Category Archives: Web Schtuff

7 Quick Takes — Things That Annoy Me on Other Blogs

Posted on by

7 Quick Takes

Granted, I’m in a bit of a foul mood because I have to go in for a venous doppler ultrasound on my leg to check for a clot tomorrow morning. (Update: no clot!) However, I surf through a number of blogs here and on The Simple Woman’s Daybook each week and there seems to be some common threads about what irritates me each week.

–1–

Music players. Usually, I’m reading blogs after Daniel goes to bed, when he’s napping, or when I’m listening to podcasts so a blast of music tends to be ill-timed. They make the blogs load slower and frequently, it’s not even music I *like*. If I want to be listening to “Stronger” by Mandisa (which is on my list of favorite things right after having my fingernails removed with pliers), I’ll have it playing on iTunes.

–2–

Politically or spiritually-motivated counters. Yes, I’m fully aware that since I opened your blog, 123 babies have been aborted. (Actually, I highly doubt the validity of that number given the small number of doctors actually *trained* to perform abortions and the fact that not all Planned Parenthood clinic actually provide the procedure; but that isn’t the issue here.) I’m also aware that the national debt has gone up $1.3 billion dollars in the last hour and that you are of the opinion that 56 people have ended up in Hell. The problem is… I. DON’T. CARE. If I’m on your blog in the first place, it’s probably because I want to see what you have to say in that particular entry or what your Quick Takes are this week, not because I care about your opinions on the abortion issue, the economic status of this country, or your opinions on the salvation of others. And seriously… if I’m coming to your blog from ConversionDiary.Com or The Simple Woman’s Daybook, I probably agree with your pro-life stance or that Jesus is the Way, rendering your counter irrelevant. (Note: I am pro-life so do not leave me angry comments about how I should care more about the pro-life movement. Such comments will be deleted and you will be I.P. banned.)

–3–

Kitsch. It’s great that you have the Miss Sunshine Award, an adopted leopluridon from the Charley the Unicorn Site, and are a member of the Christian Cheerful Sisterhood. However, that schlock is making your sidebar look nasty and it’s contributing to the load time of your blog. Blogger allows you to make “about me” pages. Put all your affiliations and awards there. (Not objecting to a few well-placed images here — it’s the clutter that irritates me.)

–4–

Badly re-sized images. It annoys my inner balance when I see pictures on the sidebar that are obviously not re-sized correctly and are sticking off. It can also obscure the text and detract from your message (if you have one). There’s a great program called Irfanview that you can download for free here. I recommend it. This also goes for images in the main part of your blog.

–5–

LOL Speak. OMG ur blog lookz teh stupidz when u type liek dis. U R not 5teen. Speakz English plz.

–6–

“My Blogs List” on Blogspot sites. The long column of links with the last posting date is dumb and I do realize that it’s a Blogger issue. Still, would it be too hard to have a nice and simple list of links? I don’t care if they’re alphabetical or by type.

–7–

Country theme. It’s way too overdone not to mention that most people tend to overdo it on the kitsch factor. My idea of country simplicity is a white background with a picture of a farm or a window view of gingham curtains. Besides, the country theme is now “urban” because of all the people doing it.

For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at ConversionDiary.Com.

Commenting Quirk

Posted on by

Welcome to all who have come over because of my article refuting George’s take on the myth of the whore of Babylon. Make yourself comfortable and help yourself to something cold from the fridge.

I wanted to let y’all who are commenting know something: if you leave me a long comment, it will automatically go to moderation because it’s one of WordPress’ settings for spam. I think it exists to filter out long posts with tons of links. However, it means that I am not going to see your comment until the next time I happen to open WordPress or the next time I check my email. So… if you’ve commented and aren’t seeing it, be patient. I haven’t deleted it — it’s just waiting for me to approve it.

I do need to respond to some of the comments but I haven’t had time — I was gone over the weekend and right now, I’m trying everything I can to manage the stabbing pain in my right calf until I can get myself to my massage therapist to have her work on it. (I woke up on Friday with what I thought was a pulled muscle. It is not, however, responding to anything conventional.)

