and Flora Pittsburghensis at
Though the old addresses will continue to work indefinitely, new articles will appear at the new addresses. Update your bookmarks and rewrite your wills.
Since old Pa Pitt is an old-fashioned gentleman, he leaves the management of his Web presence in the hands of his younger friend Dr. Boli. For this auspicious occasion, both sites have had a thorough redesign, with new site logos in Pittsburgh-flag colors. There are still some rough edges: in articles from years ago, for example, some pictures have gone missing, because they were hosted on an image server that no longer hosts them. But the new server gives the sites opportunities they have not had before, and you will already see some of the effects of that newfound freedom.
And now a curious observation. For Father Pitt’s new sites, Dr. Boli installed the same privacy-respecting statistics collector he uses on his own site. It is very simpleminded: it tells how many visitors came to the site and to each individual article, but it does not tell who those visitors were or where they came from. On the day the site first appeared on the Web, the new Pittsburgh Cemeteries recorded 17,857 visitors. It is true that the mere name “Pittsburgh Cemeteries” carries a powerful and universal appeal; but since the site had not yet been announced anywhere, that does seem like a high number. Flora Pittsburghensis had 2,446 visitors its first day—again, without any announcement. What can it mean?
It means that there are far more spammers in the world than there are readers. Most of those spammers are robots, and we are left with the conclusion that the robots already outnumber us. Will the robots rebel and exterminate the human race? Not as long as they remain hypnotized by the fascinating pictures of mausoleums and wildflowers Father Pitt feeds them. It appears that old Pa Pitt and his cameras are all that stand between us and the robot apocalypse.