Category: Admin

Kristine’s Favorite Sites

If you check out the links from “Kristine Haglund Harris” on the side bar you will notice that, depending on which of her three names you clikc on, you will be taken to either the website of The Republican National Committee, The National Rifle Association, or Bush/Cheney’04. This choice of links constitutes extreme action on the part of one of the site administrators in an attempt to get Kristine to send in her biographical information and a picture, so that we can get an introduction page for her like the rest of the permanent bloggers. In the mean time, we are taking suggestions for other right-wing sites that we could link to Kristine’s name.

Welcome, Julie & Thanks, Greg

Many thanks to Greg Allen, who posted early, often, and well here at T&S. I suspect that he won many new fans for greg.org, and we look forward to hearing from him again soon. Our newest guest blogger is Julie Smith, a native Houstonian who earned a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in Biblical Studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, where she specialized in women in the New Testament. You know her here as “Julie in Austin,” but you might also be familiar with her book, Search, Ponder, and Pray: A Guide to the Gospels, which according to Julie “contains over 4,000 questions (no answers) and attempts to get LDS readers to really think about the scriptures and to introduce them to the various approaches of academic biblical studies.” Julie teaches at the LDS Institute in Austin, Texas. She is married to an engineer, and has two children, whom she homeschools. Welcome, Julie!

Hello, Out There!

Early this morning, our Site Meter rolled over the 20,000 visitor mark. Kaimi noted the first 10,000 five weeks ago, on January 22. That first 10,000 required nine weeks of blogging. Based on traffic this week — which passed 400 visitors per day for the first time on Wednesday — we will reach the next 10,000 sometime well before the end of March. Although I rarely purport to speak for all of the bloggers on this site, I think that I can safely venture the following: we all appreciate the opportunity to engage in this forum, and express thanks to our visitors, particularly those who take the time to share insights about Mormonism. Keep coming back, and tell your friends!

Welcome Our New Guest Blogger: Linda Hoffman Kimball

Many of you may already know Linda Hoffman Kimball from her work as a columnist at beliefnet.com and for Exponent II. Or from her novels (Home to Roost and The Marketing of Sister B). Or perhaps from the essay collection she edited, Saints Well-Seasoned: Musings on How Food Nourishes Us — Body, Heart and Soul. Her latest work is Chocolate Chips & Charity: Visiting Teaching in the Real World, which has already cracked Cedar Fort’s Bestseller List even though it just came out in January. I first met Linda in the Hyde Park Ward on the South Side of Chicago, where she, her husband (Chris) and three children were the backbone of a very transient ward. Like me Linda was baptized into the Church during college (Wellesley College), having been raised a devout Methodist. After Wellesley, she earned an MFA from Boston University, where her thesis was on Art as Propaganda in Nazi Germany. She now lives in Evanston, Illinois, but she also considers Boston “home.” Welcome, Linda!

Welcome again, Kristine!

For the past two weeks, we have all enjoyed Kristine’s thoughtful presence on this blog, in posts like this and this and this. No one wants this to end, including Kristine, who recently agreed to carry on as a permanent blogger. Welcome again, Kristine!

Small request for technical assistance

Since the move to the new server, most things have gone reasonably well. One little thing is still bugging me; I’ve tried a few ways to fix it, and have been unsuccessful. I’m wondering if any of our readers have the knowledge to help (required knowledge will be a little bit of understanding of Java, PHP and/or CGI). UPDATE: Got it! Thanks to Quinn Warnick , the fiction editor for Irreantum, the magazine of the Association of Mormon Letters, for the tip.

Welcome Our Newest Guest Blogger: Kristine Haglund Harris

Regular visitors to this blog will recognize Kristine as the outspoken, ABBA-loving, mother of three who currently has a vice grip on second place (among non-bloggers) in the Comments sweepstakes. Just this week, I learned that Kristine’s brother Rich was my student two years ago at Vanderbilt Law School. While living in Tennessee, I also met Kristine’s father, who is a Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt. Having spent several years in Germany in her youth, Kristine was naturally drawn to the study of all things German at Harvard (A.B.) and Michigan (M.A.). She tells me that her youngest child will be in preschool three mornings a week next fall, so she is considering a move back to school to finish her Ph.D., “though not in German — something more practical, like history or religion.” (That last comment being partly TIC, I think.) She has also been a Summer Fellow (2003) at the Smith Institute of Church History. We are all looking forward to hearing more from Kristine over the next two weeks.

We Love You Pakistan!

I was just checking over our site statistics. We seem to have settled into a groove of about 250 to 300 unique visitors per day. Our readership continues to be disproportianately concentrated in the Eastern United States. However, as the map below indicates, five percent of our recent visitors seem to be coming to us from Pakistan.

Welcome to the New Place

Hi everyone. We just switched servers — what a headache! Hopefully this looks exactly the same as the old place. A few things to note: 1. Timesandseasons.org e-mail will be temporarily down. You can e-mail me at kaimi *at* wengerfamily.com . Look for everyone else’s e-mails (if you want to e-mail them) on their personal blog site or description. 2. The domain name (DNS) is not fully resolved, and it seems to still be pointing at the other site sometimes. Since the DNS was being wacky, I set up a redirector at the old host, so you should end up here anyway. :) The only difference will be the address bar, and even that should return to normal once the DNS settles down. 3. There will probably be little bugs here and there — let me know of any you come across, we’ll get them resolved.

