Lindsay Loves

This was me. I’ve moved on.
(image from Mashable)

If you happen to be one of my RSS feed subscribers, this is my official notice that I am turning off my Feedburner plugin. It hasn’t been updated in ages, and in this post-Google Reader era, I’m slowly moving my blog outreach back into WordPress. It just seems like the smart thing to do.

If you still prefer to follow my blog without visiting the site to check for updates manually (which is how I realized the genius of feed readers in the first place, actually), you have three options:

1. Stay subscribed via RSS by using the normal WordPress feed. To do so, simply view my bare RSS feed and insert that URL into your feed reader of choice. Alternatively, you should be able to enter lindsayloves.com into the feed reader’s add dialogue and have it pick up my feed automatically. If you don’t use a feed reader, I recommend Feedly, which has grown by leaps and bounds since over a million users fled from Google Reader in May and June.
2. Follow me on Bloglovin‘, which is the second most common Google Reader successor I’ve seen (after Feedly).
3. Subscribe via email using the box below or in my sidebar. (They’re the same, just in different locations.) This will send you an email via WordPress.com every time I post. You don’t need to have a WordPress.com account, and it is a double opt-in, unsubscribe anytime kind of deal. Keep in mind, though, that if I make edits to the post after the initial publishing, you won’t have the most current version.

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I don’t use Twitter, and this blog doesn’t have a Facebook page, so those are your options right now. I’m considering Lindsay Loves for Facebook, but I don’t think Twitter is for me. I can’t handle another addiction just yet!

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.