Here’s a quotation to hang in your most cluttered room:

“If you want to beautify a room, use it constantly, and the things that will accumulate, because they are wanted, will give the room the character it needs, which will be the reflection of your own.”

– Juvenile Instructor, 1 January 1888

There. That makes this post Mormon history and not mere navel-gazing. Right?

—oooOooo—

Topical Guide

Some readers are heavy users of Keepa’s Topical Guide (there’s a link near the top left corner of this page) – month after month, my stats page shows that the Topical Guide is the 5th or 6th most visited page during that month. In an effort to make it more useful, I’ve segregated these types of posts into their own categories:

Advertisements
Humor
Magazine Cover Art
Music (those with recordings or printed music; not posts about music or lyrics without music)
Photograph Collections (“Latter-day Saint Images” and similar collections by different titles)
Puzzles
Recipes

At the very least, this shortens the list under “Mormon Life and Culture” and should make it easier to find stories you may be looking for.

Keepa Kosts

A reader suggested (and was seconded, thirded, and fourthed) recently that s/he was willing to contribute toward Keepa’s expenses, so I (well, J. Stapley, who always comes to my rescue on technical issues – three cheers for J.!) added a donation button well down in the sidebar. Even without my having said anything about it, several generous readers have already noticed and made contributions – thank you.

Keepa’s out-of-pocket costs are relatively small: $150 per year for hosting fees, $15 for domain name registration, photocopies; the chief cost is in my time. Any Keepa’ninny who feels like donating $5 or $10 now and then toward those costs would help relieve me of that much of the load. The link is through PayPal, which handles credit cards securely even without a PayPal account.

Hosting fees come due on May 5.

Niblets

I avoided public participation in the Niblets this year because of ill will from some corners of the bloggosphere – if you’re a nominee who says anything positive, you’re ridiculed for “taking this too seriously.” If you offer suggestions for improvement, it’s “sour grapes.” If you don’t say anything at all, you’re “ungracious.” You can’t win, no matter how the voting goes.

Still, I like the idea of the Niblets, if not the administration of them, because of what they can contribute to Bloggernacle community building – nearly all of us participate on multiple blogs, and it’s fun to recognize memorable posts, comments, and threads, and to discover goodies that we missed the first time around.

And I can’t deny that it’s a huge source of personal satisfaction to know that so many of you voted for Keepa in the Best Solo Blog category. Thank you.