Ubi Petrus

Having a very low resistance to gadgetry I’ve added the Followers gadget to the blog. If you like anything I’ve written here and are willing to admit it, feel free to add yourself – if you don’t want others to know you read this blog you can do so privately even. No prizes for signing up, no bling, no money.

According to Curt Jester several popular Catholic blog writers have been locked out from updating their blogs. The one commonality discovered so far? They all wrote against everyone’s favorite hate-filled atheist.

The folks at CMR note that the same thing recently happened to many popular blogs that were opposed to Barak Obama’s candidacy. So while it’s possible this abusive behavior is caused by people within Google (remember, Google owns Blogger) it’s also possible people have figured out how to coordinate abuse of the Flag button on Blogger.

As with every other time things like this happen, I’m sure we’ll never really know what happened. All I can say is something smells rather ripe with all this…

Update: The Blogger folks say this was in fact a software error. If so, then a mea culpa for insinuating otherwise. At this point we’ll never entirely know for sure, but ’tis better to believe them for now methinks. Working in the software field I can empathize with bugs that are mistakes that just look intentional. We occasionally have bugs that make things work by accident when they shouldn’t – fixing those bugs always is an interesting experience. Anyway, back to blogging for all involved we hope!

If you’re reading the blog itself versus on a feed reader, you will. Through the great goodness of her heart and her God-given graces, Argent of Argent by the Tiber and Here there are Lions has crafted a new header for me. I don’t know about an official Church position on the matter, but for my money her work qualifies as true charity in giving to the needy. Sheesh, I can’t even draw a straight line with a ruler most days and she creates this. I am beyond impressed and utterly thankful.

I’ve been looking for a three-column template for quite a while now and finally stumbled on Blogcrowds. For those of us to whom XML is YALWDU (Yet Another Language We Don’t Understand) Blogcrowds is a great resource. First, they provide all sorts of three-column templates absolutely free – but even better is the forum for Q&A for anyone trying to tweak their blog just so. The question is, do you like the three-column look or not?

I should also apologize to anyone who may have stumbled on this blog while I was in the midst of my gyrations of trying to get it all to work. There were some very trying times, and some downright ugly goof-ups in the process. Forgive me if you got caught up in one of them. So…should I keep the three columns or go back to the old template? Speak now or forever hold your peace…

I just noticed that Haloscan comments and trackbacks weren’t displaying on individual post pages. That’s what happens when I don’t look at my own posts post-by-post. Mea culpa. Everything should be working now, although I still have to delete some extraneous remnants of Blogger comments since I haven’t used that for a while now. I fully expect an overwhelming torrent of comments now that I’ve fixed this. Or something.