That is all.

A Guest Blogging Opportunity

Posted on by

I thought I’d throw this out for my Catholic readers: Michelle at Catholic Unveiled is going on a 4-month mission trip to Mexico and needs some guest posts. I volunteered (even though I’m Lutheran) and I’ll be sending her a few. If you’re interested, here is the post where you can get information.

(I think she’d take non-Catholics as well but the topics are along a Catholic vein.)

Rules for Blogging as Clergy or a Clergy Spouse

Posted on by

If you’ve read my blog for at least five years or more, you know that my husband is a Lutheran pastor and I’m thus a pastor’s wife. A number of my online friends are clergy buddies or people who are married to clergy and I’ve seen bad things happen to people who aren’t judicious in what they put on their blogs or on Facebook. (It’s happened to me too though it was nothing I wrote but rather the fact that I had a blog.) So… in the interest of helping out any clergy hopefuls (and also giving a resource to certain synod staff who read my blog), here are my rules for blogging as clergy or a clergy spouse.

1.) Don’t use your whole name. My last name is pretty searchable and while this blog isn’t the first item that comes up, it does eventually come up on a Google search. Unless you *REALLY* want people (including parishioners) reading everything you write, don’t use your whole name.

2.) Pseudonyms are good. A good clergy blog friend of mine uses pseudonyms for her husband, sons, church, and town. It means that she’s a bit harder to find online if someone does a search for her. While I use my real name, I think creating your own pseudonym is a better idea. Nickname your church(es) and your town (if you live in a small one).

3.) Anything you say can and WILL be used against you so password the good stuff. Had a crappy council meeting? If you blog it, you need to password it. WordPress lets you do that and Livejournal even hides posts that are “friends-only” and will let you filter who sees what. If you go with a CMS like WordPress, title things in a way that doesn’t draw attention to what they might be. For example, “Stupidity at Church Council” probably isn’t a good title. “Frustration” might work better.

4.) Don’t “friend” parishioners or give out your password. If you have a Facebook, consider making a censored one for parishioners so they aren’t privy to your personal life, especially if ANY of your status updates involve church. If you have a blog, don’t give your password out to people in your real life. If those people get pissed at you, you’re opening yourself up for a whole lot of trouble as well as hours of work re-passwording everything.

5.) Don’t use your blog to air the dirty laundry in your parish. If you’re pissed about something and need to get it off your chest, do a private entry. (Both WordPress and Livejournal will let you do that.) This harkens back to rule #3 — your people will get royally irritated if they think that you’re using your blog as a platform to harp about them, so don’t give them a reason to think that you are.

6.) Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to see. We’ve all heard about people losing their jobs or being denied acceptance to Ivy League schools over a stupid picture on Facebook. Your blog functions similarly. People might not be able to access the actual entry but they *can* find it accidentally in a Google search. Don’t put something up there for them to find.

7.) If you’re a clergy spouse, remember that anything you say has the effect of your spouse saying it. I’m rather passionate about a lot of issues and I either have to password my rants or take a milder tone because anything I say will be co-opted as something that my husband said. It isn’t fair but it’s a reality. If you have a rant, password it or put it in a private entry. Better yet, have a separate passworded blog for your ranting — it’s what some of my friends do.

This isn’t a totally humorous entry but it’s one that I thought was important and timely, especially as I’m watching pastor friends venting openly on Facebook and thinking “you really need to protect that….”

Possible Blog Entries

Posted on by

Wouldn’t you know that when I’m home and don’t have Internet access, I can think of a million blog entries to write and when I do have wi-fi access and some time, I can’t write anything?

Here are a couple potential blog topics that have been ruminating in my brain for awhile.

Songs that Bring Back Memories
Rules for Blogging as Clergy (or Clergy Spouses)
Rules for Driving in LA
How to be a Cat in a Household with a Baby
Irritation at Bloglines Shutting Down

OMG… Ten Years!

