A Few Additions...

Checking through my blog stats is something I do very rarely these days - my posting has become so erratic that my readership has plummeted, and  it's depressing. However, every now and then I trawl through to see the blogs from which people are visiting.

If I ignore visits via Google and shameless self-promotion on Twitter and Facebook,  most of my traffic comes through blogs by priests - His Hermeneuticalness, the inimitable Fr. Z, Fr. Ray Blake, Fr. Michael Brown, Fr. Simon Henry, Fr. Seán Finnegan and Fr. Bede Rowe make up the lion's share, mostly through their use of the movable blogrolls (except for Fr. Z) which promotes blogs according to how recently updated they've been. The most frequently referring non-clerical blogs are by Kate Edwards, Charlie J, Bruvver Eccles, and Ttony, again via their blogrolls rather than direct mentions.

These regular blogs are already on my own blogroll. When I trawl through my stats, what I'm really looking for are blogs or sites that I don't recognise - and then I click through to see if anything interesting pops up...

So, in no particular order, I'd like to highlight the latest additions to my blogroll...

Mary's Little Garden by Amy Johnson. She is a recent convert to Catholicism, and also writes a blog on religious vocations - for women as far as I can see - called Sursum Corda.

Nesciens is a blog dedicated to chant and other church music by Ben Whitworth. One of Ben's other blogs, Catholic Orkney, is already on my roll, but this new one has very different material on it.

Catholic Coffee appears to be a very new blog - there are only two posts on it so far, both pictures. There also doesn't appear to be an RSS feed enabled, which is frustrating. I wondered if it was a new version of Coffee Catholic - a blog I used to follow but which appears to have been taken over by a most unsuitable site showing tattoos... and THAT, my friends, is why I always plead with people not to delete blogs when they're finished - just disable comments and leave it to lie dormant.

Fr. Brendan McGrath writes on all things Catholic from the Great and Glorious Diocese of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It looks as though he's been blogging for a while, but I hadn't spotted him until now.

And finally, Sally Thomas writes Castle in the Sea - though, as a wife, mother, home-educator, poet, free-lance essayist, laundress, dog-walker, glasses-wearer, dinner-burner, porch-sitter and confession-goer, I'm not quite sure how she manages to fit it all in and keep her blog going too. Having said that, I'm not quite sure how she's managed to get from her blog to mine, because I can't find any direct link. There is a mystery to ponder!