Yahoo! Picks Neatorama.

Woohoo! All right! Neatorama made it as Yahoo! Pick of the Day recently. (Thanks for the heads up, Jo-Ann!) Specifically, Yahoo! Picks chose a category of the blog containing Neatorama Only content (exclusive, I suppose, because I wrote 'em!).

This is a good time to thank Neatorama's loyal readers and authors. This blog was started almost-year-and-a-half ago, on Aug 9th, 2005 with this post: Cool Optical Illusion. Neatorama now contains more than 5,000 posts within 58 categories and over 10,000 user comments - and growing!

In October 2006, Neatorama welcomed its first guest author, Miss Cellania. Shortly thereafter, Gail Hapke of Scribal Terror, Eduardo "Yayo" Fernández Quiñones of Eduyayo, w.y. of Random Citations, and Aleki joined in. In 2007, we have even more people join in on the fun: Anita of Say No to Crack, Rob Gale of A Welsh View, Spluch, and Denita TwoDragons (who is also the Top Commenter on the blog) of Who Tends the Fires. Juergen of Random Good Stuff also promises to write for the blog, although he's currently busy covering the CES in Las Vegas. More on the authors here: http://www.neatorama.com/authors.php

Neatorama also started having regular weekly "features," like the collaboration with the awesome folks at mental_floss, the Image of the Week with Cellar IoTD, the What is It? Game with the What is It? Blog, and the weekly Bizarro comic with Dan Piraro.

A big thank you is in order for the many blogs that have linked to Neatorama. This year, for the first time ever, Neatorama broke through Technorati Top 200 blogs (although it still has a way to go to The Top 100!) - It probably has an easier chance to make it to the Top 100 Most Favorited, if y'all just click here: http://technorati.com/signup/?f=favorites

The blog's server has undergone many upgrades - and if downtimes in these two weeks are any guide (sorry!), apparently we're not there yet. I'm no server expert, so if anyone has any suggestions on how to keep a Dual Core Xeon 1.66 Ghz (3.6+) server with 4 GB RAM running Apache (it's all Greek to me, by the way) alive during traffic spikes (within reasonable budget), I'm all ears.

All of this means nothing without you guys, the readers - so from all of us at Neatorama, a big Thank You reading the blog! Now, onto your regularly scheduled neat stuff ...