12 Witnesses

Be on the lookout for a massive Link Load coming today and if you like these fotos, you can see more on my Photoblog.

Today I am combining several things into one mighty Phriday foto: My tech series on blogging and Wordpress, my pictures, my trip to Vietnam and a tribute to Joe Kennedy, whose photography I love - especially the pictures of food. No. Not because its food and I’m fat. Because of the texture, perspectives and colors.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

So, I am uploading these pictures, after compressing them with Faststone freeware image viewer as mentioned in Better Blogging: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with Wordpress 2.5 media uploader. The media uploader was giving me some problems, but David Phillips helped me to to install the Flexible Upload plugin and that has settled it down. It only works on pictures though, but if I were uploading video or audio (the other options) I would use Podpress, so I don’t need it for anything else. *Note to David, who is very busy - I’m not tinkering. I promise.

One of the options of the Media Uploader is that you can insert several images and it will create thumbnails and an intermediate picture. The other option, on display here today, is the insert gallery function, which will create a gallery of thumbnails through which you can navigate, like a mini-photoblog on your post.

Rather than give you the rundown myself on how to do it, I’ll link to Matt Mullenweg, a fellow Houstonian living elsewhere in the world (California, where there is no decent BBQ), telling you all about Wordpress 2.5 media upload at WordPress.org. PS - Matt is one of the first ever bloggers and is (one of) the creator(s) of Wordpress, which is to say, he’s had some help, but he is the primary cause of its existence. He might know what he’s talking about.

So here it is a picture gallery of food from Vietnam, created in Wordpress 2.5: (click on a thumbnail for the full size picture)

[Show as slideshow]

This article is aimed at those who are already blogging from novice to blogging regular.

Be sure to check out previous posts in this series: Better Blogging: The Beginning, and Better Blogging: Tweaking Firefox.

How do you get found? Search Engines and references. Though links help you, even in Search Engines they give you greater credibility as others link to you, most of the people who link to you are part of a general group of people who are already aware of your presence on the web. Beyond that, you can’t control who links to you.

I’ve been using these tips over the last week and my Search Engine references have shot through the roof. My post on tweaking Firefox was #70 on Google’s main site (not blogsearch) for the term “Tweaking Firefox” within 7 hours of it going up. It was not yet cached by Google. That may not sound that impressive to you, but considering the number of articles on the web about Firefox, it is really pretty good.

A day later, it was #21 on Google’s main site. 48 Hours, and it is #20. BTW, I am not counting sublinks that are indented under parent links.

So let me tell you what I did up front to get it there, and then let me tell you what can happen to improve it even more.

Layering Keywords: slug, tags, categories, names and excerpts

Search Engines look for keywords. The more they appear on a certain page, the higher they get ranked, so putting keywords in the page is essential, but you don’t want simply repeat a word incessantly, because it makes reading your article irritating. If higher readership is your goal, this is unwise.

There is the trick of labeling pictures or links with terms that are searched often (e.g. “NOT Miley Cyrus” if you were trying to get American Tweens to hit your site), which will get you an early boon of hits, but they are going to leave when they arrive to find you don’t have what they were promised, so other than hitting your site for a 3 second stay, you’ve gained nothing. This is not to mention that you will lose credibility with them and likely it will create a backlash effect.

Also, Google will punish you for doing this when they discover it. Obviously, it’s counterproductive.

There are five legitimate ways to insert keywords into your content that catch search engines, but not the ire of the reader or those that run the search engine.

The first way of doing this is the post slug. The post slug is the set of keywords in your article’s web address. The post slug for the Tweaking Firefox post is seen in the picture of the address bar:

The slug part is “better-blogging-tweaking-firefox” as you might have guessed. What you may not know is that you can rewrite the post slug to anything you want, using keywords you think matter and not just as a repeat of the post’s title. You can do that in your Wordpress write post page in the place that looks like this:

In the line that reads “Permalink,” click the “Edit” link and you can change the post slug to whatever you want it to be.

You have to have your permalinks set for this style, rather than “basic” permalinks that just calls your post a number. This is what they call a “pretty” permalink. Awww. Isn’t it sweeeet?

Wordpress now takes tags. If you want your post to be picked up, tag it, tag your pictures, tag anything and everything you can tag. Alot of people never tag (I used to be one of them) and this is very effective in keeping yourself from being found on the internet, and if not being found is your goal, then you should not tag. You should also probably not put your thoughts (or pictures, videos and other information) on the internet, but keep your thoughts in a nice leatherbound journal beside your bed.

Here’s the tag set I used for Tweaking Firefox.

