Neatorama Update - March 2009

Hello Neatoramanauts! Just a brief update on the State of the Blog:

Mystery Sale - I'm sure that everyone's been wondering about their packages. Don't worry - they're coming.

We usually ship out orders within one business day, but Mystery Sales are a bit unusual. We've gotten a lot of orders that it took a while for the warehouse to gear up to ship (happened last time, too!)

The first batch of shipments is scheduled for this Friday 3/6/09 - and we will process order and ship continuously for the next week or so. I'll make another update about the Mystery Sale soon.

Many of you emailed me about tracking the progress of the order - you can check the status of your order if you're registered at the Neatorama Online Shop at the time of the purchase. For security purposes, the username and password for the shop are separate from the blog. If you ordered and did a quick checkout, you can't check the status online.

Rogue Ads - Some of you have seen inappropriate (though infrequent) ads on Neatorama. Like I explained in the last update, we've had a rash of rogue ads that should be taken cared of by now. If you see one of these, please let me know (a screenshot would be lovely)

Blocked email - A lot of people who didn't get the automatic email receipt for their orders have @sbcglobal.net email address. It seems like our emails are being blocked (not in the recipients' spam filter and not bounced back to us either) - does anyone know how I can get our emails unblocked by sbcglobal? We have never spammed anyone.

Reading All of Neatorama - Congratulations to James Lim, who has just finished reading all of Neatorama. He email me that it took him 3 months and 2 days to read all 637 pages of the blog (well, so far anyway - it's a never ending journey because we keep on adding posts!). James has just joined a small but growing cadre of Neatoramanauts who have accomplished such a feat.

Caption This - If you'd like to get yourself a free Neatorama T-shirt, go forth to One largeprawn who's running a Caption This contest (with a very strange photo!) If you're a blogger who's interested in running a competition in your blog and want us to spot the prize (a free T-Shirt from the Neatorama Online Store), please email me!

Upcoming Queue: It's Much Better Now. Promise! Neatorama reader CalamityKate wrote this about the much maligned UQ:

Hi Alex, I just wanted to eat a little crow here. I was one of the haters of the UQ and was excited when the feeds became separate. But I still had the original feed on my Bloglines, and I’ve been converted! I think that the changes you made to “tighten up” the process have worked really well, and I rarely see posts from people that seem to just be pushing their own content. Forgive me? :-)

Glad that you've kissed and made up with the Queuebot, CalamityKate! And for the rest of you feed readers, it's time to give the Neatorama Full Front Page feed (with Upcoming Queue posts) another try!

Upcoming Queue Top Submitter for February 2009

As promised, the top submitter for the month of February 2009 will get a free iPod Touch. The rest of the Top 10 will get a free Neatorama T-shirt (since taliesyn30 and scbr are tied for the 10th spot, both will get the prize). Congrats, guys!

As I have written before, I intend to continue to reward top submitters to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue. I wont' tell you what March will bring for them (maybe something, maybe nothing), so it'll be fun ;)

New Funny Science T-Shirts

A Day Without Nuclear Fusion is a Day Without Sunshine - $9.95

Great Vocab Didn't Save the Thesaurus From Extinction - $9.95

And lastly, we've added a couple of new designs to our growing list of Funny Science T-Shirts on the Neatorama Online store. Check it out: Science T-Shirts | Science Toys