Recently in Administration Category

First Friday arrived for August the other day, and with it a new blog here at stblogs.org: Sr. Cora Lombardo has started the site Caritas Christi to share the depths of the love of God which are to be found in the Heart of Christ. Sr. Cora is a member of the religious community The Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and serves as the DRE at St. Paul Parish in West Haven, CT.

Don Marco (Fr. Mark Daniel Kirby) is a Cistercian monk of the Abbey of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem in Rome, and chaplain to the Benedictines of Jesus Crucified in Branford, CT. Readers of Fr. Keyes' blog will already be familiar with Don Marco, as his homilies have been posted there already from time to time.

His weblog takes as its theme The Face of Christ. Welcome aboard!

I've upgraded the blog software to Movable Type 3.32 and moved the blogs to a different server machine. I hope this will help resolve some access-control problems that authors and commenters have run into recently. My previous hosting provider's attempts to improve security were behind most of them.

It's not unusual to hear a person say "I'm between jobs", having left one and seeking another.

Mark Windsor's new blog is for people who are "between churches". As it happens, he spent a long time in between, before he became a Catholic; now he's offering some company to Anglican friends who have set out to find another communion, whichever one it may turn out to be.

He calls the site Rafting the Tiber.

Sorry for the outage. The hosting company's having a rough year for reliability, apparently: two disk failures on the same machine so far.

As you can tell by the appearance of the site, CL is under construction while I'm rebuilding it under MT 3.

There are a couple of changes for end-users. Commenters can sign on through the TypeKey service, and occasionally comments will be held for review before they appear on the site if the spam-blocking software raises any warnings about the text.

James Preece, the proprietor of Catholic and Loving It has launched http://uk.stblogs.org/, a reference point for Catholic blogs in the British Isles. Congratulations, James!

No, that's actually not a joke, although it's more of a "gathering" than a convention. Next month, I'm going on Nameless Entity business to Ottawa. Naturally, I am going to meet with Pete Vere (we've never met in person.) He has invited fellow Catholic Light readers John Pacheco and Tim Ferguson as well. Are there any other Canadian readers who want to have dinner with us? My trip is tentatively scheduled for the week of Feb. 14, though I'm 90% sure it'll happen then.

It's time to make up a new background image for the blog. I've realized that color gradients are overused and not as interesting as they used to be. Here's a sample with some more, um, structure to it.

Update: A more muted version is on the sample page now. Thanks for all the great comments, and feel free to participate again.

I'd like this so I can use an aggregator to read the blogs. It's much more convenient than reading them in a web browser. I remember seeing some kind soul had exported a file with all the feeds but I can't remember who has it. If anyone out there knows who generated this or where I can get a list please let me know!

Thanks!

I love the new look!

RC and I were chatting last night and I suggested we make a change. Nothing drastic, just something different but appropriate. RC worked his magic and voila, we looked more Marian and less like Pentecost.

I've made an update to the "lite" version of the blog, intended for PDA users. It presents the titles of the last five posts, and full text of the latest ten comments. I've downsized the logo graphic too for faster loading. If anybody else is using it besides me, let me know!

The last 20 posts have been about the following topics:

• Middle East, including Iraq: 5
• Politics (including some humorous items): 4
• Media: 2
• Religion news: 1
• Other humor: 2
• Music: 3
• Food: 2
• Schools: 1

If anyone knows who owns the domain peterschair.com, would you please contact me? That site is hitting our web server all too often, so I have had to block its access.

Hi, y'all! 19-year-old convert Nathan Nelson has joined us at stblogs.org with The Tower, and gen-Xers Bobbi and Brian have brought over their own blog, a companion to their website Revolution of Love.

Nobody's been talking about the movies lately, so a bunch of folks have started a site for movie reviews: the Popcorn Critics.

Paul Rex writes a sensible weblog with a silly name, so it's a perfect fit for stblogs.org.

The Summa Mamas have relocated to new pink digs at stblogs.org: welcome, gals!

Get over there, folks, and tell SpecialK what name she should give the baby!

Fr. Sibley's Saintly Salmagundi has moved in to the "fine domain". Check out his cool clerical wear for All Souls' Day.

Pansy Moss and Peony Moss, Two Sleepy Mommies, have brought their web site to stblogs.org! Welcome, gals!

Steven Riddle's Flos Carmeli weblog has joined us at stblogs.org, and has brought along an archive even slightly bigger than that of Catholic Light.

Salve!

By the way, folks, we don't often talk about this, but our traffic is up! A year ago we averaged around 150 visits/day, and this month it's over 450/day.

We know we'll never be competition for the Drudge Report or even Instapundit, but it's a pleasure to know that somebody out there is dropping by. Aw, shucks.

Catholic Light has been at stblogs.org for a month now, and our statistics show about 50% more visits per day than we had at Blogspot. Thanks for coming by!

Bishop Sean O'Malley named new Archbishop of Boston

I have met Bishop O'Malley several times as he is a great supporter of a community of Youth Ministers I used to be involved with, the Youth Apostles. I found him to be a very holy man. He speaks several languages. Squeaky clean. Possible Pope material, if I can be candid.

There are much, much better days coming for Boston.

This quote speaks volumes:

"The Rev. Richard McBrien, a liberal theologian at the University of Notre Dame, said despite all the kudos O'Malley has won for his response to clergy sex abuse, he is still a conservative priest who would be 'uncritically loyal to the Holy See and would not veer one millimeter from its policies and teachings on anything.'"

Despite all the kudos?

It's a wonderful vote of confidence when a liberal theologian calls another priest "uncritically loyal to the Holy See."

Here's the AP pic:

Hi, neighbor!

Robert Diaz is moving his Caritate Dei blog from Blogspot to caritatedei.stblogs.org. A big stblogs.org welcome to Robert!

A reader told us that the new format didn't work well with WebTV, which has a screen resolution of 544 x 372, so I'm offering CL in an alternative format suitable for narrow-screen browsers, at http://catholiclight.stblogs.org/webtv.html. I don't have a WebTV set to test this with, so if this doesn't work quite right yet, specific feedback from readers will help.

Hey guys,

forget my last email... I think I have the new administrative panel figured out after all. Looks great! On another note, I guess we won't be exposing Rich's real identity as the Easter Bunny...

Pax,
PJV

Our links are fixed now. RC is happy. And you know our motto is "we're not happy unless RC is not happy!"