Mystery Sale
Last week, Neatorama had its last Mystery Sale. Thank you for everyone who participated! Why was it our last one? We’re working on a new system for the Neatorama Shop and I have an inkling that it may be incompatible with the way Mystery Sales work. Perhaps we’ll bring it back in the future, but for now, the last Mystery Sale was our very last one

The warehouse is officially in overdrive mode. We’ll be sending out shipments for the next week or two. Unfortunately, I don’t know where a particular order is in the queue – so please be patient, your package is on its way!

Neatorama on Yahoo!
Our post about Elena Desserich, the 6-year-old girl with brain cancer who hid love notes for her parents to find after her death, was featured on Yahoo! front page, which delivered about 2 million visitors (and over 2,700 comments – most of them are nice, but some are … wow, just wow!) in a span of just a few hours (Thanks Yahoo!) Needless to say, the servers got clobbered (though the post itself had no problem as we had put it on a CDN) So if you experienced a server hiccup last week, that was the cause.

Upcoming Queue
We changed the way the Upcoming Queue worked a little bit. Now you can browse Archived Posts (5,000+ submissions!) and keep up with comments on your submissions through RSS Feed.

The Archived Posts link is at the very bottom of the page, whereas the My RSS Feed is on the top right-hand navigation panel.

For those of you who don’t know anything about it, the Mystery Sale offers an item you can buy for $9.95. What is it? We won’t tell you – that’s the whole point of the sale!

But we can tell you that it’s going to be a physical product (or combination of products) worth AT LEAST $9.95. It’ll be new and a fun "Neatorama" item.

You can buy more than 1 Mystery Item in a single order, in which case we’ll make sure that you get different items. You can even get them gift-wrapped so you can cross Christmas shopping off your list early this year.

We’re working on a new platform for Neatorama’s online shop, and the new one probably won’t be compatible with future Mystery Sale. I’m 99.9% sure that this will be the last Mystery Sale we’ll have (if not ever, then for a very long time) so grab yours today before it’s gone!

Link

Update 11/5/09 – Time’s up! Thank you to everyone who participated!

It’s time for Neatorama’s highly anticipated Mystery Sale. What mysterious item will you get for $9.95? Well, we wont’ tell you: that’s the whole point of the Mystery Sale!

But what we can we can tell you is this: you’ll get something (or a combination of things) worth *at least* $9.95. It will be a physical item, new, fun and worthy of Neatorama. And if you buy more than one thing, you’ll get different items.

Do your Christmas shopping early. It’s simple: just get a few Mystery Sale items (you can even get them gift-wrapped) and cross Christmas shopping off your to-do list!

What will this Mystery Sale bring you? Don’t you want to find out? And remember, like the last Mystery Sale, this one is also for a very limited time. When it’s gone, it’s gone, so get yours today: Link

Update 11/5/09 – time’s up!

A couple of weeks ago, we featured Jen Yates’ new book Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong, and promised to send a free book to a Neatoramanaut whose question got answered by Jen. Here’s her pick (and answer):

From Avid Cake Wreck Reader Rebecca: "I read on your site that you had taken cake decorating classes with your husband. I wondered if you ever posted one of your cakes as a wreck?"

And the answer is: Yes! You’d have to check the comment section to know this, but the infamous Epcot (aka Spaceship Earth) cake was made by me and John. That’s part of why it was so funny when so many commenters told me I was wrong to call it a Spaceship Earth cake. Yep, we got a *huge* kick out of that – and still do when readers make a "I think that’s Epcot" crack on a new post. Heh.

Thank you Jen and congratulations, Rebecca! See more at Jen’s blog Cake Wrecks

Neatorama Mystery Sale

It’s done! After two solid weeks of shipping, all shipments finally went out. Thank you to everyone who participated in the Mystery Sale!

If you haven’t gotten yours yet, please be patient: it may be in the last batch, which means that you should get it either by next week or early the following week (USA) or add a week for customs clearance for international destinations.

New at the Neatorama Shop

M-Cups, the measuring cups shaped like matryoshkas or Russian nesting dolls are HOT – we’ve sold out of the current batch and are waiting for our next shipment … if you order them today, we’ll add a little extra "mystery" bonus to your order.

Hooray! Here comes Neatorama’s much anticipated Mystery Sale. What mysterious item will you get for $9.95? Well, we wont’ tell you: that’s the whole point of the Mystery Sale!

But what we can we can tell you is this: you’ll get something (or a combination of things) worth *at least* $9.95. It will be a physical item, new, fun and worthy of Neatorama. And if you buy more than one thing, you’ll get different items.

