LOLSaints

In lieu of a saint being posted today, we have two links for those looking for even more Catholic fun in their daily browsing habits:

• Not Said by Jesus - a fun collection of sayings NOT said by Jesus, but typically the opposite of what Jesus would say.
• Catholic Car Wash - a new video podcast by LOLSaints.com's founder, Jeff Geerling, over on Life is a Prayer.com

Have a blessed Thursday, and see you next time!

Some crazy Cannonball lady has opened up voting for the 2010 Cannonballs...

Do you want to see more LOLSaints? Do you think we've been slacking around here a little bit? Let your voice be heard!

Vote for LOLSaints in the "Blog that Needs to be Updated More Often" category in the 2010 Cannonball Awards!

[Edit: We have now surpassed 2,000... I'm guessing there are a lot of robots in here :D]

We have surpassed 1,000 registered users on LOLSaints.com, but about half of them seem to be spambots. I don't know what to do to prevent them from registering; I've tried using spam services, and even some Javascript methods.

It looks like there are human beings somewhere creating spam accounts on this site; they're not all from the same IP address, though, so it's hard to track :(

Since starting this website over a year ago, I have had some major projects going on that took up the time I was hoping to devote to this website. Luckily, I still have hundreds of images to post on the site—of course, the more people that submit saints, the easier job I have in getting them out to the public!

Since running the iPod Touch contest last year, the site has gone in and out of dormancy. This year's Canonball Awards have prompted me to take a look at this site, and start maintaining it a little more...

To that effect:

• I have set the website to send users emails when their saints are published; hopefully this will let them more easily see when their saints are able to be viewed and loved by all!
• I am working on making it easier for users to see their old saint postings, edit them, delete them, etc.
• I have merged LOLSaints' Drupal codebase with my other personal sites, which will more or less guarantee that all these sites will be kept up-to-date and secure more easily than in the past.

And don't worry... you ain't seen nothin' yet, in terms of hilarious saints and saints that will make you want to become more holy!

Due to some crazy holidays, and a lot of things going on, the Saints were on an unplanned hiatus for some time. Luckily, they're back. Expect more LOLs in the coming weeks (starting tomorrow)!

Playing around with the Drupal Views module a while, I think I've finally come to a better ranking method for the 'Most Popular' section on this website...

Instead of the old way, which was:

1. Filter by number of votes cast, then
2. Filter by the average value of a vote.

I've tweaked the filter to go by:

1. Saint must have more than four votes.
2. Filter by average value of a vote, then
3. Filter by number of votes cast.

I wish I could do some sort of weighting to the sorting rules above, so certain saint images, which have tons of votes, and are at a value of 4.8 rather than 4.9, would display before a saint image that has only a few votes but is positioned at 4.9 or 5.

We shall see... for now, check out the updated listing on the Most Popular LOLSaints of All Time page!

Sorry we've been a little sporadic in posting new LOLSaints lately... our site developer has been a little busy with an engagement lately, along with some other fun things.

There are tons of great saints coming down the pipeline, and a bunch of glorious feasts! In addition, we've merged this site into a 'multisite' installation with Open Source Catholic and Catholic News Live.

On the site itself, the saint images have been upgraded with a tiny watermark on the bottom left so people who copy out the images can see where they've come from, and the text editor has been upgraded and speedily improved for the submit a saint page.

Please let us know if there are any other changes or problems we should look into! One of the next things that we'll be working on around these parts is an upgraded theme (much faster-loading, plus more modern and cheesy!).