Redesign

I'm tinkering with the FoJ blog design.  This is an ongoing project as I need to crawl under the hood of the HTML to tweak it as I like it.  This is roughly what it will look like, though I'm going to be tinkering for a while.

Let me know if something doesn't work or looks awful.

Blogger notice

As you may know, Blogger had a meltdown Thursday, and during repair, they reverted all blogs to their Wednesday status. What this means is, posts and comments made on Thursday have been lost. Publishing is now enabled, and they say they are working to restore the missing data but whether they all come back or not remains to be seen.

More information: Blogger Status page and post describing the outage

Commenting problems

Blogger's new spam filter continues to trap valid comments here at FoJ. This is particularly likely if someone includes a link. Unfortunately, there is no notification in the dashboard, and blogmaster must go to the comments tab to check if there are any comments in the "Spam" section.

So: If you blog, check your comments folder frequently and rescue any mis-labelled comments.

Readers/Commenters: Please let us know if Blogger "disappears" your comments and one of us will retrieve them.

Blogs to contemplate: St Laika's and the Anchorhold

The Rev Jonathan Hagger (Madpriest) has launched a new blog, St Laika's, which is a worship blog. It features the Daily Office (including the resonant voice of the Rev. Jonathan) and seeks to find a communal worship space in the far-flung internet, not limited to any single (denomi)nation.

A companion blog, The Anchorhold, will focus on spirituality, contemplation, and prayer.

These are serious blogs, with serious intentions to build spiritual community. Madpriest will continue his irreverent commentary at OCICBW, but I for one am pleased to see these thoughtful, mature blogs develop and look forward to seeing them thrive.

Go check them out.

To our readers: who are you? (poll)

We thought it might be interesting to know who our readers are. Please participate in this poll. No individual information will be saved, so it's completely private. Please take the poll just once. We'll post the results in a week or so. Thanks!

Update: I think I have fixed the width so the scroll bar now fits. Please let me know in the comments if you can't see it properly on your browser. At the bottom of the poll is a "submit" button.

If you have comments for us, please put them in the comments thread to this post. You can do so anonymously if you prefer (just sign out of your Google account for the purpose).

Update 2: While the poll is still active for now, I downloaded the data on Saturday 7/31. I'm processing it now and will post the results next week.

Happy 2nd Birthday, Friends of Jake!

The Friends blog is 2 years old today! FoJ is brought to you by a diverse group of net-friends (IT, Ann, DavidH, Wormwood's Doxy, Eileen the Episcopalfem, and Padre Mickey) who met over at Jake's blog before his "sabbatical". We've had over 90,000 separate visits and over 100,000 page loads. We provide a lively contrast of views and writing about religion, faith, the Episcopal church, politics, and whatever strikes our fancy.

Thank you for joining us on this journey as we enter Year Three of our Big Blog Adventure.

Happy birthday, FoJ, and Happy Birthday, USoA! and Hello, world.... ;-)

Announcing a new blog, about nothing in particular

I have been writing an irregular series of posts on my diary at Daily Kos about my regular train travels. I decided to collect them in one place and will be posting them occasionally on a new blog, The Surfliner Stories. It's a completely non-political blog, it has nothing to do with religion, gay marriage, or current events. It's not even really about trains. It's pieces I've written that are descriptive vignettes and simple reflections of life seen through a train window. In fact you'll probably find it very boring! But stop by if you need a snooze. :^)

The view from Out There

I blog at several sites including the progressive Daily Kos, its religious offshoot Street Prophets, and my own blog at Gay Married Californian. I briefly blogged at TPM but gave it up (I just didn't "get" with that community) and I have resisted getting a user ID at Pam's House Blend since BP already complains I am too addicted to the computer, though i read Pam's blog regularly.

There is a huge HUGE amount of anger against religion generally and Christianity in particular on the progressive sites, especially from the GLBT community. As you know I live in a bridging position between believers and non-believers so I do my best to oil the waters. No, not all Christians are mouth-breathing bigots. No, not all atheists are God-bashing fundamentalists. Sometimes I feel like a complete expatriate from both communities (and having lived as an actual expatriate for a few years, I know what that's like).

Still, it was with some interest reading the statcounter for THIS blog that I saw a hit that came via Pam's House Blend, from a post about a "blender" who has a GLBT Christian blog. So I trotted over to the Blend to check out how they linked to us. I was rather chuffed to see that we were mentioned in the comment thread by someone who listed other GLBT friendly Christian Blogs and not a little amused that all the blogs so listed were our Friends' blogs, ie, the usual Episcopal suspects.

HOWEVER, this provoked a number of rants in the following comments against TEC's slow movement on GLBT rights (and rites), as well as some actual misinformation about the status of GLBT clergy (whether they are "allowed"). I guess it depends on perspective and where you are. For BP and me, part of the Roman Catholic diaspora, things are SO much better in TEC, and being part of an inclusive community that's moving towards "official" recognition of us both institutionally and locally is something to be celebrated. Others, clearly, find it's moving too slowly.

But if any of you folks have Blender IDs you might want to head over there and set them, er, straight.

FoJ Technical Note

I have added a feature that allows you to rate the posts, by clicking on the little stars underneath each one. They are fairly unobtrusive, I hope. Let us know what you think!

Update: ratings are anonymous. Just so you know!

Jake is back!

Well, after a little over a year, I've decided to return. The project that was the primary reason for shutting down Jake's place has come to an end. Beyond that, it has become quite clear to me recently that Jake still has a few more things to say.

Go on...you know where to find it... Father Jake Stops the World.

Hello World, a year later: Happy Birthday!

One year ago today, the Friends of Jake went live as a blog. We were part of the diaspora after the closure of our previous bloghome, "Fr Jake Stops the World", and we are a group blog of 5 contributors, who also have our own individual blogs. Thanks to all of you, I think it's been fairly successful. We average around 200-250 visitors a day, and have at times had very spirited commentary; that's around 50,000 visitors in the space of a year. (Our counter did not go up until late in 2008, so it's not quite accurate).

Others in the diaspora have had varied styles and success. But I particularly want to call out James, at The Three Legged Stool (TTLS), whose blog has focused more on spiritual and church issues. James has had over 180,000 visitors to his blog! If you haven't been there, go!

Since many people access the blogs through readers, all these counts underestimate the total "eyes" on the material.

So, Happy Birthday, US of A. And Happy Birthday to the Friends of Jake blog, and a joyful holiday to all Friends of Jake.

See you in Anaheim!

A day in the week

This blog uses the utility Statcounter to monitor visitors. I like it better than Sitemeter. Just for fun, here is a typical week at Friends. Notice that things are relatively quiet here on weekends. That may have something to do with our position as a religious community blog where many of you have other things to do especially on a Sunday. :-) Thanks, all, for stopping by.

Scrappy Bloggers

Thanks to Cany for passing this award onto us. As a group blog, we reflect a number of personalities and our readers have to endure a certain amount of jumping around on different topics, and non-sequiturs. Oh look! ketchup!

The Friends of Jake Receive An Award

The Friends of Jake have been awarded the Superior Scribbler Award by Leonardo Ricardo , the God-loving Artist in Guatemala who posts at Eruptions At The Foot Of The Volcano. It seems that, as recipients of said award, we are to choose others to receive this August Award. I am the kinda guy who is happy to receive the award and leave all the heavy lifting to the others. So, IT, David, Eileen, and Ann, YOU get to bestow the honors upon others.