Categories were the first way to separate posts from each other and one way to send the message to the search engine that your post has something specific in it. In Wordpress, you can post to multiple categories:

Excerpts are new in the write post page of Wordpress 2.5 and at the bottom of the page you can find a box in which you can put an excerpt of your post that would provide a synopsis of the post. You should put an introductory paragraph that is full of keywords:

The best keyword layering option that you have, though, is naming things. You need to name your pictures and you need to name your links. You also need to write out your links. Do this: go back to Tweaking Firefox and find the number of times I wrote the word Firefox. Then start hovering your mouse over the links and read the name that pops up. When you get done, feel free to write the count you get in the comments. I don’t know the number, but I know it is so many, that I don’t want to spend the time counting them. I think this is the most likely reason that my post shot so high so quickly - and it hasn’t been linked to by any sites, either. You should feel free to do so. I’d appreciate it.

[UPDATE!!! - Apparently Google didn't like that I had it layered that much and has de-linked the post. I have know idea what the tipping point is for them, as all the layers were legitimate, but apparently, quantity, though legitimate, can be overdone. Everyone take a lesson.]

SEO Plugin

Wordpress has several plugins available to optimize for Search Engines. I use All in One SEO Pack and it looks like this:

This plugin re-layers all of this information and feeds it directly to the Search Engines.

Also, you should install Google Sitemaps as a plugin. It creates a sitemap for Google’s “bot” as it crawls your site and it makes it easier to understand the structure of your site and give results that reflect it.

Content: Quality, Diversification

Obviously, good quality content is a must. You need to write well and it needs to be helpful to people. This will create traffic and links, and that will cause the Search Engines to sit up and take notice.

Also, you need to diversify your content. If you make your content specific, then only a small range of people will be looking for what you are writing about. I love what John P. has in his sub-title of One Man’s Blog: Specialization is for insects.

Media Hosting: Your Server, Compression, WP Super Cache

Finally, let me tell you about hosting the media you use on your own server. When you host images or movies on your own server rather than on Flickr or Youtube, when they are found by the search engine, you get the credit and the link. When you host them elsewhere, flickr or Youtube gets credit.

But, did you know that Search Engines evaluate your server’s ability to handle the load? If you have a cheap server, heavy traffic, high load media or any combination of those things, it will cause you to drop in the rankings.

First thing is get a good server and plenty of bandwidth. If you have a cheap package, you are hurting yourself. Look into a server that is fast and will give you all the load you are shooting for.

Next, reduce the load to the best of your ability. Two things that you can do to reduce the load on your server is to compress your pictures and to install the WP Super Cache plugin on your blog. The plugin saves images of your pages for ready pick up and speeds you up considerably.

The other thing you can do is compress your pictures with a freeware program called Faststone. This program is quick and really good. It is also a shell program that will launch a program of your choosing to edit the photograph in a different way, if you want. Well that’s a rabbit we need not chase here.

Anyway, when you save a picture, you can open it in Faststone, click on it, then drop the File menu. Click “save as” and at the bottom right is a button called options. Click it and find a window like this:

Notice the original file size and the new file size. Also, realize that the compressed size on the right has been compressed twice - once for the original compression for this screen grab and then I compressed the screen grab to host it here.

Adjust the file size to what you can live with and save it in place of the original or as a duplicate.

This keeps the picture the same size, but keeps it from being a big load, which search engines like. It also gives you a lot of graphics quick so your page loads fast for regular viewing.

Let me give out a few links for this. Mostly, this information came from John Pozadzides’ presentation at Wordcamp this year.

Also, though I have yet to review it, there is another video specifically for SEO by Chris Smith. If I get a chance soon, I may provide a follow up post for this from this video.

Right now, though, I am tired of the late nights, so it may be next week.

For my regular readers, I will try to introduce non-tech things through the middle of the week as well. I may drop a few posts a day for a while to keep certain church members from complaining about the boring tech stuff.

Still, it is my highest hit posting in a loooooong time. And a lot of it from Search Engines.

Firefox is the best internet browser around, but did you know you can tweak it? You can make this browser more efficient and adapt it to your own interests. There are two ways of doing this: Add-ons and Scripts. An add-on is an additional program that gets, wait for it, “added on” to the basic Firefox code. Scripts work within Firefox to cause it to act differently and are more susceptible to malware (malicious software) written by hackers and act like viruses. Avoid these by checking the downloads of the scripts on the download page to make sure plenty of others have gone safely before you.

You can cruise the add on section at Firefox for some that you might enjoy.

Here is a list of the ones that I have installed. Feel free to share with the class some of your favorites.

