Captain's Quarters Backup Site

CQ Down

We've come under attack all day here at the <a href="http://www.hostingmatters.com/">Hosting Matters</a> community, apparently by Saudis who have issues with free speech.  Michelle Malkin has some of the background at her site, if you can access it.  The only thing I know is that the folks at Hosting Matters have treated me very well, and I'm not going to burn my friends when they're getting attacked. 

Well, that's why I have a backup site, although I doubt anyone knows about it these days ...

Hosting Matters Is Down for Maintenance

Hosting Matters is moving its servers this morning into higher-security cages and therefore has a number of blogs off-line for a little while. This is a planned maintenance move, not another DDoS attack. Instapundit, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, and Captain's Quarters (among many others) are affected by the outage. It shouldn't last long, but in the meantime, take a look around the weekly archives and see what you may have missed earlier.

Up and Running at the New Site!

Well, we're up and running at the new Captain's Quarters at http://www.captainsquartersblog.com! I'll mostly be working on finishing up some of the programming there for the rest of the day. I will try to e-mail everyone on my blogroll to let them know we've moved. In the meantime, if you have me blogrolled or bookmarked, please update to the new site when you can. I won't be posting here except in emergencies from this point forward.

I have moved everything off of the old site and imported it into the new site as of about 3 pm CST today. Anything posted, commented, or TrackBacked after that will be lost, so you may want to duplicate it on the posts at the new site. I will be continuing my service at Typepad for the forseeable future, although I'll probably scale back the plan. If you've just started thinking about blogging, Typepad is a great way to get started and see what you can do. They have a great system and software (which is why I stuck with Movable Type when I got my own hosting) and very reliable service.

Come visit my new digs and let me know what you think!

Under Construction

Here's an update from the construction site at the new Captain's Quarters -- it's coming together really nicely, thanks to Mel at Skinny Dippin' Designs. We're not quite ready for visitors, but we're getting close. I think we may actually launch by Monday, if not earlier. Don't forget that the new URL will be http://www.captainsquartersblog.com. (If you click it and come back here, we're not under way yet.)

If you want a creative and responsive designer for your MT blog, make sure you stop by Skinny-Dippin' Designs. Mel's been terrific so far and I think you will love the new layout.

Electric Venom's Letter[s] of the Day

I completely missed the opportunity to link back to Venomous Kate yesterday in the rush of work and visiting friends, but Electric Venom included me in yesterday's Word of the Day for my post on Osama'a Navy. Lots of other good stuff in there too, so be sure to check it out, and while you're at it you should go through today's collection as well. Don't forget to congratulate Kate on her link from uberblogger Andrew Sullivan, too!

Airheads

The Northern Alliance of Blogs has a very exciting announcement -- we will be starting our own radio talk show in the Twin Cities on March 6th!

Thanks to our good friend and Lord High Commissioner, Hugh Hewitt, an opportunity arose for us to create a live show for our local Salem Communications Network affiliate, AM 1280 The Patriot. Up until recently, AM 1280 The Patriot had mostly repeats of their weekly shows airing all day Saturday and Sunday, but while Hugh was out here for The Patriot Forum, he suggested that we could create live programming in order to boost their audience. The station was delighted to meet with us, and today Mitch Berg (from Shot In The Dark) and I met with station management to finalize the arrangements.

Starting on March 6th, we will have a three-hour live show aired in the Twin Cities. Eventually, if we don't stink, we hope that AM 1280 The Patriot will have other options for broadcast such as live internet streaming, but for now we're tickled to be on the air in our local area. As the show develops, we will be updating everyone on the arrangements and news.

Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Dang! Mitch scooped me. Fastest blogger in the West, he is.

75,000 Visitors

Just a note thanking all of my readers who have pushed me past 75,000 visitors. Big thanks to all of you who've blogrolled me and linked back to me, and special thanks to my friends in the Northern Alliance.

In celebration, I'm announcing that I will be moving Captain's Quarters to a new hosting service as soon as a new design is in place. The traffic on the site has increased to the point where upgrading to full hosting services makes economic sense, and the folks at Hosting Matters make it pretty attractive to do so. Hosting Matters already supports some of the most well-known blogs, such as Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, and Power Line, so I feel like CQ will be in good hands.

