I’ve decided that when something starts to feel like an unpleasant obligation rather than a labor of love, it’s best to put it aside for awhile. So, it’s been awhile.

What with social networking sites, particularly FaceBook at least for me, it seems that blogs are no longer good venues for idle conversation, unless one has a large, established cadre of commenters. So, what is a blog for?

Well, currently this one will be used for processing of ideas and theories related to a couple of web projects I’m working on.

Until I get to that, enjoy the cutest video I’ve ever seen:

This is Widget, in a rare moment of sitting still:

So things are back to normal, data-wise, and I’ll be back to regular posting next week. I would be all happy about the restoration except that it cost me $150.00, so I’m instead just grudgingly content that I didn’t lose anything and have already backed it up in several different ways.

Does anyone know where to find statistics on Unitarian Universalist congregations — specifically average membership and average operating budgets? Google and uua.org are not helping me. Are these figures online anywhere?

Thank you!

jesspages.net now has a new front page, that aggragates the feeds from this Journal, Best of UU, and Making Stuff.

This makes me very happy.

:-)

I’ve been coding this weekend, and tweaking the sites of jesspages.net to make them more Google-able and happy in other ways, too.

Here are a couple tidbits and helpful links if you’d like to do some of the same things to your site.

There’s a nifty Wordpress plug-in for sitemapping called Google XML Sitemaps that I found very helpful, that generated a file for each of my three blogs in less than two minutes. Then I told Google where they were, and theoretically the Google-bot will be more able to pull up my content for relevant searches. Shiny.

Then there is Feedburner, which manages my RSS feeds, and has a useful feature called BuzzBoost, which I can use to aggregate my three separate feeds into one place. I’ll be rolling out a new homepage later this week, which makes me very happy, because the solutions I was looking at to begin with were all about having to learn more PHP, which I am too lazy to do at the moment, or using rather shady-looking branded type things that don’t lend themselves to customization.

And now I go back to wrestling with CSS.

Voting for the UU Blog Awards is open through Sunday, and both this blog and the Best of UU have been nominated in several categories. I’d greatly appreciate it if my readers would take a moment to vote — you don’t have to be a UU yourself to participate!

Thanks, all. It’s been a wild year.

Many other UU bloggers have asked that we all round up our favorite posts for the year to make nominations for the UU Blog Awards easier to find. And so I comply, though please don’t think that I’m groveling for nominations, because there is SO much good stuff out there. And thank you so much to John Cooley, the UUpdater himself, for once again hosting the awards. You’re awesome.

I’ve been blogging since November of 2003, shortly after we moved from Milwaukee to Chicago and my husband started seminary. Now it’s 2008, and he’s well into his first year of settlement. And how things have changed in all aspects in those four and a half years!

In 2007, I blogged in fits and spurts, based on how much other stuff was happening at the time. Here are a few of my favorites:

Anecdotes and funny stories:

• “Too Good Not to Post,” just one of many strange phone calls I dealt with in my previous job
• “Places to Read”
• “United Airlines is the DEVIL,” our getting-to-General-Assembly nightmare
• “Those Things We Say,” at the dinner table, with a side dish of drive-by parenting
• “Life in Kitten Land,” starring the stripey girls, which makes me sniffle now after Scout’s illness and passing

Religion and Church:

• “What Power the Cross”
• “Define God,” a UU Blog Carnival submission
• “Religious Politics”
• “The Authority of Ministers” from the spouse’s perspective, also for the UU Blog Carnival
• “So, What is a Sermon For?,” which ticked off some ministers I know

Social Commentary and Parenting:

• “Honesty”
• “Don’t Do Homework!”
• “G Movies”
• “A Story to Tell”
• “Those S-E-X Words”

So all three of my blogs are now W3C compliant in both XHTML and CSS, which makes me very happy.

If any Windows users see any strange layout things anywhere, can you please let me know? I’ve done the net-rendering thang, but don’t have an actual Windows box to test on.

Making Stuff
Best of UU

I will say that I am still very disappointed in YouTube and Flickr both for not using compliant code in their convenient services.

Announcing “Making Stuff,” my visual journal!

So JessPages has grown another section. I wanted a place I could put more pictures, without being limited to the rather narrow format I have here, and where I can explore visual ideas that I’m working with in various media.

I’m planning on going back through some old stuff, and also documenting various challenges that I am a part of, including the Taking it Further group and the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge.

Happy New Year!