Odd Bits - Renegade Edition

I mentioned my love of the Steelers “Renegade” stadium video in my post about attending the Steelers/Chargers game in October. Well, friend of Darwinfish and very cool blogger ErinPatricia dug up an NFL Films piece on how the Renegade video came to be and posted it on her site. It covers how the video guy thought it up, how it was first used in the Steelers/Browns playoff game in 2002 and how it became a home-field legend. There is also material from Styx’s Tommy Shaw on the genesis of the actual song.

ErinPatricia was also kind enough to link to the video I shot of the, well, video and offered up a thank you shout-out to yours truly. You owe it to yourself to check out this post!

Milestone
I also mentioned last week that I’m a spreadsheet geek and stats junkie. One of the things I track is my blog traffic. I do this manually on a spreadsheet, as well as rely on the outstanding service StatCounter.com to provide hit by hit information. I don’t do this to compete with anyone, but I do like to look for trends and patterns, as well as get a feel for what’s going on and who’s out there reading.

I only mention any of this because last week my humble little blog hit a milestone… I got my 1000th hit. Now I know that’s really not very much… so many of you have your own sites and have racked up waaaaaay more traffic than that.

This is meaningful to me because of the way it has happened. My first attempt at a website lasted just under 2 years and I never topped 300 hits. Granted, it wasn’t very good, and I didn’t post very often and the platform was clunky, so it pretty much floundered.

I had high hopes for this new project when I started it in February with a more aggressive posting rhythm and better graphics. Still, by the beginning of September, I was only at around 260 hits. (Thank you, Mom and Dad, for 240 of them.)

But in September, I began making contact with a number of other bloggers, many from Pittsburgh, but not necessarily. Things really began to look up from there. Not only were my new friends reading and commenting on my rants and ramblings, they were providing me with such good examples of what could be done with a blog. And I went from 260 hits to 1000 in 2 months. Like I said, that’s not much for a lot of my blogging friends, but to me that’s unthinkable.

I want to thank you for reading… as Bobcat Goldthwaite used to say, “thank you for encouraging my behavior.” Knowing that you are checking in here regularly makes me want to always have something waiting for you. I still can’t promise something every day, but I’ll try to do at least a solid 3-4 posts a week. And I promise that this will be the last post about hits… at least until 10,000.

And in one last ode to my numbers-geekdom, I get to do this post on 11/11. That’s just a fun date to write! The best, in fact, until we hit 2011. I won’t have had that much fun since 9/9/99.