Good news first

Velorian received the mystery box and took some awesome pix of what I tucked inside.  Yay!

OK, now on with the bad ...

I'm not getting all my Blogger comment alert emails

I just found out that I haven't been getting about half of the comment alert emails from Blogger since the "Pet My Scarf" post.  That makes me feel sick.  First of all, a snarky comment about Lenore snuck past me and one of her Grandchildren saw it, which is horrible.  Actually, that's how I realized something was up, because she left a response for that troll.

Blogger only emailed me 26 of the 52 comments for Lenore's post!

I quickly checked the subsequent posts and realized it's been a problem for a while.  I feel *terrible* because some of you have said wonderful things that I would have responded to WAY before now, some of you asked questions that need to be answered, and who knows how many comments were left on random, old posts that I will never ever know about. :(

Anyone else having this problem with Blogger comment alert emails? I know it's not a problem with my actual email.  I'm getting all my paypal emails because I always double-check my paypal account when I get a pattern order.  **edit: I'm not the only one **

Blowing through my bandwidth

I *way* underestimated how much traffic Boing Boing was going to send my way.  They took my site visits from around 1,100 per day to 6,713 on the 5th.  Six times the traffic!  That was totally overwhelming.

I was COMPLETELY unprepared for what happened the next day:  Fark.com picked up the story about Lenore's ornaments (focusing on the octopus-ness, not the heart-warming-ness, sadly). They sent 21,446 visitors to my site.  Jaw dropping, isn't it?

I've now used 40% of my 80 Gig monthly bandwidth allotment.  Last month I almost went over, so I'm pretty sure this month I will, unless I move my site.  It's too bad, too, because I love my host.  But they charge $5 for 5 Gig increments if you go over and they don't offer a hosting plan with more than 80 Gigs of bandwidth (which I think is strange).

Bookmarking widget

This morning I added the Add This widget to all my posts.  If you click it, you are taken to a page where you can add the post to any one of the bazillion bookmark aggregate sites out there.  I've received a lot of traffic from people "stumbling" my site, so I thought I'd make it easier.

Add This was super simple to put into my Blogger template, so if you've been thinking of adding something like this to your blog, try them.  If you're using a new Blogger Template, they have a fancier button that expands a little panel where the user can select their bookmarking service without leaving your site.  It's not just for Blogger though - you can see it in action at the Village Voice website.