Recently in Meta-Blogging Category

Starting sometime last night, my blog started getting a lot of hits.  By "a lot," I mean more than three times its normal hits in a day.  I also started noticing that a lot of the traffic was coming from Facebook and Twitter.  So doing a bit of research, I discovered that Christopher Yuan, co-author or "Out of a Far Country," tweeted a link to the first post I wrote reviewing that book and posted the same link to his Facebook page.

Honest review of ‪#OutofaFarCountry‬ from a gay man who's a self-proclaimed witch! - http://yuan2.us/29

I'll be a bit honest, I'm a but curious and concerned why he felt it was necessary or appropriate to bring up the fact that I'm a witch, but I'm still thankful that he promoted my review (and I hope many of his readers read all the posts on the topic, not just the first and "flattering" post he linked to).  After all, as one of his own commenters on Facebook said, "any press is good press."

So to Christopher, I say thank you.  To those of you who found my blog through Christopher, I say welcome.  I hope you find what I wrote informative and thought-provoking, even if you don't agree with me.  And I hope you'll stick around to read some of the other stuff I've written.

I plan on doing one last follow-up post on Christopher's and his mother's book, which I hope to have up later today.  It's something that caught my eye in one of the final chapters, and I want to talk about it.

Hello all!

Man, I've been silent for months now.  In some ways, it's a shame that I've allowed this blog to remain untouched after spending November and December working so hard to get a regular schedule going.  But alas, I felt it was necessary.  Trying to keep it going through January -- when I was completely unmotivated due to memories bringing up personal emotional issues (I'm fine now, thanks for asking) would have been disastrous, I feel.  At that point, keeping the blog going started to feel like an obligation of drudgery rather than something of I enjoy.  So rather than totally kill my own love for my blog, I decided to take a break.

I hope to pick this blog back up again, so I appreciate anyone who is willing to keep it in their newsreaders or on their blogrolls.  I won't make any promises of when or how frequently I will return right now, as my attentions have also been focused elsewhere.  During my absence here, I started a new blogging project, which I'm really getting into.  Unfortunately, due to the nature of that project, I'm required to do it under anonymity.  That means that I am unable to let you all know where or how to find it.  Sorry.

I'm also trying to get back into writing more, which means my Writing.Com portfolio is slowly starting to see some action.  (My apologies to the prudes and those just not interested in male-to-male sex, but most of the stuff I'm working on right now is sexual/erotic fiction.)  I also just updated my writing-specific blog over there with an entry about one advantage visual media has over the written word.  I encourage you to check it out, though I warn you that it relies heavily on spoilers to the movie The Sitter.

I hope you all are well. Drop me a comment and let me know what's new with you.

As is somewhat typical for bloggers, I wanted to consider my past year of blogging today and look forward to my blogging goals and vision for the future.

Since I started this blog in 2004, I've been a sporadic blogger at best.  I would have periods of time where I would post regularly -- and even multiple times a day, only to be followed by long periods -- occasionally measured in months -- of total silence.  Given the personal things that were going on in my life at the beginning of this year, the year began with one of those extended periods of silence.  I eventually got back to blogging sporadically, though.

In October, something happened that inspired me to make some changes here.  Former Conservative offered me the opportunity to serve him as a guest-blogger over at his place while he went away.  That opportunity rekindled my love of blogging.  As I began to get feedback over there and enjoyed the attention, I began to realize what got me started blogging and what I had almost forgotten about -- readers.

I'll admit that because guest-blogging allowed me to see FC's site statistics, I found myself a bit envious.  Because of FC's focused and disciplined blogging schedule, he had managed to garner a consistent following that blew me away.  This rediscovered joy of feedback and envy pushed me to make some changes, primarily developing a regular schedule.  Since then, I've made a commitment to putting up a blog post every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.[1]  Since implementing this policy, I've only failed to keep this schedule for one day (December 26), and I'm already seeing positive results, as the graphs I've included with this post shows.

This year, I've also added book reviews and book analyses to my blogging activities.  I've also sought to standardize the days that I write about the books I'm looking at more closely.  At this point, I intend to keep Mondays as a day to blog about "Raised Right" until I am finished with that book.  Fridays will similarly be dedicated to working through "The Visitation."

I'm also looking at the topics I blog about.  One of the things that I will admit is that I don't think I"ll ever be focused enough to be a "single topic" blogger.  My interests tend to be rather eclectic and my blog will continue to reflect that.  I enjoy being able to discuss religious issues, issues important to QUILTBAG[2] people, and my recent foray's into feminist thought and issues important to women. I'm also hoping to continue writing personal posts and even exploring more about the topic of codependency in general and my own struggles with and recovery from it in particular.