A New Guest Blogger

We are pleased to announce our newest guest blogger . . . drum roll . . . Dan Peterson. Dr. Peterson is a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Brigham Young University. He studied in Cairo and recieved his Ph.D. from UCLA. He is undoubtedly the best professor of medieval Islamic philosophy that I had during my entire undergraduate education. In addition to his work on Islam, Dan Peterson has long been associated with The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and is the editor of the ever so aptly and felicitously named FARMS Review. Contrary to the information contained in the BYU directory, however, Professor Peterson is, alas for him, not the Director of the BYU Jerusalem Center.

Numbers

I just wanted to note a few numbers that I thought interesting. Early this morning, the blog passed the 10,000 visitor mark. That counter began on November 21st — two months ago yesterday — so we have had 10,000 visits in 2 months. (This metric doesn’t count repeat visits from the same person on the same day). The level of positive response was certainly not anticipated by me. (Just look how excited I was two months ago, when we started to get 65 visitors a day). I remain amazed and gratified at the fact that people are this interested in our discussions, and I hope that my co-bloggers and I can continue to post interesting enough discussion that people see T & S as a worthwhile place to visit.

Quick Note on Spam Comments

We have been hit with a batch of spam comments over the past 2 days. (I guess it’s a sign that we have hit the big time.) If you haven’t seen them, here’s an idea of what they look like: “The sky is green.” -John Jones. The text is always nonsense, and the name will be linked not to an e-mail address but directly to the spammer’s site. It may be a hosting or gambling site (those are the two that have hit us so far). The combination of nonsense text (they use what appear to be randomly generated, short phrases, hopefully in hopes of seeming like a legitimate poster) and a hyperlinked name is the indication that it’s a spam comment. When we see these, we will delete the comment and ban the IP address from further comments. Readers may notice these spam comments sometimes (there will be some inevitable lag between the time they go up, and the time we delete and ban them). Please pay them no attention. And especially, please don’t clink on the link to the spammer’s site. They will be tracking where hits are coming from, and if they see hits coming from T & S, they will continue to spam us.

Thanks Ady

Besides welcoming Claudia, we want to thank Ady for sitting in as a guest blogger. It has been good for us to have a perspective other than the legal-philosopical-political perspective of the blogging crew here. A scientist’s perspective keeps us on our toes.

Claudia Bushman: Historian, Scholar, Blogger

We are pleased to welcome Claudia Bushman as our newest guest blogger. Dr. Bushman is a historian by training and has taught at Columbia University for many years. Her books include How America Discovered Columbus, In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker, Mormon Sisters: Women of Early Utah, A Good Poor Man’s Wife, Mormon Domestic Life in the 1870s: Pandemonium or Acadia, Mormons in America (with Richard Bushman), Building the Kingdom: A History of Mormons in America (with Richard Bushman), and many others. She is one of the founders of Exponent II, a Boston-based magazine focusing on Mormonism and women’s issues. In addition, historian Richard Bushman has the distinction of being married to Professor Bushman.

Technical Difficulties

Yes, we’ve been having a few last night and this morning. Nothing overly serious, but this site’s admins (such as me) are neophytes when it comes to coding. (“Possibly the most neophyte, yet badly-coded . . .”). Bear with us, we’ll get things fixed again. UPDATE: Almost all-the-way fixed now, with just a little bit of aesthetic cleaning up left to do.

New Blogger!

Jim Faulconer has agreed to come on board as a permanent blogger. Unfortunately, because Jim has real job he will only be posting a couple of times a week.

These aren’t the droids you’re looking for

It is sometimes funny to see what google combinations have brought visitors to the site. We just got a hit on our old-version blogger blog (we moved to MT three weeks ago, and will eventually dismantle the old site) from the following Google search: “topless alberta statutes” This is particularly odd because none of the words in that search are on the old site! I was sufficiently puzzled that I re-ran the search in Google, and didn’t see any link to the site — but that’s definitely the referrer on a hit from this very afternoon. Odd.

Thanks!

A lot of people are reading this blog now. Over the past few days, we have been averaging over 140 visitors per day, and we are headed in that direction again today. I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank all of the visitors, especially those who make great comments. This is a fun place to be, and we hope you continue to enjoy it.

A New Guest Blogger

We have a new guest blogger: Jim Faulconer! Jim is a professor of philosophy at BYU. You can get a sense of some of his interests from this recent article by him in the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture. Russell ought to appreciate the presence of another non-lawyer on the blog, although we seem to be skewing toward philosophers, who I think of as kind of wanna-be lawyers…

This and that – Administrative

A few quick administrative notes: 1. I will be out of town most of this week, and will be blogging lightly or not at all. Please don’t take my silence as a sign that I agree with anything Nate, Matt or Gordon say. 2. The site seems to be striking a chord with people, as we are now averaging 65 visitors per day. To our visitors: Please feel free to e-mail us, to comment on posts (and for those wondering about comments from week 1, yes, we will get them copied over at some point — technology has not been particularly cooperative), and to let us know any suggestions you have for topics of discussion or for improvements we could make to the site. Thanks for visiting, and we hope to see you here again!

Do things look a little different around here?

Yep, we have moved to Movable Type. We are currently working on updating comments and links. Things may be a bit bumpy for a few days, but we expect any problems to be ironed out quickly. In the meantime, the old site is still available at www.timesandseasons.org/mt/ . And a big thanks to Matt Evans for setting us up on this software (now if only we can figure out how to use it . . . )