Marc Chagall. Joseph, A Shepherd. 1931.
How now, Brown Cow?
Sorry I’ve been silent for a few weeks. I’m still around. And one of the major projects I’ve been working on has been transferring my blog from WordPress.com to its new home on its very own shiny new site. Behold, the new LonelyPilgrim.com!
If you’re reading by subscription, via RSS or email, then you ought not to see any difference at all from your end. If you continue receiving my posts as before, then all is well. If you don’t — then you probably won’t receive this one. But if you happen to notice any interruptions or problems, please let me know.
I’d like to draw your attention to my shiny new gizmo, the primary reason why I finally decided to move to a self-hosted WordPress installation: a plugin that generates Scripture tooltips upon hovering over Scripture references. One of the most tedious aspects of my blogging was having to manually link every Scripture reference to some Bible site or another. From my end (and from your end, too, as commenters!), all I have to do is refer to a Scripture — for example, Matthew 16:18 or John 3:5 — and the plugin dynamically tags the reference. From your end as readers, if you are reading on LonelyPilgrim.com, all you have to do is hover over the tagged Scripture reference, and the text will appear! Try it out! I call it Sacred WordPress, and after a little more tweaking, I hope to be able to share it with other WordPress users.
My only regret is leaving the close-knit WordPress.com community. The WordPress.com Reader has been the source of many interesting random encounters, and I’m going to miss those. But new readers can still follow me, and read my posts in the Reader! And I will continue following all the wonderful blogfriends I made on WordPress.com.
I hope to resume my regular blogging soon. May God bless you all, and His peace be with you!
Because the domain I had followed was lonelypilgrim.com, the subscription still works, and you still show up in my feed. Glad to see you still around! I myself have considered moving to a self-hosted blog, but one of the primary reasons I haven’t is what you mentioned: the community. I love being able to find new blogs just by looking at topics and keywords.
Whatever happened to that other blog idea you had?
Actually, Ken, I think you’re one of the very few who followed me even before I was The Lonely Pilgrim, back when I was Catholicus nascens. But there’s a handy plugin for the WordPress software called the Jetpack, which integrates a self-hosted WordPress into many of the WordPress.com features. WordPress.com users can comment with their WordPress accounts, I get the Gravatar icons and such, and it allows me to move all my followers from the old site to the new one. And I still get notifications from this blog in the mobile WordPress app. The only thing really missing is that my blog no longer appears in the subject tag index on WordPress.com.
The other idea is kind of stalled. :/ I set up the domain and everything and then never did anything with it. I’ve had some other worries lately, but I do hope to be able to dust that off eventually.
Hi Joseph, I meant to comment awhile ago but I really like your blog. I was raised Lutheran and went to an evangelical church for awhile, and entered the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil 2011, so I can relate to your journey and I appreciate how you approach the topics you’ve written about. May God bless you! Joy
Thanks for the comment, Joy, and glad to have you along for the journey! Praise God for your finding the Church and may He continue to bless you!