Tag: Blogger

Tall Skinny Kiwi visits something beautiful

jones-224x300

Awesome guest this week on our podcast – in fact one of the first folks on our “Wish List” when we started the podcast – Tall Skinny Kiwi aka Andrew Jones.

I had a great chat with Andrew right before the New Year and we shared it this week for our listeners.

Andrew has been recognized by many as one of the top Christian/Church bloggers, but he describes himself as ::

I
Me
Dad
Man
Pilgrim
Blogger
Husband
Crepe Chef
Video Jockey
Jesus Follower
Badminton Player
Director of Boaz Project
Medium Format Photographer
Missional Cell Developer for CMS

And Andrew had this to say about the podcast ::

…the podcast, which is hosted and commented on by some really wonderful people with interesting accents, I talk about my training, early mission experience, fundamentalist background as a street evangelist, the side-benefits of Bible smuggling, tinkering around with the early emerging church in the 80’s and 90’s, and I fess up to my particular heresies.

He had some great stories and great ideas that I’ve been chewing on since we chatted.

Like, “want to start a church — keep the Christians out” and “the biblical example of church is the church moving out and initiating from their house and not our house” and “follow us as we follow Christ.”

I don’t want to steal his thunder but its GOOOOD. So take an hour or so and get to know Andrew a bit better and then let us know what you think.

The Blogger Bake Off

This looks cool.

bakeoff

from the website ::

Quite simply; bake bread, give dough. You can sign up for the campaign, make a donation, upload your bread recipes and document your culinary adventures in the media centre to spread the word. Bloggers can go even further by downloading our widget and tagging five other bloggers to do the same.

I haven’t extensively looked the site over yet, but I like the idea thus far. May have to bust out a bread recipe or two tomorrow.

How to get involved ::

  • Join our campaign.
  • Submit your bread baking recipe.
  • Make a donation to Breadline Africa.
  • Vote for your favourite recipe.
  • Bake a loaf of bread and blog about it.
  • Bake many loaves of bread and host a bake sale.

Anyone else checked the site out yet?

You might be a faith blogger if…

Catching up on some RSS feeds and had to share this from Tall Skinny Kiwi ::

You might be a faith blogger if…

  • if you sit in the back row of the church because thats where the wifi signal is the strongest
  • if your sermons allow both comments and trackbacks
  • if you tithe through a widget
  • if you think committing the original sin is getting tempted by the latest Apple
  • if you pray that God will allow you to upload your photo to the Lamb’s Book of Life
  • if your prayers are less than 140 characters because thats all Twitter allows
  • if you ever wonder why the domain of Satan doesn’t have its own URL
  • if you think Jesus’ command to Peter to “Feed my sheep” was to allow RSS syndication
  • if you think streams in the desert is a blog from Las Vegas

. . . then you just might be a faith-blogger!

how to be interesting

Thomas shares a great post on how to be interesting.

  1. Take at least one picture everyday. Post it to flickr.
  2. Start a blog. Write at least one sentence every week.
  3. Keep a scrapbook
  4. Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before
  5. Once a month interview someone for 20 minutes, work out how to make them interesting. Podcast it.
    Collect something
  6. Once a week sit in a coffee-shop or cafe for an hour and listen to other people’s conversations. Take notes. Blog about it. (Carefully)
  7. Every month write 50 words about one piece of visual art, one piece of writing, one piece of music and one piece of film or TV. Do other art forms if you can. Blog about it
  8. Make something
  9. Read:
    * Understanding Comics – Scott McCloud
    * The Mezzanine – Nicholson Baker
    * The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information – Edward Tufte

I think I’m a pretty interesting chap – but one trap I find myself sinking into is sharing so much with the world via the interweb that I don’t stop and take time to share that with others in real life. And other times, I forget to take the time to find out what makes other people interesting and sharing those things with others.

I think that’s one thing I try to do when we host dinner parties, or work on the something beautiful podcast, or introduce friends – make each person see what makes the other person interesting.

In other words – this person must have some qualities/values that I find to be interesting – so be sure and share those qualities with others when you introduce them.

And also, find the beauty in each person around you. Each person has a story. Each person has value. Each person already has “interestingness.” Find it & share it.

Something I’ve also found that helps add to a person’s interestingness is reading and responding to those random surveys on MySpace. I’ve found out so many random thoughts, ideas and history behind so many of my “acquaintances,” friends and family through MySpace surveys.

Twitter has also helped bridge the time/space gap between many (new) friends as well. In fact, many of the suggestions above can be done with 140 characters or less via Twitter, rather than a full blown blog… or you can incorporate the two together.

Related ::

Thomas’ blog post
the original post from Russell Davies
share your photos for free on flickr
get a free blogger (google) blog
get a free wordpress blog
get your own free Myspace profile
micro-blog for free on Twitter
Twitter tools for WordPress

Power your church/ministry website with WordPress

Delta theme for WordPress

If you’re still behind the curve, remember it is 2007 and your church and ministry needs a website. Why not use WordPress or Blogger to power your site?

It’s as easy to use as blogging and with RSS already built in, visitors can always have the latest information delivered to their e-mail or RSS reader.

Seriously, it doesn’t get much easier.

And here are a few great themes to plug-in and get started with.

Delta Theme (as seen above)

Several other themes by the same designer

And here’s a great example of how you can really put WordPress to work: Missouri Valley Baptist
Or there’s also a sample site, Cory Miller did to show off how you can make a website with minimal effort and maintenance with Blogger.

Thanks to Cory Miller for the links.