I will also be re-evaluating my blog schedule at some point.  I've already been thinking that I'd really like to blog every day.  After all, that would give me two more posts a week to cover the wide variety of topics I want to talk about.  However, I've decided to get at least another month or two under my belt with the current schedule.  Five posts a week right now is pretty comfortable to me right now, at least most weeks.  However, there have been a couple times that I struggled to meet that schedule.  Also, given some of the topics I want to blog about, I think the time and energy I need to invest in some posts is going to increase.  So it's in my best interests to maintain my current schedule for now.

Any and all readers are invited to leave a comment offering their thoughts and suggestions.  If you have an opinion on my blogging schedule or my content (what you currently like, what you'd like to see (more of), etc.), please let me know.  You're welcome to offer such feedback any time you feel like it, but here's a clear chance to do so.

Happy New Year.  May 2012 be bright and blogworthy.

Notes:
[1]  I took this a step further and set a specific time to put posts up each day (9am Eastern on Saturday and 12pm Eastern the rest of the days).  Over the holidays, I've had a few late posts, but I do try to keep to this as well.

[2]  One of the things that I want to start exploring in my personal time is trans* issues.  This is both due to the fact that I'm finding myself wanting to gain a better understanding of those issues and a desire to quit being one of those gay male bloggers who claims to blog about LBGT issues and yet only ever seems to talk about gay male sexuality and issues related to gay men.

Having said that, I also note that I have a lot of learning to do when it comes to trans* issues.  As such, any upcoming posts are likely to be of the "here's something interesting I've just learned and I'm trying to understand it better" rather than offering anything that should be considered even remotely authoritative on the topic.

After some thought, I've decided that I'm going to do a deconstruction -- if you can still call it a deconstruction if you find more about the book that you like than you dislike -- of another book by Frank Peretti.

I've read a total of five Peretti books.  Each one of them is slightly different in some way.  This Present Darkness is about the war between angels and demons as it plays out in a small town.  Piercing the Darkness, its sequel, is also about angels battling demons, but this time the main focus is the battle over a particular soul (though it did have a swipe at the public education system, which was a popular topic at the time I was reading it due tot he emergence of outcomes based education).

The third book that I read was Prophet, which was not about angels and demons but about a journalist who found himself living a "prophetic" (in the terms of warning others of the consequences of their misdeeds) vocation.  The book mostly focused on the evils of the (liberal, of course) media and abortion.

The fourth book that I read was The Oath.  It was a strange book in that it was far more a Horror book than the others.  While it got preachy about the nature of sin, there was also no clear connections to actual spiritual movements (at least not that I'm aware of) like the first three were.  I often joked that The Oath seemed more like Peretti contracted Stephen King to write a book for him in comparison to the others I had read.

I should note that I read these four books when I was in high school, when I still considered myself a fundamentalist Christian.  As such, I read them as a member of Peretti's target audience.

I didn't read my fifth book, The Visitation until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, long after I became a witch and devotee of Freyja.  In many ways, I suppose that's why i liked the book.  In this book, Peretti turned his critical eye away from "outsiders" and turned it upon his own religious subculture.  As a former member of that same subculture, I appreciated his look.

I've decided that I want to do an in-depth analysis of The Visitation.  As I said, I'm not sure I can call it a deconstruction, as many of the parts that I will be exploring are places where I actually identify and agree with Peretti's thoughts.  However, given the nature of the main plot, which I wasn't as impressed with, I don't expect my comments to be entirely glowing, either.

I'm also hoping that it might be interesting to compare this book with This Present Darkness.  Who knows, maybe it'll even spark up some sort of discussion between Yamikuronue and myself as we compare our experiences of our respective Peretti books.

This morning, my "signing off" post went up over at Confessions of a Former Conservative.  I won't post an excerpt here, as there's no notable text in my farewell and expression of gratitude.  I will, however, encourage any of my readers who don't already check out CoaFC on a regular basis to go take a peak.  I left the community over there a little present.  ;)

Guest-blogging over there has inspired me.  Beyond merely getting the creative juices flowing, it has inspired me to get more disciplined and serious about blogging here.  As such, I'm hoping to implement a few new practices in my blogging here:

1.  I will start trying to keep a regular blogging schedule.  I will try to post something every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, as well as a post on the weekend.  I figure four posts a week should be relatively doable.

2.  I will resist the urge to rapid-fire post entries when I get into one of my manic blogging moods.  Instead, I will save up extra posts and (providing the functionality actually works with my version of MT) schedule them to post over however many days.

3.  I will create a facebook page for this blog.  I'm finding that doing this seems to have helped FC a great deal.

So Friday, I should have something new up.  In fact, it'll probably be a follow-up post relating to my guest-posts at CoaFC.

