Channel 4 reports the site took down a design for a jack-o-lantern with a three-foot-high flame after an aghast state fire marshal's office complained. The Globe said it agreed to delete the flaming pumpkin even though it "added a warning to only attempt it outdoors, away from flammable materials, and with a fire extinguisher at hand."

The Globe rolled out a tweaked boston.com home page. It's quite something. At least on my monitor, the first screen now has six ads and just three stories, six random headlines and half a photo.

Also, for you bloggy types, they've ditched the daily link to a local blog post, but given more emphasis to the Your Town listing of Globe-specific mini-sites on communities that are not in the city whose name still sits in their masthead.

Adam Pieniazek counts them down.

The Herald reports.

I wonder if that means they'll get rid of some of the ads (here's looking at you, tag.contextweb.com) that often slow down page loading?

Oh, yeah, the Times confirms the paper is for sale.

It's one thing to call Matsuzaka a fat, bloated SOB, but quite another to say he got that way by gorging on "dumplings and shumai." So, Pink Hat Hell reports, boston.com has changed the reference in a Tony Massarrotti post to "cheeseburgers."

Word out of boston.com is that they've opened up six more Your Town sites, in Hingham, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Norwell and Scituate. Still not a single "Your Neighborhood" site.

The Boston Globe may be cutting back local news coverage in the city, but out past 128, they've just added a new Your Town page.

Howard Owens, no longer GateHouse Media's online strategist, explains why GateHouse felt it had to sue the Times over boston.com's Your Town sites.

Take a look at boston.com's Theater Arts page this morning:

Via an alert reader who pays attention to the arts.

This report would make you think boston.com was having some issues - of the ten largest newspaper-based Web sites in the U.S. it was the only one to show a drop in traffic for December as compared to the year before.

But as a Globie graciously informs me (graciously because my original headline on this post was "As if the Globe didn't have enough problems"), the number is misleading: boston.com had unusually high traffic in December, 2007 because of that whole 19-0 Patriots/Super Bowl thing (remember those days?).