Due to a drop in comment spam recently, I lowered some of my spam barriers to allow for easier posting — only to find that some comments which should have been automatically approved went into the moderation queue. Everything is now back to where it was last week, and that should end any problems with posting.
Category Archives: Housekeeping
3rd anniversary
On February 22, 2005, this blog went live. Three years and 1,132 posts later, where the heck are we?
The blog continues to be reasonably healthy. Last month, this site saw just under 4,000 unique visitors; during calendar year 2007, the site received approximately 38,000 unique visitors. By the standards of the Big Blogs, these are tiny numbers — the Big Blogs get tens of thousands of unique visitors each day. But for a personal blog on liberal religion, over a hundred unique visitors a day is fine and dandy.
Of greater interest is the current healthy state of the liberal religious blogosphere. UUpdates, a site that aggregates Unitarian Universalist blogs, now tracks some 323 blogs. Many of these blogs are well worth reading — in fact, there are so many good ones that I can’t keep up with all the blogs I like. I’m also finding more and more liberal Christian, humanist, liberal Jewish, and Pagan blogs out there that are worth reading.
What I continue to miss about the liberal religious blogosphere is the lack of face-to-face contact. Here in Boston, Unitarian Universalist bloggers have managed to gather for an annual picnic; and Unitarian Universalist bloggers typically meet a couple of times at General Assembly. As we see more and more Unitarian Universalist bloggers, my hope is that we start building regional networks — ideally, we’d include not just bloggers, but those who read the blogs as well; and not just Unitarian Universalists, but other religious liberals, too. And ideally, we will become more place-based, instead of being place-less.
Correction
In an earlier post, I stated that the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Board of Trustees cut off funding to the Steering Committee of Young Religious Unitarian Universalists. This statement was incorrect. The cut-off of funding to continental YRUU was not an action taken by the Board, it was taken by UUA staff. A statement on this issue has been issued by UUA staff today: Link.
In emotionally-charged issues like this one, misinformation can be harmful, and I apologize to my readers that I did not check my facts before writing my post.
Update: A denominational politics wonk has informed me that UUA staff makes funding decisions, which are reviewed by the Board’s Finance Committee but rarely challenged in practice. The funding issue should be seen as separate from YRUU’s status as a sponsored organization; sponsored organizations are designated by the Board, not UUA staff; and at this point, YRUU maintains its status as a sponsored organization.
New index
It’s time for end-of-the-year improvements to this blog. With more than a thousand posts, finding relevant information on this blog has become difficult. So I’ve created an index, using tags to link the index directly to relevant entries. Entries from February, 2005, through February, 2006, are now indexed.
Your comments on the index are welcome, especially if you see things I’ve missed or errors I’ve made.
Messy upgrade, sorry
Yesterday I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, and didn’t do a very good job of it. Because I forgot to upload one key file, the appearance of the blog has been off-kilter for 24 hours. If things still look hinky in your Web browser, try reloading this page, and if that doesn’t work (Safari users, you know who you are), empty your browser’s cache (e.g., go to the “Safari” menu, select “Empty cache”).
Excuses, excuses
I’ve been meaning to implement “tags” on this blog — tags are a kind of keyword that allow for improved searching within the blog. I wanted to add tags to provide a kind of index, to allow me (and you, or any other reader) to find worthwhile things quickly among the all the junk that has accumulated in the 1000+ posts here.
It proved to be more time-consuming than I had envisioned. I spent three hours yesterday making a false start, and then figuring out how to fix the mess I’d made. I spent another two hours today implementing the fix, and then beginning to add tags to the earliest posts on the blog. That used up all the spare time I have had for the past two days, and so I haven’t had any time to write a real post. Excuses, excuses.
You’ll find a “tag cloud” at the bottom of the sidebar on the main page. Click on any phrase or keyword there, and you will get all the posts that I have tagged with that phrase or keyword. As of now, I’ve only added tags to posts dated February-December, 2005 — eventually, all posts will be tagged.
Post 1000
Near as I can tell, this is the one thousandth post on this blog. That means it’s time for a look backwards and a look to the future.
Looking back
Back on 22 February, 2005, this blog made its first appearance. I originally called it “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog.” In the winter of 2005, the Unitarian Universalist blogosphere had expanded to some forty-six blogs. Forty-six! I thought that was way too many Unitarian Universalist blogs, so my original title was meant to imply something cynical like “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist Blog, As If the World Needs Another One.” There was also just the faintest echo of geek jargon. (If you’re curious, you can see those 46 blogs on Philocrites’s “Guide to UU Blogs” as updated on February 14, 2005, from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: Link.)