And in other good news, it turns out that another favorite blogger of mine is considering asking me to fill in for her when she goes on vacation.  It'd be rather cool if I get a rep for being a guest-blogger.  And if it keeps me going here, all the better.

My final day of guest-blogging at Confessions of a Former Conservative is being met with My enemy's pawn is still just a pawn to me.  Here's the teaser:

Of course, I told myself that I didn't hate these Pagan people.  After all, they ultimately were not the enemy, and I was no Jack Chick.  I understood that these poor peers of mine were mere dupes of Satan, pawns of the enemy that were being used.  I didn't hate them.  I did not spew venom at them directly, but at their invisible masters, of whom they were completely unaware.

My stint over at Confessions of a Former Conservative continues with When losing your religion involves losing more than that.  Here's a snippet to pique your curiosity:

Beyond that, you might have no sense of who you are, because everything you based your identity on is now gone.  So in addition to not knowing how to relate to anyone from your past or new friends you might make, you find yourself trying to figure out what it means to be you all over again.

While I've lapsed into silence here at my blog (something I hope to remedy soon), I'm spending a few times as a guest-blogger over at Confessions of a Former Conservative.  My first post there talks about fundamentalism as an all consuming identity.  Here's a brief excerpt:

Granted, my story is probably not typical in the fact that not every fundamentalist gets as involved in leadership roles as I did.  However, the pattern of increasing involvement in church activities is pretty standard.  It may be another small group Bible study.  It may be some outreach ministry, like going door to door or handing out tracts for Halloween.  But it's simply assumed that "church stuff" -- a term used to great effect by Frank Paretti in his book, The Visitation -- will continue to consume more of the fundamentalist's life.

If you haven't done so already, hop on over and read the rest.  And if you're not a regular over there, be sure to check out the rest of FC's blog.  He's well worth the read.

I thought I'd spend some time today playing around with my blog.  It started out by deciding to find a plugin that would allow me to tweet my blog entries on Twitter automatically.  My search also led me on to discover another neat plugin called Zemanta.  It's a handy plugin that suggests links, pictures and other content that I might want to include in my blog posts.

I'm hoping this will be particularly helpful to me, as I've been trying to make sure I include at least one photo with every blog post I make.  I find while it's not necessary, it does make my blog much more aesthetically pleasing.  However, this has proven challenging, as I'm very concerned about not using copyrighted work. This has mean trying to find public domain images, which can be a challenge.  So if this new plugin helps make things better, all the better.  Here's to hoping.

Well, I've made more progress.  I can now successfully build my main indexes and entries statically.  This means that comments will show up immediately now.  I'm still running the monthly and category archives through the publish queue, though.  I don't think that's a bad thing.

To get things to work better, I've made a few changes, including caching widgets, enabling some widgets as server-side includes (I discovered the beauty of SSI when I started Ingvi's Corner, and am glad to use them here), and changed my archive widgets so they don't display a count for each category/monthly archive.  (I figure part of the problem was that trying to generate this data for each page was really thrashing the script's interface to the database during a database.)  Hopefully, all of these things will add up to much better experience for both myself and my readers.

I'm also starting to realize the MT is becoming an extremely powerful system.  In some ways, I suspect it's more than I really need.  I'm just a simple blogger, and I've found myself spending more time that I planned tweaking MT to get performance and stability.  In some ways, it's enough to make me consider going back to Typepad or blogger, where someone else can worry about most of that stuff.  But I like running my own blog software, so I don't foresee that happening.  Besides, who knows, I might find benefits to the increased power.

(Special thanks to Jon Sullivan for providing the public doman image used in this post.)

UPDATE:  Success!  I've found that by switching over to using the Publish Queue, I can manage to rebuild my entire site.  Of course, it's not done yet.  So far, the publish queue has only made it back to the entries for April 2007.  In fact, this update may not show up until the very end.  But for now, using the publish queue rather than immediately publishing seems to be the way for me to go.  Of course this means there will be a slight lag time (up to fifteen minutes) before a submitted comment will show up.  Ah well.  I can't have everything!

I've decided that it's finally time to upgrade my blog to Movable Type 4.  I've been putting this off, as I wasn't sure I wanted to go through the hassle involved.  But recently, I've looked at a few new features that are incompatible with MT 3.x.  So I decided it was time to make the switch.