What will this Mystery Sale bring you? Don’t you want to find out? And remember, like the last Mystery Sales, this one is also for a very limited time. When it’s gone, it’s gone, so get yours today: Link

Though the Mystery Sale is over, you can still get geektastic Science T-Shirts, Funny T-Shirts, nifty Ice Trays and other fun stuff at the Neatorama Online Store. Thank you to everybody who participated!

Neatorama Software Upgrade
We’re going to be doing a maintenance/upgrade soon on Neatorama – if everything goes well, you shouldn’t notice anything. If not, then, well, pardon the hiccups!

Upcoming Queue
As I’ve posted before, the Top 5 Submitter (based on Front Paged submissions) to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue for the month of August will win very cool prizes. The top dog will win an iPod Nano, whereas the rest will get cool stuff from the Neatorama Online Store.

As of today, the field is wiiiide open:

Please read the FAQ and Submission Tips to increase your chances of getting posts promoted to the Front Page. Remember that copy & pasting your description is the surest way NOT to get your post picked up

Hello Neatoramanauts! It's been a while since our last Neatorama State of the Blog post, so I'd like to take a minute to update everyone.

Mystery Sale - July 2009
Thank you to everybody who participated! We truly appreciate your business and support. It took us a few days longer than I had initially expected to gear up to ship out orders, but the warehouse has started to ship out - we shipped the first batch two days ago and it'll probably take us another full week or so to complete every order.

Usually, we ship out your NeatoShop order within 1 business day or so, but the volume of shipment for the Mystery Sale is (like last time) extraordinarily high. We're working hard to continually improve this process and thank everybody for being patient :)

If you ordered from outside of the United States, please be extra patient - shipments can take up to 14 to 21 business days due to customs clearance (those guys can really take their time though they're usually much, much quicker). I'll do another round of update when we've finished shipping out.

Twitter Only Contest
We're going to post a Twitter-only contest where you can win cool stuff from the NeatoShop soon. It won't be announced on the blog, so you have to follow @neatorama on Twitter (we won't overload you with tweets, I promise!) to find out. Perhaps if it's a success, we can do the same thing on Neatorama's Facebook Fan Page ... what do you think?

Upcoming Queue Top Submitter Prize
Love it or not, I think the Upcoming Queue is one of the neatest feature of Neatorama. For those of you who are not familiar with the UQ, it is a way for the blog's readers to write a blog post. Submissions are voted up or down by other viewers and good posts are promoted to Neatorama's front page (details at the Upcoming Queue FAQ).

For the coming month of August, we're going to have a neat prize for the top 5 submitters: the number 1 submitter (based on frontpaged posts) will get an iPod Nano, whereas the rest will get some extra neat stuff from the NeatoShop.

Remember that quality, not quantity of submissions will be the key - please read the Formatting Tip first.

Neat Stories You May Have Missed
We posted a lot of neat stories on Neatorama in July, so be sure to check these out (in case you missed them):

Fun with Low Temperatures	What 'Chu Know 'Bout Wombats? (Photo: Shami Chatterjee)	7 College Pranks
Weird, Wacky World of the Platypus	5 Historic Train Robberies	Wonderful World of Big Science

Thank you for reading Neatorama! Please tell your friends about the blog!

Hello Neatoramanauts! Today’s the day of our Mystery Sale. What wonderful items will you get for $9.95? Well, we wont’ tell you: that’s the whole point of the Mystery Sale!

But we can tell you that you’ll get something (or a combination of things) worth *at least* $9.95. It will be a physical item, new, fun and worthy of Neatorama. Plus, it’s a new item never seen before in previous Mystery Sales (if you must know, we try not to repeat the mystery item). If you buy more than one thing, you’ll get different items.

What will this Mystery Sale bring you? Don’t you want to find out? And remember, like the last Mystery Sale, this one is also for a very limited time. When it’s gone, it’s gone, so get yours today: Link

Upcoming Queue Top Submitter – May 2009

When we launched the Neatorama Upcoming Queue, we promised to reward Top Submitters. As a token of my appreciation, the top 5 submitters of May 2009 will get a random cool ice tray from our online store:

Ice Invaders, Gin & Titonic, Bone Chillers, and Cool Jazz ice trays
See our complete selection here: Party Ice Trays

You still have a chance to be a Top Submitter for this month (and there’s always next month) – learn more about the Neatorama Upcoming Queue here: FAQ | Tips

Neatorama Facebook Fan Page Hits 1,000 Fans

Thanks to Neatoramanaut Becky, we have a Neatorama Facebook Fan Page – and recently we’ve just hit 1,000 fans! Thank you, guys!

