Anonymous, not exactly

I have not tried to stay anonymous, certain things would give away my identity, but I certainly have tried to keep a low profile.  I declined an offer to be interviewed by Peter Bowden of UU Planet because I know how I get tongue tied in front of a camera.

On of my favorite hymns says:

“If you cannot sing like angels, if you cannot speak before thousands, you can give from deep within you. You can change the world with your love.”

Yep, I am not the kind of person who can speak before thousands.  But fortunately there are other ways to contribute.  That is why I set up UUpdates.net. it is my labor of love.

Farewell Categories

One of the deficiencies I wanted to address with the latest release of http://UUpdates.net was to get rid of the categories for sites.  I had "other" which really meant I had not put it into a category yet and "Personal reflections" which was really just my way of denoting it didn't fit into any other category.  Not particularly helpful.  Now, taking a hint from most blog software, the sites have labels associated with them.  I wanted to create a special category for OWL folks who were interested in following bloggers who tend to focus on sexuality and related topics.  This would be difficult with categories, but it is easy with labels.

I don't want to create too many labels, but I would certainly be willing to add labels that folks would find useful, especially if they would help identify the sites that should be tagged with a particular label.

Another label that folks might find particularly useful are the sites tagged with UUA.  The sites tagged with UUA are all the blogs that are maintained by the UUA, UU World, etc.  Especially for folks that are webmasters this might make a great feed to include on a church's or districts home page if you don't want to include them all.

If you have any suggestions for other labels please feel free to comment.

Chalice Image available on UUA Site

When I made my previous RSS inspired chalice image it hadn't actually occurred to me that others might be interested in using it.  I did find that at least one other site was using the image.  For those who are not aware the UUA maintains a set of images for folks to use, and this time I actually made the image to comply with the submission guidelines.  Now the image can be found here on the UUA chalice clip art page.

New site is live

The new version of UUpdates UU RSS aggregator is live, and as far as I can tell any legacy functionality is still working.  For example the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of St. Petersburg is using UUpdates to generate a list of UU Quotes.  If you notice any issues with the site please do let me know.  I am taking a look at what it would take to make the site a little better on Internet Explorer 8, but aside from that I am not noticing any major issues.  If you do notice anything wacky going on please do let me know!

Teaser #2 for new site.

OK, final teaser before going live with the new site.  I will continue blogging about new features and soliciting feedback, but I will do more of that when the site is live and folks can check it out.  But for the teaser shot there are 2 things to show here.  First the much improved tag cloud, and second the much improved look on a mobile device.

The new site is ready to roll, but before I turn it loose I need to ensure that I don't break anything for folks using the utilities or distributing updates via javascript/rss.  This should not take too long, and I really don't want to break anything in migration.

In terms of Unitarian universalist blogs I really like this cloud: Religion, Theology, Social Justice, Love Spirituality... good stuff.

New UUpdates Logo

It has been a while since I have made any substantial changes to UUpdates.  But after a few job changes, a career change, major surgery, moving cities, etc. etc. I finally got the time and was able to set to work on fixing some of the deficiencies with the current site.  It is not quite ready to go live, but things are definitely in the home stretch as I put it through the paces to make sure it is ready to go live.  Hopefully more will be coming soon, but in the meantime I have created a new chalice for the new site.  I have also submitted this to the UUA, for anyone who would like to reuse this for spreading the word about Unitarian Universalism please feel free.