Punching Kitty has been around, bringing St. Louis news to your lookin’ balls, for over three years now. (Technically our birthday was on Saturday, the 14th, but today’s good enough for us.) As with previous years, here’s the numbers:

• 3 years
• 1,648 articles
• 2,422 different “tags”
• Well over a million visitors.
• 4, maybe 5, bastard groupie kids

That’s a pretty great run so far, and while this last year was particularly challenging with all the travel we had to do for the “day job”, we’re excited to keep going for a little while longer. While we’re here, blabbing about ourselves, we should answer the top three most  common questions we get about the site:

_Q: Why the name Punching Kitty? _

A: It’s funny sounding, and the last thing we wanted to do was to have some lame reference to St. Louis or the area in our name like “river”, “arch”, or “lou”.

Q: Are you going to do a podccast?

A: I would only move to doing a different medium (read: something other than writing) if I 100% knew I could do it just the way I envision it and in a way that wouldn’t take away from the site.

Q: How long are you going to do Punching Kitty?

Until I, or the majority of you all, get bored with it. Whichever comes first.

In other, semi-related and already obvious news, we are also relaunching the site with a new design today. Punching Kitty, from the very beginning, has believed in a design that is clean, uses easy to read dark text on a white background, has big photos, and have our name super huge on the top of every page. This design is an amplification of all of those ideals. Here are the highlights:

Categories

You should notice a dramatic simplification of our categories. We now have only 6: “Happening” (Current, generic news), “Media” (internet, local news, etc), “Crime” (duh), “Sports” (duh), “Going Out” (local shows, events, etc) and “Politics” (All capitalism and political stuff). They are all prominently linked in the header, and this should make the categories far more useful and function as subsections of the site going forward.

New Tip Form

The tip form has been redesigned and along with allowing more information as well as an extra photo (you can now attach up to 4), it also allows for a clear way to contact for things like the site being broken or corrections.

Featured Posts

The selected featured posts are now headlines at the top of the home page. Looks cleaner and less images for you to download.

Advertisements

There is far less advertisements on the site with this new redesign and that’s not be accident. We really wanted the content to be the focus, and since the goal here is to entertain and inform rather than get rich, it made a lot of sense to minimize them down to the two units on the right. Our hope is that we can soon fill these slots with some quality ads for local businesses or universal products.

Comments

We’re all in with Facebook comments. While the over-all number of comments per day is down, they seem to be of higher quality and less shit-disturbing than previously so they’re here to stay. You can now see a link to the comments right there on the home page for each post.

Internet Explorer 6

We’re not even sure why we have this here because if you’re using the browser version of that crust that forms in the corner of old people’s mouths then you can’t see this, but just for completeness sake: We no longer support IE 6. The 36 of you that came using that browser in the last month need to figure that shit out for yourselves.

More to Come

We’re still working on it and refining it as we go along, so please if you see anything broken or just a suggestion let us know via the contact form.