Glancing back at July, looking forward into August

July was a very robust month for AmericanPapist, it's second-busiest month ever, in fact, behind only April 2008, when Pope Benedict visited and I was making regular media appearances.

August might be a bit slower for a couple reasons.

First, Pope Benedict is on vacation, so the amount of Vatican-related news decreases when most of the Vatican curia (and basically the entire city of Rome, for that matter) take off work as well.

Second, to mirror that lull, I'm planning on being on the road from about now until August 11th.

Blogging from the road will be light, and I've found that the story content and sources tends to switch disproportionally during these times from topics I go out and find to topics you find and send to me.

That's right, instead of the time-intensive task of combing the news feeds and bugging the regular AmP-sources for quality content, I'll be looking at my email inbox for tips when deciding what to post, during those occasional moments when I steal myself away from beaches, boats and friends.

The upswing of this is that such stories tend to stay on the mainpage longer because updating is less frequent.

So: "thomas [at] americanpapist [dot] com." Help me keep AmP humming along even as the summer wanes!

Thank you.