Since starting this site 8 months ago, the administrative load has increased quite a lot. We are now receiving over 2 and half million pageviews a month and as a result of this, the administrative tasks have increased - this has meant that I am not able to comment as much as I would like on the lists. So, this has prompted me to put together this list of things you can do to help the site out - these are all things that will make my job easier- giving me more time to comment and write lists!

10. Wear our Merchandise

As you should all know by now, we have a line of our own merchandise! When you buy something from our store it helps us in two ways:

1) We make a small amount of money off each item you buy
2) When you use the items, you are publicizing the site!

In addition - you get the benefit of owning some very exclusive and cool merchandise! Everyone is a winner!

You can get to the store by clicking this link.

(Read the rest of this list…)

Not so long ago we did a list on the Top 10 Most Commented On Lists. It was a moderately popular list (as all our meta lists are) which starred as its top item the Top 10 Stephen King Books at 240 comments. I am pleased to say that that list is now only 9th on our list of the most commented. It seemed appropriate to revisit this topic after Christmas - especially as we move in to our second 6 months of existence as a site! So, here are our overall top 10 most commented on lists to date.

10. Top 10 Most Evil Men

Total Comments: 239

This is an interesting one - on the previous list of most popular comments, the Top 10 Most Evil Women ranked as number 3 with 184 comments. Now it is no where to be seen while the evil men have made an appearance. As you can probably imagine, George Bush Junior made an appearance in the comments and that is always guaranteed to incite a riot. And a riot we had! Loose_Cannon, Bucslim, and Frank had a rather excited debate about 9/11, Bush, and someone called Dick Cheney (I don’t know who he is). Fun reading - be sure to check it out! Oh - and whether you like it or not, Josef Stalin is still number 1 on the list!

View the list

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Over the 7 months that the site has been running, things have gone pretty smoothly. There have, however, been a few occasions where mistakes were made that needed correcting. This is my list-of-humility where I tell you the biggest mistakes I have made! Consider it my Lenten penance!

10. Not Citing Sources

I think we have all seen the result of not quoting sources - 100 comments bitching about plagiarism! It turns out that Wikipedia has a policy that you must open source any document that quotes even the tinniest bit of it and must cite every page you quote. I didn’t know that when we started out and a LOT of internet police decided to tell me! I am so sorry! I now open source any document that may even smell of citations from Wikipedia so as to not offend the Wikipedia police. (image above: Jfrater upholding copyright law).

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For those of you who are new to the site, each month I write a post to explain some of the stuff that is happening behind the scenes. This is our February edition.

8. New Design and Logo

Our Logo competition was highly successful and resulted in the selection of a great new logo. As a result, I was able to put together a new design of the entire site, taking in to account some of the things that have bothered me about the old design. Most noticeable is the new color scheme and layout; I have removed the left hand panel which has given us a much greater amount of space for the body of our lists.

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As regular readers will have noticed, the site has now been redesigned. Because of the high cost of this kind of work, I have done the redesign myself - this means we have no new features - just the new look. As part of the redesign I have removed some ads and moved the others around in order to make them fit better on the site. The end result is, I think, a lot cleaner.

Shop Open for Business

We have now opened our merchandising shop. Feel free to browse our items and see whether there is anything you would like. The shop takes Paypal and all major credit cards.

Visit the List Universe Shop

Please let me know what types of merchandise you would like to buy and whether you want it with or without (or both) the URL (ie, just the logo, or logo and text).

The new color scheme should make the site appear more credible to first time readers and by using blue for the links it should be easier to use.

If you have any complaints or problems, please tell us in the comments here.