Let me just say that if Six Apart plans to stay in business, they need to make certain aspects of upgrading between major versions of MT much easier.  I decided that it would be better for me to just go ahead and blow away all my old MT 3.x templates and start fresh.  The problem with this is that Six Apart provides no easy way to just tell MT 4.x, "Hey, take this existing blog, get rid of all its old templates, and start with a fresh batch of MT 4.0 basic templates."  Instead, I had to manually create most of the new templates.  (I was able to shoehorn in the five or six templates that actualy kept the same name between MT 3.x and MT 4.x  using the "Refresh Template" option.)  This meant creating a brand new blog and starting the comparison and revision process.

Now I just have to go back and add back in some of the extras I added to my templates, like the Sitemeter code, the MyBlogLog Widget, and a couple of other things.  Of course, I'm also thinking about getting rid of some of the add-ons (like Jiglu) as MT 4.x now offers similar features directly.

Of coures, I also need to figure out why my server won't let me rebuild the entire site.

For my readers (all six of you), this upgrade means a couple things:

1.  Any links from your site to posts on my blog are broken.  The way MT 4.0 structures everything has changed.  (Apparently, they decided to structure things more like Blogger and WordPres do.)

2.  My blog only allows authenticated comments now.  Now that MT 4.x offers many options for comment authentication, I decided to kill spam for good and turn off "anonymous" comments.  The good news is that there's support to leave a comment using your login from Typepad/Typekey, Livejournal, Blogger, and any other service that offers OpenID authentication.  Also, I'm allowing people to register an account directly with my blog.  So there's plenty of options for commenting.

So please bear with me for the next week or so if there seems to be any issues.  Hopefully, I'll get things straightened out from this upgrade quickly.

(Special thanks to Peter Griffin for the public domain image used in this post.) 

I think that it's safe to say that my question and answer exercise has wound down. It was a fun exercise, and I'm almost sad to see that it's already over. However, I'm hoping to try it again someday, perhaps in three to six months.

I actually did this exercise on three different blogs or diaries and got different questions and answers at each site. I decided that it might be fun to post a link to each of the resulting entries. So below, you will find a complete list, organized according to the blog or diary they appeared on.

The Musings of a Confused Man
Speak not of such things for the frighten me!
A rose by any other name?
The things kids discuss during class! (Content is somewhat mature.)
Spiritual Sexuality and Sexy Spirituality

Passions and Reflections
My biggest purchase
Sounding off about a clapping hand
How embarrassing!
As if I need any more changes!
Driving down the polytheism highway
Engendering differences
God-bothering etiquette
Okay, so some might think me a morbid god

Jarred's Slice of Heaven
Plus it strikes me as a REAL mockery of marriage
Start spreading the news...
Happy bundle of sticks

After many emails with StartLogic, their technical support finally determined that two tables from my blog's MySQL database up and disappeared. This means that my only option was to restore from a backup. Fortunately, I created a backup back when I was first having problems, but before the errant tables decided to run off together. This means that I was able to restore almost everything.

In fact, the only thing I ended up losing was two blog posts I posted during the window when everything seemed to be okay again. The good news about that is that they are both posts I also put up on Multiply. So I didn't lose anything.

I apologize for how long it took to resolve the problems. I hope to be back up and running at full capacity soon.

Oh, and as a sidenote, apparently if you need to restore from an old backup of you MT database, you're better off dropping all the tables from the database first. I skipped that step in my first attempt to do a restore and got nothing but grief as a result.

About once every two weeks, I like to run the index page for my blog through the HTML Validator. I like to try and keep my page as clean and properly coded as possible. (Now some day, I just have to tackle cleaning up my style sheet and feeds.)

For the most part, I get a fairly clean report and it just takes a couple of minutes to clean up any errors the validator does report. Fortunately, the templates I use have already been cleaned up, so any errors I get are actually introduced by my posts. Considering I don't use much HTML in my posts, I don't make many mistakes with it. In fact, my most common mistake is posting a link that has an ampersand in the address and forgetting to replace the "&" with "&" in the address.

Then there are those times when I post the results from an online quiz. Today, when I went through the validation process, the results for the "What Color is Your Soul" quiz alone generated eighty errors. And I had to spend several minutes reading through those errors and making the minor updates that would make each little error go away in turn.

Even these errors are relatively minor. They usually involve not adding the terminating slash to a tag that doesn't have a corresponding closing tag or not enclosing an attribute's value in quotes. The hard part is reading through the dense burst of code that make up the quiz results and finding the mistakes. And when there's a few dozen such mistakes, working through each one can be tedious.

I hope there eventually becomes a day when online quiz creators start doublechecking their HTML against the latest specification. It'd save me a bit of time and trouble. Not to mention any other erstwhile quiz takers that like to keep their blog's HTML clean.

I figured I'd get at least a PG-13 or even an R. But I never expected this!

Is this why I get so few comments? Are y'all in just a hurry to get away from my smut as fast as possible?