I've already set up a new domain -- www.captainsquartersblog.com -- which you can start using immediately, as it's temporarily redirecting back to this site. I'm switching from Typepad to Movable Type, made by the same people, so I'm used to the concepts. I'll also have a new e-mail address, but you can continue to use the old one, too. I think I'll have a designer working on this in the next few days, and then I should have a definite time frame for the grand opening. I should be able to upload the entire contents of CQ to the new blog, so the archives will all be on the new site. After the switch, I'll keep this blog running (on a reduced service plan) in case I need a backup if Hosting Matters has a problem.

After tomorrow I may have another announcement regarding the blog ... we'll see. Keep your fingers crossed -- and keep coming back!

Still Northern Alliance to Me

The Elder at Fraters Libertas has immortalized the Northern Alliance in song ... the Billy Joel song "Piano Man," to be specific. An "homage" like this deserves a response -- and one will be coming soon, I'm sure.

Now where did my Jim Croce songbook go? Hmmmm ....

Can't Get Enough of Link Love, Babe

Continuing my Sunday tours through the blogosphere in honor of Valentine's Day (it's next Saturday -- start making those arrangements!), let's see what's happening on some of my blogroll friends ...

Starting with the Northern Alliance, Saint Paul at Fraters Libertas notes the success of the two local dailies despite their lack of customer service, and draws the only logical conclusion: it's time to get more rude with readers. Hindrocket at Power Line gives some background on Herb Brooks now that the movie Miracle has been released; be sure to read it. King at SCSU Scholars reviews a piece by Mark Steyn and relates it to his own well-documented work in improving educational standards in Minnesota. The Warrior Monk at Spitbull rails against the suburban machine. And Mitch at Shot In The Dark notes his change of heart on capital punishment.

Sailing further along the coasts of the blogosphere, Electric Venom has a couple of posts up worthy of note. The first is the long-delayed Snark Hunt, featuring yours truly's take on Adam Sandler's latest career announcement. And Venomous Kate also has a link to the transcript of some truly original cyber romance (adults only, please!). Alicia at Twilight Café recounts her experiences terrorizing poor man-boys at fast-food restaurants. (If you're ever in Texas, be afraid ... be very afraid.) DC at Brainstorming, meanwhile, has become Pre10tious ...

Moving out into more stormy seas, Jon at QandO uses the Democrats' suggested questions for the Bush/Russert interview and handles the pressure better than Bush did -- unfortunately. Brant at SWLiP, fresh off of playing Dueling Comments with me here, gives a Holocaust revisionist a chance to rebut Brant's earlier outrage. As you might expect, it's all vague assertions of conspiracies and no proof whatsoever; Paul Davies needs to read more William Shirer. To see where that crap leads, Crossing the Rubicon2 notes a disturbing incident intersecting anti-Semitism and Germans once again, complete with aggravated assault, this time in New York. And Allah notes that Europeans simply love Jews -- in fact, they want them to move there and abandon Israel. They're suggesting Germany, of all places. Seriously.

Finally, it's not link-love unless we check in with the Master of Red himself, the Commissar at Politburo Diktat. In one post, the Commissar gives us 10 signs your blog has made it, and in another notes a report that the US may provide aid to Iraqi communists as a bulwark against Islamic extremism. Uh, guys, didn't we just kick out the Marxist Ba'athists?

'Bare' With Us

I have learned an interesting lesson in cultural blogging today -- if you write about a really hot topic, especially involving sex, then you can expect to get a whole bunch of new readers via search engines. Captain's Quarters has recently been averaging between 50-70 page views an hour during prime time (around 40 unique visitors). Today, however, after writing about the Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake Boober Bowl halftime show, I have been receiving over 300 page views an hour from referrals from search engines.

Don't get me wrong; I like getting new readers, and I hope that all of them take a longer look around the blog to see if they find any other interests here than a grainy picture of a 37-year-old's right breast (which is not posted on this site, but you can go here and tell them I said hello). I'd just hate to have so many of these visitors never check back in, and I hope the increased traffic isn't keeping regular readers from accessing the site. This is the reason I never posted about Paris Hi1ton or her video -- it's not representative of what I do with the blog.

So what would be representative? Take a look around, and if you like what you see, bookmark and/or blogroll me. Hope to see you back here soon. In the meantime, good luck on your searches.