Adblock Plus :: Firefox Add-ons - Blocks Advertisements in articles and on websites. I never see the dancing mortgage ads at Yahoo anymore. Huzzah!

Auto Copy :: Firefox Add-ons - Automatically copies to the clipboard anything I highlight, saving me extra clips. This plugin is essential to efficiently putting together a “Link Load” post with tons of links to interesting things. It saves 2-3 extra clicks per link, and is used in combination with a couple of other programs for great speediness. Just call me Speedy Gonzalez. Andele!

Better Gmail 2 :: Firefox Add-ons - This add on kicks into gear when you log on to your gmail account. I don’t use gmail that much, but if you do, go to the home page and review the features to see if it’s for you.

CoLT :: Firefox Add-ons - This add on is a power blogging must: Copy Link/Text. When clicking on a link, this add on adds a couple of items to your right click pop up menu: 1) Copy Link Text and 2) Copy Link Text and Location as… The second option has an arrow and gives you several choices. The first choice is “as HTML” which, when selected, will produce a fully formed html coded link in the clipboard and it saves you TONS of time and energy. This is the primary way I was able to produce all of the links that you see in this post in just over five minutes. The typing next to the links, a little longer.

del.icio.us buttons :: Firefox Add-ons - Inserts a button in the toolbar of Firefox that will let you bookmark a page in del.icio.us. If you don’t know what that is, it is a place to store your bookmarks online, so that you can access them anywhere without having to be at YOUR computer.

Digg This! :: Firefox Add-ons - Adds a “Digg This” item to the right click menu so that you can easier submit things to Digg. By the way, if you want to be read, you want to be dug. If you and your friends will start digging each others interesting posts, they will start reaching a much wider audience.

Download Statusbar :: Firefox Add-ons - Replaces the download window with a status bar at the bottom of the page. Easier to keep up with and not as much hassle with a pop up window.

DownThemAll ! :: Firefox Add-ons - Allows you to download multiple files instead of one at a time. Very useful.

Fasterfox :: Firefox Add-ons - Makes Firefox more efficient and helps it to load pages faster. it can do nothing about slow connections, so if you have one, a slow internet is what you will have. If, however, you have a highspeed connection, this plugin makes Firefox seem even faster than you would have guessed.

Forecastfox :: Firefox Add-ons - Puts a radar screen and weather alerts in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, as well as current temps and the forecast for the next two days. Also alerts you to dangerous weather when watches or warnings are released.

Greasemonkey :: Firefox Add-ons - More on this one in the next section, but this plugin allows you to insert scripts.

MinimizeToTray :: Firefox Add-ons - Minimizes Firefox windows to the system tray.

Skype Sidebar :: Firefox Add-ons - If you use Skype to webchat, this gives you some tools in Firefox.

Web Developer :: Firefox Add-ons - Tools for Web Developers.

Now, to the Scripts that you can add.

Greasemonkey refers to the shade tree mechanic who used to lift the hood and tinker with his car to make it just a little faster, just a little better. These scripts are computer programming’s version of folks lifting the hood of Firefox and tinkering with some great help in efficiency and some just fun applications.

First, you have to install the greasemonkey addon, then you can install the scripts. Here are a few that I’ll recommend.

Akismet Auntie Spam for Wordpress … If you’ve ever gotten much spam caught in the anti-spam plugin, Akismet for Wordpress, you probably have been frustrated while looking for legitimate comments among the pages of spam. This is especially tedious when the spam is several thousand words long with a hundred some odd links to sites hosting medicines without prescription, porn and investments. This script recognizes that you are in Akismet and collapses all the comments into one line entries. You can expand the entry with a click if you think it is legitimate and verify. It collapses pages of spam to 1/10th the size.

WordPress Comment Ninja This script does two things. The first thing it does is allow you to reply to comments from the notification email you get when someone comments on your blog, providing you are reading the comment in Firefox. The second thing it does is to create links to do the same thing from the comment section of wordpress. Although I use Outlook to receive my email for 12 Witnesses, I have used this script to answer comments from within the Wordpress.

Amazon - Denver Lookup 1.2.6 When looking at a book on Amazon, this script will form a link under the title that will take you to Denver Library’s information about the book - usually more than what Amazon has to offer.

Google Image Relinker This script will allow you to click on an image from Google Image Search and it will go straight to the image, rather than to the framed version of the original website. This is if you don’t like Greased Lightbox below.

Download YouTube Video III Allows you to do just as it says, download videos from YouTube.

Greased Lightbox (v0.16) Now here’s a great script. When you search for images on Google Image Search and click on one, it will launch the large picture against a black background. You can then navigate VERY QUICKLY through the page with the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Flickr Photo Magnifier Creates bigger pictures from smaller ones on flickr.

