My system doesn't have any spyware on it either, so don't suggest that as the culprit.

Update: I'm not sure, but this pop-up thing may have something to do with Bravenet. I've got a Bravenet hit counter on the R&D blog. If it's not that, I'm fresh out of ideas.

New Template.

Yep, I got myself a shiny, new template. This one, unlike my old one, actually seems to work properly. If you were using Internet Explorer, the old one required you to reload the page if you wanted to scroll all the way to the bottom. And if you're one of those rare, sane people who uses Mozilla Firefox, you had to reload if you didn't want half the page to display nothing but gibberish. Of course, considering how I haven't posted jack squat here since last month, the gibberish may have been viewed as an interesting change of pace.

The only bad thing about this template (I mean besides its punishing dullness) is there's no blue. My trademark blue is nowhere to be seen.

And, yes, I'm still on hiatus.

A Short, Quick Post.

I just found out Robert Quine, one of my favorite guitarists, killed himself. Just two or three days ago I reread this interview with him. This really sucks. I don't know what else to say.