Sentinel.com blog

The following is one of our favorite  letters to the editor of all time.

Bring Buddha back

I live on the Lower Westside. For many years a green, medium size plaster Buddha has been sitting in my front yard facing east and watching the sun rise for me as I am rarely awake that early.

Friday morning, I went outside to find that my Buddha was gone, taken Thursday night I presume. I am concerned about the person who took him. Perhaps they are not aware of the cosmic law that is, whomever shall purloin another person’s Buddha is developing for themselves some seriously bad Karma. Trust me, no one wants that. Therefore, I suggest that you divest yourself of negativity and bring back Buddha immediately. Thank you.

John Morris, Santa Cruz

Online readers, including the Buddha-kidnapper, you may be able restore balance in the universe. Can you bring back this Buddha?

Santa Cruz Police keep a list of houses in the city that have been cited for loud and unruly instances in the past year. They update the list every two weeks. If you’re searching for a place to live (or a great party), it’s nice to know where the noise is coming from.

Our database with the SCPD’s loud and unruly addresses was down since February, but back up in time for those lining up a place to live in the fall. We’ve also added a handy map:

View Cited for loud and unruly in Santa Cruz in a larger map

We’re working on a story about Thursday night’s raid on Pacific Avenue. We’ll post it on santacruzsentinel.com shortly

Here’s the press release on the raid that involved 49 officers.

One of the most read stories on our site today is about preschool teacher Tiffany Chapman, who described her shock Monday when escaped fugitive Maurice Ainsworth smashed through a locked door and threatened her with a loaded gun.

She was singing nursery rhymes to three babies, including her 8-month-old daughter, when Ainsworth broke down the door and put a gun to her head.

We just added audio from Chapman to the story. Here’s what she told Sentinel reporter Shanna McCord about the moment:

Our website’s readership has never been higher than for the five hours that the armed fugitive was loose in Santa Cruz. We were receiving more than 35,000 page views an hour. Our views for the day of the ordeal were 252,430, sixth best day in our history.

Here’s what the traffic spike looked like:

Here’s the list of all-time best days for the Sentinel:

Aug. 6, 2008:         399,413 – Baby photo contest
Aug. 13, 2009:         307,331 – Lockheed Fire
Aug 14, 2009:         266,804 – Lockheed Fire
Jun 21, 2008         260,111 – Trabing Fire
Sep 10, 2010:         255,386 – San Bruno explosion
Nov. 29, 2010:        252,353  -  Fugitive loose in Santa Cruz
Jun 12, 2008         236,002 – Martin Fire
Jun 20, 2008         212,032 – Trabing Fire
Aug. 5, 2008:         210,808 – Baby photo contest
Nov. 2, 2010:        198,176 – Election

We were first on the story, quickly added a google map of events (which has received more than 100,000 views – not counted above) updated often, received pictures and video by cell phone and from photographers and reporters at the scene. We added a slide show, updated the photo blog and posted an early version of our A1 that evening.

The main story was recommended by more than 3,000 people on Facebook (most I’ve ever seen for a Sentinel story). We also sent out our updates and photos on both Twitter and Facebook and we added more than 50 friends during the day.

For the month of November, we received 3,475,482 page views and had 429,262 unique monthly visitors. That’s up from 2,941,376 views and 355,158 visitors last November. November 2010 was also our biggest month ever for total daily unique visitors. Here’s a graph of what our daily unique visitors looks like since Jan. 1, 2007: