It’s been a while since I published a post unrelated to politics. I’ve been hard at work redesigning my parish’s website. While our go-live date was initially set for Advent, the powers that be decided to move it to November. I’ve been scrambling to put the finishing touches. I think I created a website that honors my parish and our Church. It may not be the Sistine Chapel, but I think it’s beautiful.
The good news is that I refined my skills in website design and learned about new WordPress plugins which I will be integrating into RosaryMeds in the coming months. You will see the site become less blog focused. I’m going to make the Rosary prayer resources more prominent. I will still write articles and, God willing, finish another book. But I want to focus on providing sufficient resources for praying the Rosary.
It’s astonishing to think that RosaryMeds will turn 16 this December. The website has served as a wonderful platform for me to delve into my faith and understand the Rosary better. I hope you have found as much education and enlightenment in reading my articles as I have in writing them.
I try incredibly hard to keep politics out of RosaryMeds’ posts. After all, the Rosary does not belong to a certain political party, country, or race. Our Holy Mother gave it to everyone to better know and love her son, Jesus. If you want to follow politics play-by-play, there are plenty of other websites for you to follow. You come to RosaryMeds because you love the Rosary and want resources for deeper prayer. I thank you for that. But because of recent political events, there are certain improvements I’m going to make to the website.
The Changes
Here are the changes that I will be rolling out on RosaryMeds. I think many of you will like them since they will provide a less distracting experience on the site.
No more Google-hosted advertisements via their AdSense platform.
No more Amazon affiliate links.
No more promotion of RosaryMeds on Twitter.
My books will remain on sale on Amazon for now although I’m seeing if there is a way to offer them directly through the RosaryMeds website.
I’m going to keep linking articles on the Rosary Prayer Facebook page but not do any type of paid advertising or post boosting.
In short, I’m not giving big tech my money nor making commissions from those of you who visit my site.
Why the Changes?
I have come to realize that the media and large tech giants have no interest in promoting free speech and will actively censor opinions and platforms that they disagree with while misinforming the public about why they are censoring certain voices. These changes to RosaryMeds aren’t about whether I agree with the recent actions at the US Capitol. They are about me using my freedom to not expose my audience to platforms that limit, control, and twist the free exchange of information. Granted, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon are private companies, free to run their platforms how they want. And I’m free to not use or support them.
Will these changes make a huge difference to these tech giants? Probably not. RosaryMeds only has a few hundred visitors per day on good days. So it’s not like Google and Amazon are going to be affected by losing RosaryMeds’ user base. But accepting ad and affiliate revenues from these companies just doesn’t feel right anymore. By accepting their payments, I’m solidifying their hold on the market to blacklist and shut down any other company that doesn’t align with their political views or those of their political allies.
What this Means for RosaryMeds
I remember the internet before Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Back then, you would hear about a website from a friend and visit it. If you liked it, you bookmarked it in Netscape Navigator and told your friends. Websites would link to other sites on the same topic (remember webrings?). I guess that is the model RosaryMeds is going back to. If you like RosaryMeds, tell your friends! Sign up to receive email updates. If you run a website, link to RosaryMeds. If you want to kick a few dollars my way for hosting costs, please do. But I’m done with giving big tech a platform to silence free speech.
The good ‘ole days of screechy modems and static text!
I started RosaryMeds as a hobby to learn how to create a website and write blogs. I later experimented with ads, SEO, and affiliate marketing out of curiosity. I used it to learn how to self-publish books. But RosaryMeds has never been a serious source of income or even a “side hustle.” I learned what I wanted and now I’m turning the site back to ad and affiliate free.
The True Value of RosaryMeds
The real value of RosaryMeds to me is that it has been a way for me to better explore the Rosary. It’s been like a prayer and meditation journal that I’ve shared with the world. It has helped me get more out of the Rosary and I hope it has also helped you. There’s no amount of money that Google or Amazon can throw my way that is worth more than a single person coming to know the joys of Rosary prayer. If you’re reading this, I hope you will continue to visit this site and, more importantly, pray the Rosary. We need Rosary prayer more than ever right now!
Good news everyone! I redesigned the layout of the Joyful Mysteries resource page. It’s much more app-like and acts better on smaller screens like phones and tablets. I’ll be working on the other mysteries this month and roll them out as they become available.
Thanks to some great WordPress plugins (a big shout out to Slide Anything and Tabs Responsive!), there are now tabs for each mystery and for each section within the mystery for intentions, meditations, videos, and scripture passages (related links tab coming soon). Within the meditations, you can scroll/swipe left and right to read a random meditation from other websites. If you like what you read, be sure to follow the links and visit those sites. This new layout should reduce the number of pages you have to navigate to pray the mysteries.
As much as I enjoy writing about the Rosary, I also want to provide helpful resources for when you are actually praying the Rosary. I always wanted RosaryMeds to be a “hub” of Rosary knowledge. I can’t come up with great insights into the Rosary mysteries on my own but I can gather all the great ideas other people have across the web and make them accessible in one place.
Take a look at the new Luminous Mysteries page. For each mystery, it contains intentions, meditations, videos, and related articles. What I hope is that you will visit this page and browse a little for some inspiration and new Rosary meditation ideas. In the coming months, I also hope to provide similar pages for the other Rosary mysteries and update them regularly as I come across related web pages.
If you have comments and suggestions about what you would like to see on these pages or if you would like to see certain websites linked, please get in touch with me. I would love to work on whatever you find useful.
After years of work, my new book is finally complete and available now on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats. The Rosary Prayer Guide for the Rest of Us is a follow up to my original book, The Rosary for the Rest of Us. In this new book, I provide ideas for meditation per bead of the rosary. Combine that with the more holistic view in my original book and you have two terrific resources for smarter and deeper Rosary prayer. Pick up your copy today!
As we approach Advent, I’m sure most of us will focus more on what’s on sale on Amazon than on prayer and fasting. When it comes to seasons of preparation, Advent tends to take a back seat to Lent when it comes to people focusing on their spiritual needs. This Advent, I want to challenge you to devote more time and energy preparing what is in your heart in addition to what is under your Christmas tree.
True story. One time my wife and I met with a priest for a class on a weekday in Advent. The priest offered my wife a small brownie bite which she politely refused saying that she was abstaining from sweets during Advent. The priest surprisingly said that was the first time he’d ever heard of someone fasting during Advent. Lent? Of course. But you must be a special sort of crazy to fast during a time when stores, markets, homes, and offices are stocked wall-to-wall with Christmas candy and pastries.
It would be a Christmas miracle if I could abstain from eating from the office cookie dish.
I mention this not to show how strong-willed my wife is (okay, maybe I wanted to brag a little). I mention this because of the priests surprise that someone actually took a season of preparation to actually prepare for Christmas! I think many of us hear that word, preparation, but don’t actually internalize what it means. We decorate our homes, buy gifts, trim a tree, and do all sort of things to prepare for Christmas, the holiday. But we so often skip the preparation for Christmas, the Holy Day.
I encourage you to make a plan for Advent similar to what you do for Lent. Don’t just think about what you can give up. Advent is a good time to think about what you can add. Here are some ideas:
Set up an advent wreath and pray around it every day with your family.
And on that last point, I have just the solution to help you pray the Rosary during Advent. After many long months, I’m happy to announce that my latest book, The Rosary Prayer Guide for the Rest of Us, is now available in paperback on Amazon. Right in time for Advent and Christmas. This book continues what I started in The Rosary for the Rest of Us. But instead of taking a holistic approach to each Rosary mystery, this new book takes a tactical approach. It has scripture passages, intentions, and quotations of wisdom for each Rosary bead. Get an overall understanding from The Rosary for the Rest of Us but get focus for each prayer in The Rosary Prayer Guide for the Rest of Us.
Wow, it’s embarrassing to see that I published my last article over a month ago. How time flies right? I’ve been busy with a family vacation and preparing and delivering a presentation on the importance of rosary prayer. But I’m back now. After a little editing, a video of my presentation will be available online soon. Working on that presentation also gave me some great ideas for future articles so hopefully, I will end the summer strong.
English: A sunny August day at the beach at Joss Bay, a rural beach not far from Broadstairs in Kent, England. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I hope your summers are going well. Remember to pack that rosary wherever your summer adventures may take you. There’s no such thing as a summer vacation from prayer and living a holy life.
While I loved my previous WordPress theme that was created by a dating site for some odd reason, it is time RosaryMeds got a fresh coat of paint. The old theme just wasn’t keeping up and didn’t support many of the modern new features found on other blogs. One huge new feature is that RosaryMeds is now more mobile friendly. No more manually zooming in to read text! So if you are reading this on your phone or tablet, enjoy.
There is still some work to do like tweaking colors, adjusting the formatting, and updating the header image. But regardless of the look and feel the goal of RosaryMeds remains unchanged — getting you enthused about rosary prayer.
On December 11, 2008 I started RosaryMeds with my first article. And now here we are, four years and 177 articles later. Let’s take a look at some notable statistics from 2012. I’m not going to win any awards for web traffic, but thanks to all 2,186 of you who visited RosaryMeds this year and viewed a total of 4,575 pages. And a big thanks to all 641 of you who visited the site more than once! I hope you found much of the content inspiring, thought provoking, and relevant. This year was busy for me since I’m a new dad, but I still managed to write 30 articles. As many of you know, RosaryMeds is a hobby of mine and gives me the opportunity to really focus on my Catholic faith and the rosary. Writing articles is like a form of meditation since I really have to think about my faith and how it relates to the events in my life. In trying to make rosary prayer more accessible to you, it has also strengthened my knowledge and joy of prayer. So thanks everyone for encouraging me to write articles about our shared faith in God.
