My schedule of late has made it hard for me to write regular blog posts. That being said, readers will now be able to follow my Twitter feed through the box now in the sidebar.

The previous incarnation of my blog offered readers the opportunity to request mass intentions. This service is now back up (see the link also in “Pages” on the sidebar). Let’s hope it doesn’t drown in spam like the last time!

I’ve added a small technical update to the blog: a plugin that lets readers forward a post they like by email to someone else. Just click the “Email This Post” link that now appears on each post to be taken to a page that let you do just that.

I’ve had a lot of the go lately, so I’ve been catching up with some back posts. You can find recently-posted material related to events as far as a week back. Just so you know. :-)

I’d added a couple of new static pages to the blog, outlining my comments policy and my publicity policy.

I’ve added a couple of features to the blog. One is a widget in the sidebar, called “Reading List”, that shows what books are currently part of my life (as I’ve actually had several people since my ordination ask me what I’m presently reading). The other is a page that shows my public Google calendar, which can be found in the “Pages” box in the sidebar.

One thing I am going to have to do is create a “publicity policy” for my blog, as I’ve been getting a fair amount of email from people asking me to publicize this or that event, link to this or that song they performed and uploaded to Youtube, etc. While I don’t mind helping, I don’t want my blog to turn into a billboard either. Suggestions for objective criteria to help achieve this balance are welcome!

Now that I am starting to use the new domain name, I added Google Analytics to the blog to be able to track how it is being used. H/T to New Advent for the advice.

Many have you come here because you entered or clicked through to the “fatherdowd.net” domain. But if you take a look at the address bar in your browser, you’ll see that you actually landed in the “bishopdowd.net” domain. I’ve set up a simple redirect as part of my gradual shift to the new website. Eventually “fatherdowd.net” will disappear, so please update any bookmarks you may have set up!

For those wanting to attend the ordination ceremony, it will be held at Mary Queen of the World Cathedral in downtown Montreal. The main entrance to the church is on René-Lévesque boulevard. The ceremony will begin at 7:30 p.m., but I recommend getting there at least an hour early to have a decent seat. There will be a reception afterward, open to the public. Details regarding the reception will be announced at the end of the ordination.

For those who cannot attend, you will be able to watch it unfold live through the magic of streaming video on the web through a Livestream channel:

You can also go directly to the broadcast page, where additional options (like posting Facebook comments) becomes possible:

http://www.livestream.com/eglisecatholiquedemontreal.

Simply click the link and a page will open with the video. The live broadcast will start 15 minutes before that actual start of the ceremony.

I was asked by a media specialist yesterday how many visits my blog actually gets. A darned good question! I have not tracked that stuff much for a while, as (to be honest) I wasn’t that interested. But I did think it might be interesting to see how things might have changed since my appointment as bishop.

According to a web statistics program called “Webalizer”, provided by my hosting service, in the month of July I had 180,125 “hits” on pages in the “fatherdowd.net” domain, with 24,630 of these hits being actual “visits”. In August I had 216,451 “hits”, with 30,271 “visits”. I can’t tell how much of this traffic is human beings versus robots crawling the Internet looking for content (e.g. for search engines), but when I looked at the daily data I did see spikes on days when major news pieces came out. That is consistent with people becoming curious and wandering over to check things out. I might add that the July statistics were fairly small until July 11, when the daily numbers doubled (makes sense, that is when the news came out), and then they had a big spike on July 18, when the article in the Globe and Mail really broke the news to a broader audience. This means that the numbers are consistent with human and not robot behaviour… which means I’ve had a lot of people coming to visit, perhaps for the first time. Welcome!

While these numbers are interesting, I wonder if there would be a way to improve the gathering of these stats even further. If any blog readers have ideas in that regard, I’m open to suggestions.