Apr 27 2012

7 Quick Takes Friday: Vol. 160

Category: 7 Quick Takes Friday,Memes,WordPressLindsay @ 6:21 pm

Well, this number can’t be right, even if it is Jen’s, because the week before last was 169. Maybe I should just give up.

— 1 —

The awesome Catholic memes just don’t stop. My favorite part is that it’s entirely Scriptural and is also awesome. Apparently this meme is called Storytime Jesus. (Not all of the examples there are clean, but some are still hilarious.)

— 2 —

I have finished my last major project for the year at work. It’s bittersweet. I hate the ridiculously busy times, but I’m not really a fan of the super dull times (a.k.a. summer), either. My plan for this summer is to get some good reading done. Perhaps another encyclical, and if I’m really focused, Love and Responsibility. I’m not ready for the full-length TOB yet, but that seems like a good stepping stone.

— 3 —

My next review for ACNM is due on Tuesday, and I’ve already finished the book, guys! I was so excited that I finished another Sherlock Holmes story from the e-book I’ve been reading on my phone. I even got a fiction book from the library. It’s been so long since I’ve read fiction, and although I know Thumped is in the review queue and it’s out now, I’m not ready enough to commit to buy it in hardcover. I’ll wait until the library’s copy comes in and swoop in like a hawk.

— 4 —

I came home on Tuesday very tired but delighted to find a surprise package waiting for me: a review copy of Dawn Eden’s new book, My Peace I Give You! It doesn’t even officially come out until May 14, and it was offered to me by the author herself. (Okay, so she told her to contact her publisher and I did, but the ending’s the same.) I feel like such a baller! This is even more exciting than getting Sinner from Tiber River!

Best surprise package ever?

— 5 —

That's an interesting place for an Easter egg, WashPo

7QT is rapidly becoming the place where I dump photos instead of sharing them on Facebook. Good idea? Bad idea?

— 6 —

I didn’t really get to celebrate when it actually happened, but I needed a little reminder. Click for full-size.

— 7 —

I have jury duty. I’ve been a registered driver and a registered voter for many years, so I suppose it had to happen eventually. Clearly I’m not going to ignore the summons, seeing as I’m telling the Internet about it. I haven’t decided whether I want to serve, but I will at least offer myself for service. This is how politics works: if you don’t participate, you can’t complain about the way the system works. I’m participating now. I’ll complain later.

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Jul 31 2011

New Domain: LindsayLoves.com

Category: General,WordPressLindsay @ 11:04 pm

Friends, readers, casual arrivals from Google searches: I have moved. All the content is the same, and I’m still using WordPress, but all the links should now point to LindsayLoves.com, my new domain. I had a brain blast that led to the domain name, and I jumped on it, and here I am. with many thanks to my amazing hostess, Anna.

Please update your links, bookmarks, and RSS feeds. Eventually, contrariwise.burned-bridges.net will be replaced with a static page. It won’t be quite like my LJ or my old BlogSpot, but the idea is the same. This domain has the added bonus of being a simple combination of my first name, which I like and is unlikely to change, and “love,” which I hope I won’t stop doing until I’m dead.

For now, the title of my blog will remain Contrariwise. I’ve used that name for so long that I can’t give it up yet. I know it’s best to have a matching domain name and blog title, but I don’t care enough yet.

I changed my mind: Lindsay Loves it is.

I hope this is the first step toward owning my online self and uniting it with my real-life self. They’ve never been hugely disparate, but I am calling myself to honesty and integrity, and if I can’t own the words I write here, then I can’t be myself.


Jul 02 2011

WP Archive Plugins

Category: WordPressLindsay @ 4:11 pm

When you’ve been blogging as long as I have, you end up with a tremendous archive of old posts. I don’t get many visitors to my older posts (except for the occasional Google search result), but I prefer to keep my archives displayed attractively just in case.

Until today, I used the Clean Archives Reloaded plugin. It was great because it displayed every month I posted in, but you had to click the individual months to see the post titles and comment counts for each post. It was simple, organized, and effective. Today, I noticed that it was broken.

I’m currently using In Over Your Archives. I only began using pictures recently, but it’s nice that the layout adjusts neatly when there are no pictures. I don’t like the awkward display of the post categories, though, and I can’t get a customized PHP file to upload. Server trouble, I guess. It does have a bug where it will repeat a few posts in a loop, but I can’t quite figure out how to reproduce it and report it.

This would be nice, but I suppose it was not meant to be. (screenshot by Vladimir Prelovac)

I gave Snazzy Archives (pictured above) a try, but I got the same error that Clean Archives Reloaded produced. It looks great on the host site, but I can’t get it to work at all over here.

Anyone else out there using self-hosted WordPress to manage a big-archive blog? How do you keep your post list in check?


Jan 31 2011

Comment Subscription Enabled

Category: WordPressLindsay @ 10:52 pm

One of the benefits of blogging more frequently is that I pay more attention to making the blog better. If you’re anything like me, you like to subscribe to the posts you comment on, just in case anyone responds to your comment(s) or the discussion gets interesting later on down the line. I use Google Reader to subscribe to blogs, so after I read (and comment on) the post, it disappears. Out of sight, out of mind. Email subscriptions help with that problem. Granted, just as “liking” or commenting on facebook posts can do, this can be annoying if you subscribe to a popular post, but stopping the subscription should be just as simple as starting it. Please let me know if it’s not working or you have trouble. Otherwise, enjoy!


