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”).
Tag Archives: excuses excuses
On top of everything else…
December is a busy month for people who work in churches — even those of us who work in post-Christian Unitarian Universalist churches still have lots of Christmas madness to contend with.
On top of the usual Christmas madness, here at First Unitarian we still have a number of building improvements going on. When I first started working in churches, the old battle-scarred religious professionals all said, Make sure you never have building projects going on during December, because it’s just too much — yet here we are, with building projects still going on.
On top of Christmas madness and building projects, we’ve been experiencing 20-30% increase in Sunday attendance each month since May. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — growth is a stressful thing for churches to undergo.
On top of Christmas madness, building projects, and the stress of growth, I’ve got whatever virus has been infecting everyone here in New Bedford. It’s one of those lingering viruses that sticks with you for weeks — I’ve been sick off and on for over a month — and it’s gotten so many people that supposedly one of the clinics in the city had to close down at noon one day because they had so many sick people wanting treatment.
The upshot of all this is that I don’t have time to write anything tonight. I’m going to bed instead.
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.
Housekeeping
I have just completed transferring all posts from this blog’s old site, at American OnLine, to this new site. A few glitches intervened:
- A big apology to the people who get notified of new posts to this blog via email. They found themselves with over a hundred email notifications in their in-box in the last 24 hours. Please accept my apologies — and sorry you have to delete all those email messages.
- No word yet on how this affected those who have an RSS feed. I had understood that backdating posts means no RSS feed — if I’m mistaken, my apologies to you as well.
- One or two posts got away from me, and appeared momentarily on the main blog before I corrected their dates. Sorry for any confusion.
But now the transfer is over — it’s been a mess for some of my readers — and a mess for me as I transferred the old posts one by one, by hand, from AOL’s kludgey blog system. Thank you for your patience.
One last thing — the old AOL site will stay up for a few more months, and then it will disappear.
Web site revision, blog comments
Just finished revising the main Web site. The new, simpler design, should make it easier to navigate. You will find some new content has also been added, more to follow. Your comments and critiques are always welcome; please use the email address listed in the menu at left.
Web site stats for January show an uptick in viewed (i.e., non-robot) traffic: 757 “unique visitors” for the month of December, 883 January. It’s very nice to have more readers — thank you all! — but there’s been an associated increase in comment spam. I’ve been so vigorous about deleting comment spam, I may have deleted legitimate comments in error. If that happens to you, please accept my apologies and send the comment in question to me via email.