Rogue Ads

It’s taken a lot of work behind the scenes, but I believe we’ve significantly improved the quality of ads on Neatorama – not only are the rogue ads gone, but so are the annoying yellow teeth ads! (Scuttlebutt of the ad industry is that those yellow teeth ads are actually the best performing ads in the history of Internet ads. That’s why you see them everywhere – they’re coming from practically every single ad network on the web. Banning them cost us a pretty penny, but I think we did the right thing).

Running a small blog costs next to nothing (I know, Neato was once very small) but running a large one is actually quite costly. Bandwidth and server costs for Neatorama run in the 5-digits annually and growing. So unfortunately, ads are a necessary evil. Perhaps one day the Neatoama Online Shop is large enough that its revenue could sustain the blog, but for the foreseeable future, ads are our best option.

Because we have to rely on ad providers, sometimes rogue ads slip through – I appreciate everybody’s continued help in spotting them. Please let me know if you see an inappropriate ad, banner that has a self-starting audio, etc., so we can track ‘em down and ban ‘em (my contact info is at the bottom of the blog).

As a final note, I’m trying to find a balance between maximizing ad revenue and minimizing the number of ads that appear on the blog. Many of you probably noticed ads moving/appearing/disappearing starting in the past couple of weeks.

Neatorama Widget

Neatoramanaut Ajan surprised me with an gift: Neatorama’s very own RSS feed widget for Macs. Now, I won’t pretend to understand the mechanics of how it was made (I don’t have a Mac and wouldn’t know the first thing about widgets) – but it looks very neat! If you want one, click here to download it: Link – Thanks Ajan!

Note: a while ago, someone asks how to get in on the Mystery Sale and whether there is an email alert or something like that. Well, the answer is simple: visit Neatorama every day (or subscribe to our RSS feed) – the Mystery Sale is never announced beforehand and it only lasts for a short period of time, so you have to catch it when it’s going on (That’s part of the fun!)

It has taken us just a little over two weeks to ship, which is a significant improvement over the Mystery Sale back in February. While many of you got your shipments within just a few days, some of you are still waiting. The latest wave of shipments will take a few business days to arrive (a bit longer if you’re outside of the United States because of customs clearance). I appreciate your patience – your packages are on their way! Meanwhile, we’ll continue to work to improve the item selections and shipping time.

Many of you have gotten Adam Koford’s latest book, the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out. At the list price of $12.95, it’s a steal! Plus, be sure to check the front jacket – Adam has kindly signed a Neatorama book plate you can affix to the book. It’s surely going to be a collector’s item!

I’ve been slacking on my posting duties on Neatorama – so, I’m looking forward to getting back on that horse … after I catch my breath!

Hi guys! Today’s the day for Neatorama’s much anticipated Mystery Sale. What will you get for $9.95? Well, we won’t tell you … that’s the whole point of the Mystery Sale!

What we can tell you is this: you’ll get something (or a combination of things) worth at least $9.95. It will be a physical product, new, and definitely a lot of fun. If you buy more than one things, you’ll get different items.

We continue to listen to your feedback, and have worked hard to make this Mystery Sale the BEST one yet.

Like the last Mystery Sale, it’s only for a limited time. The last one didn’t last 24 hours. When it’s gone, it’s gone. So get yours today: Link

Update 5/5/09 #1 – If you don’t get in, please try again – the servers are overloaded with traffic right now

Update 5/5/09 #2 – let’s try that again, shall we? I’m crossing my fingers the servers will be okay
Update 5/6/09 – Time’s up! If you’ve participated in this Mystery Sale, thank you! For those of you who missed it – catch it next time. Be sure to visit Neatorama regularly as the Mystery Sale is not announced beforehand.

I know many of you are wondering where your Mystery box shipment is at. For those of you who haven’t received the shipment, don’t worry! We’re not done shipping ‘em out yet!

In fact, we’ve been burning the midnight oil trying to get this done (it’s Friday 11:30 PM @ the warehouse when I wrote this post and scheduled it for Monday). There are only two of us here in Neato HQ, working on the store side of Neatorama, and we’ve been shipping packages like mad! I do, however, acknowledge that we have to improve the turnaround time for the next Mystery Sale.

Even though this sale is over, you can still get Funny Science T-shirts, fun kitchen stuff and more on Neatorama’s Online Store.