Jan 28 2011

Contrariwise Mobile

Category: WordPressLindsay @ 6:54 pm

I’ve been blogging for a long, long time (nine and a half years). I’ve seen a few spikes in my traffic over the last few years. After I wrote an editorial for my campus newspaper on modesty, I posted it here and submitted it to the old Catholic Carnival, and I got some great traffic from that exposure. I discovered Switchfeed back in the day, and when the bloggers moved over to Switchfoot.com, they remembered me, linked me, and sent a flood of visitors my way. Earlier this month, my adaptation of a specialized Catholic liturgical calendar program into Gcal was ridiculously popular, perhaps my most popular post ever.

Recently, I began reading Lindsay in Progress. I can’t remember how I found “the other Lindsay,” as I like to think of her, but I enjoy her blog. I visited it once via Google Reader on my iPhone and was shocked and pleased to discover a beautiful mobile theme for her WordPress.com site. As of a few minutes ago, I have applied the same theme to my own blog.

Screenshot of the mobile version of my blog

I definitely prefer the desktop browser version, but at least I know I have control over the mobile version and it looks just as classy as I want it to.


Apr 02 2008

Crisis Averted!

Category: General,WordPressLindsay @ 8:55 pm

Whew. I tried to upgrade to WP 2.5 over the weekend. I was exhausted, and it was late, so I figured I’d just get everything uploaded and head off to bed. Yeah, not so much. I wound up breaking things so badly that it took at least another hour of fiddling around to figure out what I’d done wrong. My blog disappeared for two days! In the end, I just had to delete the .htaccess file I created recently. I’m not sure what was so bad about it, but I’m back in business and trying to get used to 2.5. It doesn’t look different from the front, but everything on the back end is new and shiny. I like it, though…now that it works.


Feb 01 2008

Catholic Carnival 157

Category: Catholic Carnival,General,WordPressLindsay @ 11:02 pm

Kate Wicker hosted the Catholic Carnival this week. She has a great “Feast Before the Fast” theme, since Ash Wednesday is next week. I’m not quite ready. We just finished celebrating Christmas!

I submitted a post to the Carnival again, the one about FOCUS Conference, which I also sent to our five FOCUS missionaries. Imagine my embarrassment when, of all days, WP started malfunctioning on Tuesday. I got everything fixed by the end of the day, but I’m still not quite what went wrong. Something about the redirect from my hostess wasn’t working properly, but it’s all good now.

Jen at Daughter of the King ponders her spiritual game plan for this Lent. Last Lent went very well for me. I gave up secular tv and watched a lot of EWTN instead. I resumed praying the rosary every day; I tend to fall in and out of the habit.

My crowning achievement seems strange at first: For Lent, I resolved to take never pass up vegetables. I did this not because, as Fr. Frank lamented, I see Lent as a diet plan. I did it because I realized that food was one area of my life that I hadn’t yet given over to God. I needed to grow up, be healthier, and stop being so picky. Those first few salads and broccoli florets were tough, but I’m so much better for it. I was humiliated to admit my childishness and do something I absolutely did not want to do. Now, not only do I eat vegetables, I also like red and green apples, and I’m working on oranges. Soon I’ll eat the whole pyramid!

I haven’t definitely decided what to do for this Lent. Unfortunately, I am running out of time.

Finally, Heidi at Silent Canticle gives us her thoughts about writing for free. I don’t blog for the glory of God any more than I do everything for God. Blogging for God sounds like it could go the way of Christ the Lord. I’ve never written anything for pay, though, and I copyedit for free (except at CASL, where I was paid hourly regardless of how much work I did). I blog as an extension of the personal journals I’ve kept since middle school. She makes a good point about using the talents God has given us, though. The few posts I’ve had that seem to have really reached people make the whole process worth it.

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Jan 20 2008

WordPress Updates

Category: General,WordPressLindsay @ 4:58 pm

I’ve been doing a little work in the background over the past few days. I didn’t do much tinkering with this theme after I applied it, but it needed work. I finally validated the XHTML, which wasn’t difficult. I did lose the neat sidebar section headers, though, and I can’t remember how I got them back in the dynamic sidebar in the first place, so I’ll have to go without them.

Live Comment Preview is not working with this theme, so I installed the WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin instead. If you see any horrifically clashing colors or notice any malfunctions, email me (see sidebar). It’s hard to test as the blog owner.

I also need to get trackbacks to show up, though I already lifted some code from my old theme to keep me from having to login when I post comments, so that shouldn’t be hard. I’d like to get back to actually writing soon instead of doing all the technical background work, though I’m glad I can actually do that work myself.

Edit
: I didn’t have trackbacks because I didn’t trackback. I’m a genius. I also added NoFollow Free, because if you comment, you deserve some love.


Apr 22 2007

Customization Complete

Category: WordPressLindsay @ 11:48 pm

Well, sort of. I would still like to have the navigation in nice little tabs in the header, as well as putting the search bar there, but this will do for now. If only I could figure out how to get my fanlisting code rotator working again, and add cute little pixel icons for the time and date, and get those single-page navigation links aligned properly,…. and stop being such a perfectionist.


Mar 21 2007

New Layout!

Category: WordPressLindsay @ 11:50 pm

I’ve been meaning to get a new WordPress theme for a while. I actually wanted to use a different one, but I don’t think my hostess allows me the storage space I’d need for it, so I went with this one. My goal is to add a bunch of different header images that will randomly fill in for that one up there. I’m still customizing it, so be sure to let me know if you see anything that’s gone awry.


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