Our contact form hasn’t worked in months. Oops.

We realized this week that we haven’t gotten any emails from our contact form in literally months. Which is odd, if you really think about it, but I guess not odd enough to invite an investigation.

So, if you sent us ANYTHING in the last 3-4 months and we didn’t respond to you, it’s probably because we hate you we didn’t receive it. So sorry. Our email addresses on the the contact page (scroll down) still work. We are also impervious to spam, in case you were curious.

Accept our sincere apologies. Or don’t. But either way, please resend anything we didn’t respond to.

Teaching our “About” page how to ride a bike

It’s time we grew up a little. We’ve been developing Monday Night Brewery for over two years now, and yet we were still content with the same About page from 2006. This simply cannot stand.

We’ve taken a stab at revising it. That’s not to say it won’t change again. Joel unfortunately has the admin password to our website, and so he might sneak in late at night and add some expletives. Silly Joel…

MNB makes for some sorely disappointed Googlers

I try to keep my eye on where our millions and millions of visitors come from each day. Yesterday we got a fair amount of Google traffic (read “a few clicks”) from the phrase “Craft Beer Marketing Strategy.” Interested, I went to investigate. Here’s what I found (click for larger view):

The good news? We’re the number one hit (today and yesterday, at least). But I feel bad for all those Google folk clicking on our link hoping to find some silver bullet marketing plan for a craft brewery. Sure, we talked about our marketing plan briefly in our last post, but all we really said was that we HAVE one. I have no doubt that we’ll drop off in the rankings as time wears on and we throw up some new posts.

And let’s be honest, we’re not talking about 100′s of people searching for this term every day.

MNB is Moving

Don’t worry, we’re not moving to somewhere lame like Delaware.  We’re just moving our site over to a new bigger, better, faster server this evening.  What this means to you:

• Quicker, more reliable load times when you click on all the amazing pictures of me
• No downtime (we were getting death threats from our fans last time the site went down)
• Better beer (site loads faster, we waste less time on it, we spend more time brewing beer…I think the logic works)

Also, don’t post any comments between now and tomorrow or else they’ll be lost in never never land as the database will be in transition from one server to the other.  BTW, we’re thinking about creating a never never land feature as a permanent one we could use selectively for certain commentors on the site (and Chris, maybe you can patent that for us).

Get a text alert about brewing every Monday

We get a lot of emails every Sunday or Monday asking if we’re brewing that Monday. The answer is usually “Most definitely!” but there have been a few (sad) times when we’ve had to cancel. But wouldn’t it be great to know ahead of time, without having to email?

To keep you guys informed, we’re starting a text message service to let you know if we’re brewing on any given Monday. If you’d like to sign up, us the form below, or go here. We promise we’ll never use your cell number for evil (Joel might though, so we’ll keep the numbers away from him). You can opt out at any time.

Isn’t technology great?

Stop all that jibber-jabber

UPDATE: Screw it. Experiment over. If it ain’t broke, don’t try to explain it to Jeff. That’s my motto.

You may have noticed that all of the comments have disappeared. This is true. We’re experimenting with a new comment system, Disqus, that theoretically allows us more customization and control over the comments. Unfortunately we (I) haven’t quite figured out how to import the old comments into the new system.

During this experiment, which could last indefinitely if successful, I suggest you create an account with Disqus if you don’t have one already. Of course, if you’re a “technology have,” you already have an account. For which I give you a hardy congratulations.

If you’re not a “technology have,” don’t worry. Joel isn’t either. It only takes a couple seconds to create an account. Either way, let us know what you think of the new commenting system.

RSS and beer

Beer blog aggregators are great. It used to be there was only one good option: Really Simple Beer Syndication. The most comprehensive beer blog resource I’ve run across. Unfortunately, it’s not all that customizable, and it seems like any ol’ beer blog can make the cut. Now there’s a new option.

AllTop has a new “beer” category. BTW, AllTop is awesome for non-beer related topics as well. It’s user-friendly ? you can delete blogs with a single click ? and is organized by blog (instead of by most recent posts, like most aggregators). Last, AllTop added us as one of the top beer blogs. We’re at the bottom. Yup, keeeeep scrolling. Almost there.

Not cool.