Here are some other interesting metrics from 2012. While it is no surprise that most visitors are from the US, do you know who rounds out the top five? It’s the Philippines, Canada, United Kingdom, and India. I never would have guessed those, especially India. The fact that mainland Europe had so few visits highlights the changing demographics of the Catholic Church. Drilling down even further, here are the top five cities that visited RosaryMeds — Hollywood, Manila, miscellaneous, Miami, and Makati. Hollywood at #1? I guess there are still a few Catholics in hiding somewhere off of Sunset Boulevard. Thank you for all of you who came to RosaryMeds via Facebook and the Catholic Answers Forums. Those two traffic sources made up nearly half of RosaryMed’s referral traffic (people who follow links to RosaryMeds from another site).
And this year I can thank all of you who bought my book which I published on Amazon December 10, 2011. There are now 72 copies of The Rosary for the Rest of Us floating around in the world. While it’s not going to be on the New York Times best seller list any time soon, I got just as much out of writing that book as I do writing articles on RosaryMeds. And to celebrate four years of RosaryMeds, I’m making the Kindle edition of my book available for free this week through Friday (and Amazon Prime members can borrow the book for free through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library all year long). Head on over to Amazon and download a copy to read on your smart phone, tablet, or PC. Don’t be shy about leaving a review on Amazon or telling your friends either. Also, it’s not too late to buy a copy as a stocking stuffer for the prayer warriors on your Christmas list.
Thanks for a good four years and I’m looking forward to year #5!
It’s that time of year again where we crawl deep into our garages and take out all the Christmas lights and decorations. I’m always excited each year to see if the outdoor decorations I bought the year before at a discount (since I buy them after December 25th) will actually work. This year, a lit snowman backed by candy cane lights graced our front lawn to keep our Christmas polar bear company. Of course, the Christmas season is also about shopping. I know that we all say Christmas shouldn’t be about gifts, but chances are you will need to buy presents for at least one person. I’m going to tell you how you can shop for Christmas gifts online while supporting RosaryMeds and without it costing you an extra cent.
Do you know why blog websites display ads for various online retailers? Whenever you follow a link from a blog site to an online store and purchase something, that blog site gets a little payment from that online store as a small “thank you” for referring someone’s business. This is called affiliate marketing. I know that term gets a lot of bad press since most people associate it with pyramid, MLM, work-at-home, and “get rich quick” schemes. But it’s a legitimate way many blogs try to cover their costs (hosting, domain registration, site design expenses, etc.). The great thing about affiliate links is that they require you, the customer, to do nothing differently except initially go to the website via a special link from the blog site. You just purchase items that you were going to buy anyway, but the blog site gets a small payment. I try my best to be selective about who I partner with and only promote sites and products that I personally like and relate to the overall themes of RosaryMeds — the Catholic faith, rosary meditation, and prayer.
For example, you might want to consider buying something from Mystic Monk Coffee. This coffee is actually roasted by Carmelite monks in Wyoming as part of their vow of daily labour. It’s the only coffee we brew in my house. Sure, I could go to the market or Starbucks and pick up a bag of dark-roasted beans. But I feel good knowing that when I buy Mystic Monk coffee I’m helping support a monastery and people who dedicate their lives to praying for others like you and me. And when brewed correctly, it tastes great to boot. Do you have a coffee drinker on your gift list? Consider Mystic Monk.
Another Catholic online retailer that is near and dear to my heart is Ignatius Press. To be honest, it is sometimes a love/hate relationship particularly when they send me their catalogue in the mail. The frustration comes from the fact that they offer so many interesting books and videos that there aren’t enough hours in the day to read them all. Just to name a few titles that look interesting to me — 50 Questions on the Natural Law, A Biblical Walk Through the Mass, The Seven Big Myths about the Catholic Church, and Modern Moral Problems. Do you have an avid reader or movie watcher on your gift list? Consider buying something from Ignatius Press.
Of course, in my humble opinion (wink, wink), one of the best gifts you can give yourself or others is a copy of my book, The Rosary for the Rest of Us: A Practical Guide to our Most Powerful Prayer. I saw a huge gap in the types of rosary books available to aspiring prayer warriors. The books are either extremely basic; giving only small paragraph descriptions of each mystery and not even much reflection. Other rosary books are incredibly dense with a lot of scholarly analysis and history of the rosary. That might make for good reading, but does it make for better praying? My book focuses on helping you get the most out of actually praying the rosary, not just learning its history or the story behind each mystery. Do you know someone who could use a little rosary prayer? Consider The Rosary for the Rest of Us.
So there you go — three great Christmas gift ideas. Follow the links to those online stores from this post or on from the banners on the left-hand sidebar of the RosaryMeds website as a way of showing your appreciation for either my articles or my book. And, speaking for bloggers everywhere, if you do intend on purchasing something online this Christmas, check and see if your favourite blog has an affiliate link to the sites that have the items you want. It’s a great way of saying “thank you” to the blogs that you enjoy visiting without requiring any extra effort or money.