Beginnings: In the beginning, this blog was merely an experiment. I was at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois (UUSG), as a one-year interim associate minister, and we were trying to come up with new avenues of communication for that church. Just for fun, I set up a blog on my AOL account, to see if a blog might provide another useful avenue of communication. I didn’t announce the blog’s existence to the congregation, yet within days, members of the congregation found the blog, wrote comments on it, and told me that they liked reading it. Suddenly, it wasn’t an experiment any more. I found myself writing a church blog for people I knew, members and friends of UUSG.
A second-tier UU blog: When I moved to New Bedford, Mass., in August, 2005, to serve the First Unitarian Church here, I discovered that very few people from my new church read my blog. I began writing for a mainstream UU readership. I moved to my own domain name in October, 2005, and within a year my readership grew significantly, from 600 unique visitors a month, to over 2,500 unique visitors a month. For a short period of time, “Yet Another Unitarian Universalist” was a moderately influential blog in the UU blogosphere — not a first-tier blog, but definitely in the second tier. My readership peaked in May, 2007, at 3,600 unique visitors; my Technorati rating peaked at about the same time.
An online notebook: While my readership was peaking, I found my interests changing. Last srping, I stopped trying to be a mainstream UU blog, and began to write more for myself. Now I use this blog as a notebook where I can think through ideas in public. Last April, I started videoblogging, and even though very few readers actually watch the videoblog entries (typically, a videoblog entry gets about 50 views), I still do it because videoblogging is fun for me. With these changes in emphasis, my readership dropped dramatically, to about 2,800 unique visitors a month as of September. However, the number of comments has increased, and best of all some people from my own church here in New Bedford have begun reading the blog regularly. I feel much more connected to my readership once again.
Looking to the future
A few new directions for this blog may emerge over the next few months.
Right now, I’m in the process of outlining a major writing project. Back when I was nineteen, I left college and spent a year working in a lumberyard. Recently, for no apparent reason, memories of that year began flooding back, and after writing pages of notes on those memories I began to realize that I was looking at a book’s worth of spiritual autobiography. I don’t particularly want to write a book at this point in my life, so instead I may simply post some of that material here.
Another big writing project seems to be bubbling up as well. I’m idly working on writing out a coherent system for religious education in liberal churches. At the moment, this project seems to want to follow the format used in Christopher Alexander’s book on architecture, A Pattern Language. Maybe I’ll be writing a “pattern language” for religious education? We’ll see what comes of this.
You may see more and more of two these two big writing projects here on this blog. But I can guarantee that some of the old, familiar features will continue as well. I’ll still write long, nerdy posts about birds and other local critters. My irrepressible alter ego, Mr. Crankypants, will no doubt make periodic appearances. I’ll keep on videoblogging, just for the sheer fun of it. After all, this blog is my hobby, and it’s supposed to be fun!
As always, let me know what you think.
New look
Over the next couple of days, I’ll be making some changes to the appearance of this blog.
I’ll be switching to a fixed-width page, to match my main Web site (something that I’ve been planning to do for ages). You’ll see a smaller font on the first page which will make easier to scan articles to find one you want to read — just click on the header to any individual post to show that post in a larger, easier-to-read font.
All navigation will be shifted to a sidebar on the right-hand side, and I’ll be making some changes to the way the navigation works. I’ll be adding tags sometime in the next month, so posts will be marked with both a general category, and a more specific tag (or tags), so you can more easily find articles on the subjects that interest you. It will take at least a month for the navigation to settle down.
Behind the scenes, I have switched to a moderately-tweaked version of the default theme for WordPress (my blogging software). The default theme will allow me to use all the new php calls included in the latest upgrades of WordPress, without me having to revise a whole lot of code. I’m also upgrading to the latest version of WordPress to take advantage of widgets and other time-saving devices, again so I don’t have to revise a whole lot of code. The less time I have to spend revising code, the more time I have to spend writing something worth reading.
Note that during the upgrades and changes, the blog might not be accessible for short periods of time. Safari users, you may have to “Empty cache” under the “File” menu in order to see the changes correctly. If you see any other problems, please send email to me at danrharper AT aol DOT com.
Minor updates
Today, I devoted what free time I had to working on some long-standing issues on the main Web site.
- I added a few new readings to the collection of responsive readings, as well as fixing the page navigation a little.
- On the quote page, I added some new quotes, got rid of some old ones.
- A few other minor odds and ends added, subtracted, repaired, updated.
If you have any comments or complaints about the changes, or about anything else on the main Web site, here’s your chance — leave your thoughts in the comments to this post.