Mystery Sale – the warehouse started shipping out the orders last Friday. We will ship every day (it may take us a week or so) till all the orders go out. I’ll do another update later this week.

Upcoming Queue – if you have original content on your blog, here’s a good reason to submit it to the Upcoming Queue. From Bill Zeman, whose blog was frontpaged on Neatorama:

[Tiny Art Director] has been getting tons of traffic and links lately, including Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic, The Guardian (best of the web), Saatchi Gallery (world art news), Neatorama.com, b3ta.com, Metafilter.com, Daily Candy, Design Observer, NotCot.org, FlavorPill (in the viral section), Urlesque.com…

Thanks to everyone who is linking and sorry that I can’t list everyone, but I want to give a shout out to neatorama.com where all this traffic originated. If you want to promote a site, check out their upcoming queue feature – just make sure your server is ready for it – mine wasn’t!

Link – Thanks Bill!

Neatorama Store – back in stock: Fuzz, the Crime Scene Scarf – just $13.95

Mystery Sale: Thank you to everybody who participated! This was our third and best Mystery Sale ever! Due to the high volume of orders, it’ll take our warehouse about two to three weeks to ship out the Mystery sale orders – regular orders won’t be affected and will ship out in just about one business day.

Some of you didn’t get the automatic email receipts from the store: for some reason it seems like sbcglobal.net as well as a couple other ISPs decided that our emails are spam and nuked it en route. This is a problem we’ve discussed before on Neatorama, so if you have one of these emails, perhaps it’s time to switch to Gmail.

Neatorama Upcoming Queue: A few naughty submitters were caught gaming the system – so we’ve instituted a few safeguards. For instance, now the submitter’s info is anonymized during the voting period. This ensures that the focus of the vote is the post, and not the poster.

Rogue Ads: I’ve gotten an email saying that there’s been a rogue banner ad on Neatorama. I spent all morning hunting for it, and it seems that we’ve located and banned the guilty party, but if you do see a NSFW ad on the blog, please let me know!

Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt Winner: Last week, we had our 8th Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt. The winner has been announced in the answer page.

Woohoo! It’s time for Neatorama’s much anticipated Mystery Sale. What will you get for $9.95? Well … we won’t tell you because that’s the whole point! It’s a mystery!

What we can tell you is this: you’ll get something (or a combination of things) worth at least $9.95. It will be a physical product. It will be new and fun. If you buy more than one, you’ll get different items.

We’ve listened to your feedback and have worked hard to make this Mystery Sale’s item selection the best ever.

Like the last Mystery Sale, however, it’s only for a limited time. So get yours today: Link Time’s Up! Thank you for participating in the Mystery Sale, guys! If you miss this one, be sure to catch the next one … and remember that the Mystery Sale is not announced beforehand, so visit the blog every day!

Though this sale is over, you can still get great T-shirts on the Neatorama Online Store. Thanks, everyone!

Hello, everyone! Neatorama is having its much anticipated Mystery Sale. For just $9.95, you’ll get … well, I won’t tell you: that’s the whole point of the sale – it’s a mystery!

What I can tell you is this: you’ll get something worth at least $9.95. It will be a physical product. It will be new and fun. If you buy more than one, you’ll get different items. You can even get it gift-wrapped (it’ll be a fun thing to do for Christmas) and better yet, it’s the easiest way to get all your Christmas shopping done!

As with the last Mystery Sale, you snooze you lose. It’s for a limited time only (the last one lasted less than 24 hours), so get yours today: Link Time’s Up! Didn’t get yours? Remember that the Mystery Sale is never announced beforehand, so visit the blog every day!

Waves of shipments have gone out – the last of which was yesterday. If you ordered one, then you should be receiving it shortly. Those of you who live outside the US may have to wait a little while longer, since customs usually take their sweet time clearing shipments.

Though this sale was over, you can still get great t-shirts on Neatorama’s Online Store. Thanks everyone!

Hooray! Neatorama is having a Lucky Bag/Mystery Sale – For $9.95, you’ll get … well, it’s a secret … a mystery … I can’t tell you – that’s the whole point of the sale!

What I can tell you is this: you’ll get something worth at least $9.95. It will be a physical product (it could be a t-shirt, or a book, or something else entirely). It’ll be new. And hopefully, fun!

Intrigued? I promise you the Neatorama Mystery Sale will be fun.

It’s for a very limited time only, so hurry! Link

Update 9/15/08 – Thanks for the great response, guys! Time’s up on the Neatorama Mystery Sale. For those who didn’t buy today, perhaps next time!