RIGHT AROUND NOW, my hits counter should be registering its 100,000th visitor. With uncannily precise timing, the counter has gone dead and vanished from my Bravenet account. At first I thought it might be that Bravenet's free counters have a 100K-bug self-destruct mechanism, but it appears that I am not alone with the problem:

My counter stat in my site has changed to a picture that says, "Counter code has changed. Please update your code." But I come here to copy the code and my counter stat is MISSING!

I just checked yesterday and it was still working...

So it seems that this announcement on their support center page, posted today, is probably more relevant:

We are currently experiencing some technical difficulties which may result in your services not working. We are working to fix these issues and expect to have everything resolved shortly. Thanks for your patience and understanding with this matter.

I've registered a "service ticket" and we'll see what happens. Meanwhile, welcome to visitor #100,000, whoever you are and whenever you show up, and boo to Bravenet for their timing.

UPDATE: Well, now the counter is back, but it clearly wasn't counting hits since sometime early on Sunday. Based on past readings for Sunday and Monday, I would guess it lost about 250 hits, so it would have reached 100K later today. But whatever; the milestone should be reached in the next day or two by any reckoning. For what it's worth, PaleoJudaica took 13.5 months to get to 50K hits, but just under eight to get from there to nearly 100K. I've noticed a fairly sharp increase in hits since around the holidays. I thought at the time it was because many people had time off and were spending more of it websurfing. But the spike hasn't dropped off much, so it may be that the advent of new biblioblogs such as Ralph the Sacred River, Serving the Word, the Macintosh Biblioblog, as well as Zeth's Biblioblog aggregator, has increased our overall audience.

In any case, for whatever reasons, thanks for visiting both PaleoJudaica and Qumranica and do keep coming back to both.