“I’m at LifeSource and I can’t believe it!” So began Laurel’s cell phone call to me this afternoon. I immediately thought that, for the second week in a row, our regular “save us a loaf” order for Alpine Bakery’s 2 Seed Sourdough Whole Wheat bread hadn’t come in (great bread, by the way).
But no, it was good news. Laurel had picked up the January issue of Salem Monthly from a stand outside of the store and her “Religion Should Unite, Not Divide” article had been published! This was a surprise, as the Salem Monthly folks had never responded after Laurel emailed in the article, so we assumed that the article had been rejected.
It’s fun to see your name in print, so I could share in Laurel’s excitement—especially since my name also got in at the end, along with a plug for my Church of the Churchless weblog. The title of her piece was changed to “Fearing Fundamentalism” and several paragraphs got cut, but such is par for the writer’s course.
Salem Monthly is on its way to becoming a valuable Willamette Week-lite countercultural asset for our overly staid community. Congratulations to the paper’s staff, plus whoever redesigned their web site, which is much improved. I found Laurel’s article without any trouble using the site search engine (though the unformatted format leaves something to be desired: paragraphs).
Speaking of search engines, I got the Google bug yesterday morning and managed to figure out how to install a search capability for HinesSight. Now, I realize that any HTML competent person reading this would have been able to get a Google search capability up and running in a few minutes. For HTML challenged me, it was much longer.
Yet when I finally got the search box in the left column to more or less fit in 200 pixels, I felt as excited as Laurel was today. “I’m searching my own weblog and I can’t believe it!”
Wanting to be prepared with a response in case my daughter thought of this, my first two searches were on “Celeste” (23 relevant results) and “Serena” (56 relevant results). And my response is: This doesn’t mean that I love our dog twice as much as I love you, my daughter. Serena simply lives with us, and you don’t, so she gets more press.
But when you and Patrick have your first child (which, gosh, I guess would be my first grandchild—but don’t let this fact put any pressure on you) I guarantee that your HinesSight Google ranking will go way up.
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