Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Happy Birthday to Us! (and some other stuff)




I 100% missed the one-year birthday of my blog. Womp womp. As of May 2nd, this blog has been in existence for an entire year. Sing it with me: Happy (late) birthday to you, happy (late) birthday to you, happy (late) birthday dear bloggy-blog, happy (late) birthday to you!
Now, marvel at my Paint skills:

Ahem.
To all of my readers who read on mobile devices, this post may not make much sense to you if you are reading it on your cell phone. So if you want to, please scroll down to the bottom and click “view web version” after you get done reading so you can actually see everything I’m about to talk about.
Last night I spent quite some time glued to my laptop making some changes, so I thought I would take today and let you know what I did. You may have noticed a couple weeks ago when I added a “Home” and “About Us” tab right underneath the header. If not, then guess what? A couple weeks ago I added a “Home” and “About Us” tab right underneath the header. Cool, huh? Last night I also added a “Contact Us” tab as well. All three are pretty self explanatory: “About Us” is just a short synopsis for any of my new readers. “Contact Us” is where you can go to find our e-mail address, as well as the links to our Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest page. When you get tired of looking at all of that stuff, simply click “Home” to get back to the main page of the blog.
I also added a sidebar to the left side of the Home page. I did this mainly because I did not want everyone to scroll for five minutes to see everything. So on the left side we have a few pictures, the link to the Mercy House shop that I told you about a couple weeks ago, a list of the blogs I follow, and my affiliate link.
On the right sidebar, I’ve added a search box  so you can type in a keyword and search for a post, rather than having to dig through the archives to find it. When you search for marriage, for example, it will bring up all of my marriage-related posts. I’m currently working on labeling all of my older posts so that they are sure to pop up like they are supposed to when you use the search function.
Right below the search box is a place where you can subscribe to my blog posts via e-mail-wahoo! Simply type in your e-mail address and click “submit”. Google will open up a new window where you type in those crazy looking letters to verify you’re not a robot, and then it will send you a confirmation e-mail. Be sure to check your e-mail for that confirmation e-mail and follow the instructions, because if you don’t then you won’t actually be subscribed. And if the e-mail doesn't show up after a few minutes, you might try checking your Spam folder, just in case. I highly recommend subscribing, not just for my own benefit, but because you don’t have to worry about missing my posts when they are delivered right to your e-mail inbox. Sometimes Facebook doesn’t like me and it may not show where I’ve linked to a new post in your newsfeed- this way you won’t miss it. I subscribe to my favorite blogs, and I can tell you that it is really convenient!
Underneath the subscribe option is all of our social media sites. Everything is still the same, except I added our Pinterest account as well. Next we have the top ten posts for this blog. These are the most viewed posts that I’ve written. So if you’re new to our blog and would like to play catch-up, this is the perfect place to do it! Lastly we have the blog archive. If you don’t like using the search box, or if you can’t find what you’re looking for, then I still have a by-month list of every post I’ve written.
A few other notes:
As I mentioned above, I am working on applying labels to all of my posts. Some examples are “Life”, “Marriage” and “Spiritual”. In addition to the search box, this can help you find other posts related to that topic. For instance, if you click on the label “Life” at the bottom of yesterday’s post, then all of the posts with that label will be displayed.
And last but not least, I have also changed the way the Comments work after a couple of you notified me that you had a hard time submitting them. You now do not have to be a Gmail user to submit a comment, nor do you have to do the weird word-verification thing. This may open up the comments to the occasional spammer, but I monitor the comments and will make sure I delete anything that should not be there. But hopefully it will make it easier for all of you to interact on the blog, rather than having to resort to Facebook to send comments.
Woo! That was a long post. But I hope it was helpful to you. And please let me know if anything is not working like it should. I’ve tested everything, but sometimes things behave differently depending on what reading device and/or web browser you use.

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.”  ~Colossians 3:23

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