Google Doc Download GM Script Allows you to download documents stored on Google Docs, and when combined with “downthemall” allows you to get all your Google Docs quickly, which is handy if others have been editing them.

GZoom Allows you zoom in on Google Maps beyond what you normally could.

Google 100 Instead of 10 results from Google, you get 100 results on a page.

Facebook Auto - Colorizer Colors Facebook pages to blend with the main picture on the page. Somewhat fun.

Facebook Fixer A collection of enhancements for various aspects of Facebook eg. showing bigger profile pictures, making it easier to view albums, showing people’s age and sign, auto-reloading error pages, changing redirecting links to direct links.

Pearl Crescent Page Saver is a free FireFox extension that you can use to capture images of web pages as PNG or JPEG files. You can capture an entire web page or just a portion of it.

Here are a few pages full of other scripts that you can explore for yourself.

25 useful Greasemonkey scripts you should take a look at

This list is in no particular order from best to worse, it’s written just as I’m going through my plugins!

Best of: Greasemonkey Scripts

This post is a compilation of the best and most popular Greasemonkey scripts available to its users, broken down into category for easier reference.

Top 10 Greasemonkey scripts to improve your productivity

“Greasemonkey extension (with the help of Stylish) can do wonders for your productivity”

I got the basic gist of this from the video of Lorelle Van Fossen’s address at Wordcamp 2008, a convention of bloggers who use Wordpress listening to the pros talk about specific aspects of blogging and Wordpress. If you check out the video (at just about an hour long) you will hear a couple of other things that I will reference in later posts in the Better Blogging series.

I’ve recently found a ton of information from the pro-bloggers, those that design a lot of the blogging software, about how to blog better. I am sifting through that load of information and then will pass on to those who may read what I learn. Of course, I’ll be linking to the originators of these ideas, so you can go straight to the source, if you want.

I talked with a fellow pastor last week and he was on his way on a Mission Trip. I asked if he would be blogging the trip the way I did Vietnam. He said that he wasn’t set up for it, but really thought it was an effective tool for communicating. I promised to help him set up when he got back from his trip.

My friend was right. Blogging is a powerful form of communication and also is highly effective to those who read. The questions are, “Who is reading?” “Can we reach those that don’t know us?” If we can do it well, then we stand a better chance of getting the message out.

With that in mind, no matter who you are, I am embarking on another tech series to help you blog better and more efficiently. Hopefully, it will save you time and you can reach others. I can say that my feed subscriptions have doubled this week since I’ve been doing a few things differently. I haven’t even really gotten started.

This series will have a little something for everyone. If you are a lurker (someone who just reads and doesn’t even comment) there will even be stuff for you. Nevertheless, I will be aiming mostly toward those who already blog.

In this series, I plan to address:

• where to blog (service and software)
• content choice
• how to blog for better search engine results
• all kinds of software to help you do cool stuff - for free
• what to do WHEN your rss feed gets scraped and used by a splog (spam blog)
• how to get it done quickly and efficiently
• more…

While I am gearing up for this, I want to offer you a chance to ask questions now that might form an answer post. Now’s your chance. Just ask away in the comment section.

If you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, give it a whirl now. A lot of what I will be writing about will have to do with it. For those who don’t understand what and why, I’ll explain:

Firefox is a browser, like Internet Explorer from Microsoft. The primary difference is that Firefox is what is called “Open Source,” which means that people other than those who own and run Firefox are free to develop “add-ons” and “scripts” that can be installed in the browser to customize it to your liking. It works for Apple or PC, so whatever your native operating system, you can use this browser.

The up side of open source is that you have MANY people working to make things better for you. The down side is that some people will write intentionally malicious software to mess others up and you might be a victim. However, this is usually avoided easily. Choose add-ons from Firefox’s site and Scripts that have been downloaded significantly by others (if others use it and it is malware - malicious software - then they will report it and it will be taken down). I’ve never had a problem with anything I’ve used in over two years of using Firefox.

The main reason I switched is that almost all the pros use it. I figured they knew something worth knowing. Astoundingly, I was right. They did.

After I switched, I found that Firefox is the standard in “compliance” - which is to say, it is the best browser for interpreting the computer language in which web sites are written. In Firefox, everything seems to appear as it was intended.

For instance, my site, when viewed in Internet Explorer, has the “footer” at the top of the site between the sidebar and the content columns. In Firefox, it is at the bottom of the page, where it was designed to be. If you use Internet Explorer all the time, try Firefox for a week. You will be absolutely amazed at how different the websites you visit look. Some change drastically. Next in the series, I will give you a huge list of all kinds of tweaks you can do for Firefox to customize it.

