Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

You could spend your money at Four Green Fields, Leroy’s Four Wheel Drive, Four Paws Sake Pet Care, Four Corners Custom Framing, Studio Four Photography in Bradenton, and the Four Stars Star Mart.

You can also get a great cafe con leche at the Fourth of July Cafe, watch the game at the Fourth & Inches Sports Bar, or head to 4th St. in St. Petersburg for the Fourth Street Shrimp Store, Fourth Street Liquor Mart or Harvey’s 4th Street Grill.

Blues great Tampa Red was born in 1904, and Gasparilla was first held in May of ‘04. Of course, the NCAA Women’s Final Four is coming to Tampa Bay this year, early next year will bring Tampa’s fourth Super Bowl, and the Lightning won the Stanley Cup in ‘04.

And this past week, Sticks of Fire turned four years old.

• First post ever
• First Anniversary
• Second Anniversary
• Third Anniversary

Thanks a bunch to all the contributors, commenters, and readers for helping to make this such a nice place.

Posting has been light recently, and we’re heading out of town this week, so it may be even more sparse.  We’ll future-post a couple of items, and check in now and again, but can I suggest you take a few minutes to check some other local blogs.

I have this list of about 200 Tampa Bay area blogs, but it has not been cleaned up in months.  If you notice that any are no longer posting, please let me know.  Likewise, if you know of any blogs that are not listed, tell us in the comments.

Ladies and Gents, boys and girls, children of all ages and yes — you too Tommy…

It’s Sunday Friday evening and I figure a good time to make a server change on Sticks of Fire that we’ve been putting off. The site will be going down for a bit’o'time and perhaps longer if we run into problems. Expect the fun to begin around 9:30 tonight.

If all goes well, however, Sticks will only be offline for a half hour less than an hour or so… But that’s the best-case scenario. I’ll update this message when things have been completed.

UPDATE: OK, due to some technical problems after a second attempt last night, we had to call off the server switch… And then we ran into more problems when we attempted to bring sticksoffire.com back to life. It’s back up now of course but any early morning readers noticed the site was not working right or working at all.

Carry on as you were

UPDATE #2: Yes, instead of adding a new post, I am re-using this one. Just to reiterate what I said above: 9:30 PM Sticks of Fire will be going offline for a bit. Hopefully she’ll be back up and running by 10:30 but no promises.

FINAL UPDATE: Whew… Done. Almost 3 hours of work. Some of you will experience Sticks being down for a bit longer as the serve change is recognized around these Interwebs… But everything should be done and working. Lemme know if you notice any problems

Got a minute?

Actually, it will take about 10 minutes.

Would you take this Blog Reader Project Survey? Yes - even you lurkers, and those that stumbled here by accident.

Thanks.

Update: Feel free to quit after the 2nd page - it goes on and on (see comments here).

Around lunchtime yesterday, Sticks of Fire registered its 500,000th visitor. That includes all visitors since inception from the old blogspot days.

Thanks to all you who keep coming back here to read what we have to say, and thanks to all of the wonderful contributors who keep this site interesting.

Speaking of contributors, we’ve finally finished (sorta) updating the list of Sticks contributors and their biographies. There are a couple still missing, but I’m certain those will be completed soon.

Once again, we thank YOU for hanging out with us in the sticks.

Because it’s of very little interest to many of you, it has been a while since we posted our traffic information. But because we want to be able to make a note of it, we’ll be including this every now and again.

In January 2007, Sticks of Fire loaded 35,244 page views from 22,525 unique visitors. That is an increase of 92.95% and 112.02% respectively over last January.

Broken down by month - the first figure is page views, second is unique visitors:

• Dec-06 … 22,010 … 14,770
• Nov-06 … 22,563 … 14,747
• Oct-06 … 54,816 … 23,794
• Sep-06 … 85,511 … 44,228
• Aug-06 … 18,948 … 12,138
• Jul-06 … 17,234 … 10,914
• Jun-06 … 20,481 … 14,074
• May-06 … 20,459 … 12,112
• Apr-06 … 17,623 … 9,872
• Mar-06 … 19,860 … 11,256
• Feb-06 … 16,953 … 10,297
• Jan-06 … 18,266 … 10,624

For the entire year of 2006, Sticks of Fire garnered 334,724 page views from 188,826 unique visitors, which averages 27,894 PV from 15,736 visitors per month.

If you look at September & October, you’ll see a huge spike. This is mostly due to the national interest in the Trenton Duckett story.

Previous Sticks traffic information.

Feliz cumpleaños a Palos Del Fuego.

Los palillos dan vuelta a tres años hoy. Leer el primer poste. Mirar el primer aniversario. Volver a vivir el segundo aniversario. Muchas gracias a los escritores. Más agradece a los lectores. Y la mayoría agradece a ti.

(No soy realmente seguro porqué elegí escribir esto en español, pero lo hice. Me disculpo a los de ti que hablen español fluido - esta traducción coja era assited por Google. )