And The Winner Is…

And the winner is...

Congratulations go out to Claudis K from the great state of Michigan for logging on and capturing a screenshot of her visit which marked Sitemeter recording my 100,000 hit! Yeah Claudia!

Claudia beat out a particularly strong showing from my international readers from Jr. America to our north as well as a host of regulars here at POTF for a sweatshirt from the Official Ablaze!(TM) Firefighter’s (TM)(R)(C) official line of (in)activewear.

I’d also like to thank everyone for hanging out, participating in discussions that were sometimes lighthearted and sometimes serious (sometimes a combination of both where if we didn't laugh we'd go mad as hatters), and for reading this slack jawed yokel’s drivel. If I could afford it, I'd buy everyone a shirt with my logo embroidered on it but that's just not within my budget. Sorry.

You guys and gals make blogging theological just plain fun and I just wanted to say thank you to everybody. Again, Thank you!

Putting Out The Fire Reader Appreciation Contest

I was clearing out my inbox earlier today while waiting for the keynote speaker of a metrology and biopharmaceutical trade show which I was attending when I noticed an email from the good folks at Sitemeter. Normally I don’t pay attention to how many people read this blog unless I’m getting a ton of hate mail which usually only happens when I shine a light on problems facing our beloved synod like the Southeastern district trying to reintroduce Roman monastic practices and the desert father’s brand of mysticism to our daughter churches or, the all time sacred cow it seems: teaching youth to look less like Lutherans and more like evangelicals in how they worship, how they act, and how they talk as is the case nearly every time the LCMS has a national youth gathering. When I’m getting a bunch of hate mail or if synodical and district employees think that they can actually leave anonymous comments without me finding out who they are (newsflash: nothing is anonymous on the interwebs) then... I do in fact have a tendency to pay attention to the little counter that not only tells me how many people are visiting POTF but where they are signing in from and what their IP addresses are. A word to the wise, nothing is anonymous on this blog if I don’t want it to be. Anyhoo…

As it turns out, that little counter at the bottom of the page indicates that in a day or two I will hit the magic number of 100,000 visitors. I never thought I would have seven hundred visitors much less seven hundred posts with what will soon be over a hundred thousand guests here at my little corner of the Lutheran blogosphere.

As a way of showing my appreciation to everybody who reads the drivel I end up writing I’m gonna have a little contest: the visitor who takes a screenshot of the Sitemeter counter when it rolls over to that magic number of 100,000 will win a t-shirt, polo shirt, or sweatshirt with the official Putting out the Fire logo embroidered on it. Just take a screenshot, sign in and leave a message (it's very important that you leave me a message with your name!) and as soon as I verify where you signed in from, and your IP address I’ll get right to work and get you your choice of shirt from the POTF inactive-wear line of clothing. The only limitation is that the shipping address must be in the United States or Canada.

So good luck everybody and thank you from the bottom of where my heart would be if I actually had one for hanging out at POTF and making blogging fun for yours truly

500 Post Blogiversary

A big thank you to everyone who has visited, commented, supported, and linked back to POTF. Without you folks, this would be no fun at all. There have been 500 posts with 1090 comments from you guys over the last four and a half years. Who would have thunk it? Again, thank you all.

HTTP Status Code 400

This is appropriate… did anyone out there know that the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) status code 400 means “The request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled.”

Appropriate considering the slack jawed yokel who writes this stuff can’t type.

Source: Wikipedia of course.