News And Notes: Joey Votto, Fixing my Blog, & a Group Break

Today was a good day for a multitude of reasons:

1.  Joey Votto, according to all accounts, is about to become a Red for the next decade (and very, very wealthy in the process).   As far as I am concerned, it's nice to see my favorite team finally trying to keep players rather than serving as a farm team for the "big boys."  I had begun to resign myself to the fact that Votto would be in a blue uniform soon (either of the Toronto kind or the LA kind) so I'm even happier than I might have been if I had expected to hear of news like this!

2.  My blog appears to be fixed.  A few of you inquired what was wrong - well, I noticed about a week or week and a half ago that my visitor rate dropped by almost 200 people on average.  I couldn't figure out why though - I thought maybe the warm weather kept people off the blog...or (more likely) people got sick of me.  However, I later realized that my blog wasn't showing up as being updated on anyone else's blogroll (which is the primary traffic driver to my blog).  Although it took me about another week or so to figure out what the issue was, thanks to someone over at the Blogger forums, I got things working again.  It turned out the culprit was a big 'ol table of my 2011 Allen & Ginter relics that I had posted on a blog post.  For some reason, Blogger doesn't get along well with tables made in Microsoft Word.  Once I deleted the table from the post, everything worked within minutes.  Weird, but it's nice to see visitors again!

3.  I have ordered boxes for my next group break.  I am hopeful that they will arrive tomorrow...  While I won't know for sure until the boxes arrive, I can say that this break SHOULD be one of the best yet.  Assuming all the boxes were in stock (hence why I have to wait to make sure they arrive), I should have 4 or 5 boxes which should include at least 9 or 10 hits, not to mention plenty of other cool stuff.  I'll have more details, including final pricing once the boxes are in hand.  I'm going to try and keep the cost at $25.00 per team (or less if I can) this time around.  Stay tuned for more details for that.  Since you read this far though, if you want to claim a team ahead of time leave a comment here (assume $25.00) but don't send payment quite yet - wait 'til I post the sign-up page.  Anyone that signs up early will have approximately 24 hours from when I post the sign-up to get their payment in.

4.  In one piece of bad news, I hate the new Blogger layout.  I had to revert back to using the old layout - and I'll continue to do so until Blogger forces me to change.  I also figured out how to make my comments on all of your blogs appear - I must use Google Chrome.  My browser of choice is actually Maxthon - but for some reason my browser doesn't seem to "play nice" with blog comments any more.

I think that's it for tonight.  I have a bunch more trade posts that will be coming up this week - some of you have been waiting for a month (or more) for me to post my end of the trade.  I also hope to get the group break figured out soon - and maybe since my last contest was missed by the vast majority of you, I can come up with a different contest idea as well.  Thanks for reading  - and welcome back to Nachos Grande!