The criteria I use when selecting blogs for HalfEagle can be found here:
http://blog.halfeagle.com/2008/08/how-does-halfeagle-pick-its-scouting-blogs/

I’m a bit swamped this week, but I’ll do my best to take a look at your blog and get back to you. I don’t promise to add every Scouting blog, but I do promise to send an email with the reasons for my decision.

Thank you, Kevin!

I was wondering how I could get my blog, A Boy Scout’s Blog added to halfeagle. Here is the link http://boyscoutblog.wsr3.net. Please email me with any questions.

> The good news is those excessive hits don’t request the entire page, they just check to see if the URL is a redirect. (With a bandwidth friendly HEAD-type request.)
> Some blog RSS software (like Feedburner) generates new random redirect URLs on a frequent basis and it was causing some blogs posts to show up multiple times on the HalfEagle home page. I added a check to resolve any redirects up front to prevent anyone from accidentally gaming the home page of HalfEagle.
> Unfortunately, I didn’t fully realize how many extra hits that redirect resolution would generate. I’m going to throttle everything back significantly, and look at some other ways of dealing with that problem.

One immediate affect of this throttling back is that it may take longer for new posts to show up on HalfEagle. I tried getting this down to between 10-20 minutes, but I’ve bumped it back up to an hour. This also delays the auto twitter promotion by @halfeaglebot.

I’ve also increased cache durations in a few places and generally improved every bit of code I’ve run across. I sincerely believe in “It’s not a problem, it’s an opportunity.”

There will be more significant code changes when I get back from camp however, because I sincerely believe that a faster update will help promote everyone’s blog entries. Plus, as a blogger myself, I like to see my announcements show up while I still have the entry fresh in my mind.

I also confirmed that the error was not occurring on one of the other blogs that HalfEagle carries, so it might be isolated to just the one site. Please email me if your site seems to be affected and I’ll fix it ASAP.