Heavenfield

Well, May 5th is Heavenfield’s first birthday. It has been a great year with 17,206 actual visitors to the site and quite a few more I know reading along with syndicated readers.

I think I’ll celebrate the anniversary with a run down of the top 5 posts of the last year with their hit count. I should point out that WordPress does not count visits by the site owner.

Out of 154 blog posts, these are the top 5:

1. Martyrdom: Red, White, and Blue (275)
2. Which Mary? (254)
3. You know Easter is coming early when… (206)
4. Lindisfarne and St. John the Beloved (199)
5. St Aethelthryth of Ely: An Enduring Saint (197)

None of these got more than 50 posts within their first 2-3 days so these are posts that have turned up almost daily in search engine hits. There are another about 5-7 that also turn up nearly daily in search hits. Its been fun the last couple months watching them jockey for position to finish. At least only one (#3) was found by off topic search words like ‘green beer’!

Excluding the ‘about me’ page, Early Medieval Kings has been by far the most popular web page with 509 hits. Going along with this, early medieval kings is by far the most common search term to find Heavenfield.

Last but certainly not least a big THANK YOU to my two biggest referrers: Dr Nokes at Unlocked Wordhoard and Jonathan Jarret at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe!

Now that the semester is winding down to a close over the next week I hope to get back to blogging on a more regular basis. Brendan is getting impatient to move on…

My Distilled Prayer project has officially moved over to my new blog on the psalms and devotional materials. Here is the new url for the project: http://psalterstudies.wordpress.com/distilled-prayer-project/

All of the posts originally put on Heavenfield are still here. The main page has moved. I hope I see some of you over on the new blog occasionally…

I’ve been reading some of the great posts by my fellow bloggers on the creative google searches that find their blog. Sigh…. I’m feeling left out. People who come looking for Heavenfield, well, they seem to get what they came for. Come on people… give me something to cringe at. I could use a little comic relief.

Search hits from the last two days:

Today: double monastery of whitby, king penda, columba of iona, voyage of st brendan the abbot, king clovis i genevieve, bede martyrology, the life of st aethelthryth, passover in ireland, st columba of iona day, consecration cross lindisfarne.

Yesterday: st patrick’s day, ely cathedral transcept, medieval kings, marti gras, anglo-saxon royal women, latin models, pictish symbol stones southern scotland, st ailbe, scott degregorio, brigantia map craven yorkshire.

This is really a very typical couple of search days. Some search terms like Columba, Aethelthryth/Audrey, now Genevieve, whitby, and ‘medieval kings’ tend to turn up almost daily.

While I’m happy that people continue to find posts on many medieval topics in Heavenfield’s archives, there is just nothing to make fun of here. I must be doing something wrong! The only time I’ve gotten close to humorous searches were all the variations of “green beer” that I got around St Pat’s day.

Derek the Ænglican is back at his blog and posted a new meme. As I have been hunting around this week for something to post on without much luck, I’m going to pick up on this…

So here is the meme:

1. Give three reasons why you blog
2. Repeat the meme rules
3. Tag three bloggers to continue

Why I blog….

• First, this blog has become a mental filing cabinet. Someplace to work out questions or store thoughts and musings (this is why I file posts in categories so much - apart from creating a neat tag cloud). Its also a place to work out projects and get some feedback. I do want feedback, so please comment on any post.
• I’m beginning to feel a call to stress the continuity between the modern Anglican church(s) and the medieval church. People get so focused on learning about the early church that they want to skip over the medieval church completely. This is full of so many problems I don’t want to go off on that tangent here. Anglicans are supposed to balance a tripod of scripture + tradition + reason. Tradition is securely there in the middle holding everything together and the Middle Ages are vital to the development of tradition. In a climate where cradle Episcopalians are a small minority reminders of where Anglican traditions come from needs to be continual.
• I joined my first medieval list-serv in the early 1990s and have been part of the online medieval community continually since then. The list-servs have waxed and wained over the years and still have there place, but they are increasingly becoming more like announcement lists where the most active discussion is 3-4 posts answering a query. Despite the current flurry of activity on ANSAX, this seems to be a steady trend on virtually all medieval lists. So what is the next big thing? Well, Heavenfield is an experiment to see if the blogosphere is where the online medieval community will be for the next generation. I think the medieval blogosphere is only in its infancy, so who knows how it will all develop. I think that its interesting that the blogosphere and list-servs don’t overlap too much the moment with a few exceptions.

So who to tag…. I think I will tag Jonathan Jarrett, Jennifer Lynn Jordan and I’ll try Dr Nokes again… and anyone else who wants to join in, please do. Leave a comment here so we know to look up your contribution.

It is becoming very apparent that Folklore Friday is going to have to be an occasional feature this semester, so hopefully it will reappear in coming weeks as a pleasant surprise rather than a regular feature. I shall do my best to post on the lost kingdom for January before January is gone next week! If you have been wondering what Brendan’s fate has been this short Epiphany season, he out at sea with no land in site.

Since most of the branches of the history meme didn’t link to the original post (and its been over 10 days), here is a summary of the new branches:

I was tagged by Jonathan Jarret who did Count Borrell II.

• He also tagged Antiquarian’s Attic who did a very nice meme on Gruffydd ap Cynan.

I did St Oswald of Northumbria on December 30.

I tagged:

• Jennifer Lynn Jordan who did Prester John.
• Derek the Anglican who did Aelfric Bata (and John-Julian put up a wacky story of St John of Beverly in Derek’s comments).
  • And he tagged LutherPunk who did the pirate Jean Lafitte.
  • Caelius Spinator did geologist William Smith.
• Larry Swain who did the other Aelfric, of Eynsham.
• Nicola Griffith who did St Hild.

Readers did:

• Gabriele Campbell did King Heinrich IV
  • And she tagged Kristen Campbell who did St. Columba
• Wynn Bexton did Philip Arridaios, half-brother of Alexander the Great.

I’ll update this post if any others I tagged put up their meme. Looks like there is a nice spread of historical figures here and by my count, two mutations. One mutation is the choice of a fictional character (Prester John) and the second is the list of seven things novelist Nicola Griffith would like to know about St Hild. I have to say I expected a few literary mutations…. I think that someday we could use another round of tagging to get beyond a few of the usual suspects.

Happy New Year! Here is hoping that we all have a great 2008!

A little preview of what you can expect on Heavenfield.

The three regular features will continue:

* Person of the Week (PW)
* Lost Kingdom of the Month (LKM)
* Folklore Fridays (FF)- just began last week

I’ll be blogging my way through the Voyage of St Brendan for one church year. Given the compressed liturgical year in 2008 that means I could be through the main stops before summer. Never fear Brendan fans, all those new ‘translations’ I picked up for Christmas should have plenty of Brendan related topics for a while.

The Distilled Prayer project will also continue, and so will posts on feast days. By mid-May I will have gotten through the whole calendar once and I will probably get more selective in which feast days to post on.

In addition to all this there will be book and movie reviews, comments on other blogs, maybe a few memes or challenges and the usual bloggy miscellanea. I’m sure the Anglican Communion will manage to inspire a post or two as well… sigh.

I hope to keep the mix of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic fairly even, so no one will know what to call my site. Most links to Heavenfield on medievalist meta-sites call it an Anglo-Saxon site, while a few Anglicans I know refer to it as ‘my Celtic site’. So I hope to keep y’all confused on that… I try to avoid such artificial distinctions.