Posted on by

It’s pretty hard to believe that I’ve been doing the blogging thing for ten years now. I started my journal as an experiment in the summer of 2000 and have kept it going in one form or another since then. Not all the archives are uploaded — it’s an ongoing project that I work on when I have some extra time and a good Internet connection, both things that are lacking these days.

How My Life Has Changed Since Then: When I started blogging, I was a 20 year old college student living at home over the summer. I was dating this guy I’d met over the Internet and working at Barnes & Noble to pay for books and living expenses. Ten years later, I’m married to that guy (8 years now), living in southern California, have a 15 month old son, and have worked a variety of jobs. I’ve lived in 8 different places in 7 different cities/towns in 4 different states. Oh yeah… I also have 18-24 inches less hair than I did in 2000. 🙂

What Blogging Has Done for My Life: It’s been an *interesting* ten years and blogging has given me an outlet to express my thoughts/frustrations/reflections on everything in my life. In my last year of college, I was meeting Crystal, Krissy, and Eileen for the first time. In 2002, blogging kept me sane when we moved to Newark and I was pretty much stuck in the house all day. I made friends through blogs4God (at that time an Internet Christian blog portal) and became a moderator for them in 2003. When we moved to Minnesota and then to Montana, my blogging people became a portable community that I could take from place to place. In these 10 years, I’ve made some really great friends (some of whom I have been able to meet in person) and been able to be part of some amazing experiences in their lives such as rejoicing when someone was able to adopt their daughter from China and being with a friend (by phone and in spirit) at the death of her brother. When Daniel was born, I had an amazing support system in place to help me deal with my stress, grief, and joy and I had people who held my hand from afar when my grandfather passed away.

How My Faith Has Changed: When I started blogging in 2000, I was a neophyte Christian and trying to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. (Philippians 2:12b) Ten years later, my faith and how I express it has really evolved. When I started blogging, I was attending an Episcopal church at home and a Conservative Baptist church at school. (Being Lutheran was a compromise between the two.) I know now that I am bi-ritual (i.e. I can worship in both liturgical and free-form settings) but that my ultimate preference is liturgy. The parts of the Bible that I thought I understood ten years ago mean something entirely to me now. I would say that I’m more conservative theologically now but I can express that conservatism in a more grace-filled way.

How the Internet Has Changed: I got into blogging relatively early and hand-coded my blog at first. In the intervening time, I’ve used: Livejournal, Greymatter, Moveable Type, and b2/Wordpress. b2/Wordpress has been what I’ve used the longest — 7 years combined with WordPress being about 5 years of that. The blogging thing seemed to catch on around 2003 and a lot of the blogs I used to follow have petered out since then. With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, blogging has gotten edged out and I admit that posting to Facebook has made me less likely to blog. On the other hand, blogging is also a way for me to get the junk out (in passworded entries).

What I’m Proud of Having Done: I think the posts I like best are mostly from 2003 and 2004 when I tended to be more reactive and take on more people. Probably my best post was a letter to Dr. Michael Newdow that was cross-posted to blogs4God and caused me to incur the ire of the people at Atheism @ About.Com. I also have some political posts from that time where I took on someone that annoyed me and explained why their point of view was completely and utterly wrong. If nothing else, those posts caused me to figure out a whole lot of diplomatic and polity issues.

What I Probably Shouldn’t Have Done: I probably could have been slightly less vitriolic about my utter dislike and disdain of our ex-president Bush. (Those who knew me back in 2003 are probably laughing hard enough to choke at that statement.)

What I Hope For the Next Ten Years: I hope that we’ll be more settled in a place where Jon has a call and that Daniel will be a happy and healthy 11 year old. I’m not against having more kids but if we do, I’m hoping for a daughter named Hannah Grace. As far as blogging, I hope that I’ll have two Obama administrations to blog through and that whoever follows him is somewhat competent. Peacefulwaters.Org is renewed for the next two years and Grace-Filled.Net will be renewed for at least another year in September. I have no idea what will happen in that time but God-willing, I’ll be blogging through it all.