Some of these updates will help you blog better and some will help you read better, so whatever you do in the blogosphere, there will something for you there.

A really big Link Load of interesting and eclectic stuff. Check back.

Oh, and very little of it standard Baptist Blogosphere kind of fair.

See you in a bit.

If you are new to blogging or don’t know much about hosting a blog on your own site vs. blogspot or even wordpress free services, you can check out my rundown from last year that will give you the basics. There are a few changes of specific info from then, but just a few.

I am really diggin’ Wordpress 2.5. Kevin Bussey said he hated it over on Marty Duren’s blog, but I think he just hates change. He’s such a stick in the mud, he probably still likes his worship with all hymns and just the 1st, 2nd & last verse sung to a Hammond B3 Organ with the vibrato wailing.

Anyway, 2.5 is awesome in a lot of ways, but I’ll just tell you a few of my faves.

1. The Visual Editor is MUCH better and you don’t have to do the shift-alt-v thing to get the extra buttons.
2. In the Visual Editor, you can post media to your server by uploading pictures, audio or video. I’m still using flickr and podpress for most of this, but I am experimenting and have found hosting the pictures on my own server is a little easier and a lot more flexible than it used to be.
3. Big fave - You can embed video from Youtube or other similar hosting site via the Visual Editor. Wordpress used to really not like you embedding streaming video. You used to have to write it in the html side of the code and publish it immediately. If you ever changed anything in the post, the video would quit. This makes obsolete the embedify plugin that I was previously using to do the same thing, but it only worked with Youtube (I think - I never tried it with another service).
4. The plugin page will check if you need to update your plugins and will do it for you with the click of a link, rather than forcing you to overwrite a file with ftp.

Well, those are just the top vote getters at the moment.

I also want to give you a new list of plugins that I am using. Joe Kennedy put up a list and it reminded me of a lot of changes that I have made in this area, so here they are:

• Akismet - The anti-spam plugin that comes with Wordpress.
• All in One SEO Pack - This plugin is a Search Engine Optimization tool that will hlep your posts get found and, hopefully, read.
• Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter - Inserts a copyright tag at the bottom of your post when read in a feedreader.
• Anti Spam Image - This plugin is no longer available on its host site, but might be found if you search for it. It puts the number/alphabet image input box by the comment section to keep spam programs from filling my comment section full of offers for porn and medications without a prescription. Very necessary, in my opinion (The plugin! Get your mind out of the gutter). Other plugins offer similar options.
• Bad Behavior - This is anther anti-spam plugin that monitors ip addresses for frequent attempts to access and post to your site and shuts them down cold. When it is working, it rocks. Unfortunately, it sometimes messes up, like the time it shut me out of my own blog and I couldn’t even log in to the editor. It’s not doing that right now, but it is corrupting my category tables or something, so it is in time out (deactivated) for behaving badly. Hopefully, an update will patch it up and let it get back to shutting down spammers. I’ve just upgraded to the latest update (Monday night), but it is still living up to its name, so it is still in time out.
• Countdown Timer - This is a fun little plugin that lets you count down to something that you might be writing about. Our big trip to Vietnam was the last thing I put up. The downside is that the time and date function don’t work right, so you have to figure how far it is off (I think about 2 hours behind) and set your event for the appropriate wrong time so it will show the right time. A little high maintenance.
• Feed Statistics - Most of our blogs are read in feeds, but they aren’t counted by Statcounter codes that we embed in the page. This plugin lets you see some information about how many people are grabbing your feed, and which posts they pick up.
• Google Sitemaps - This plugin creates a sitemap for the Google to pick up when it scans your site. That’s beneficial, because it helps Google decide if your post is relevant to searches that others are performing and this will cause relevant searches to rise in the search results.
• inline RSS - One of two rss feed scrapers that David Phillips installed to scrape the feed of my photoblog and put the titles as links in the sidebar of my blog. If you need help, ask him. He’s pretty cheap tech support. I don’t know which of these scrapers is actually doing the work, but I’ll link to the other one when it comes up. (This is all alphabetical, you know.)
• Maintenance Mode - This plugin allows you to stop others from accessing your site while you do upgrades or mess with the template.
• Move Comments - Allows you to move comments from one post to another. This is handy if someone says something brilliant but it relates to another post.
• PodPress - Plugin that turns your blog into an audio or video podcast. It’s awesome and easy.
• Slashdiggalicious - This puts a bunch of icons for social networking sites that allow a reader to post a link to your article to those sites.
• Subscribe to Comments - Allows readers to subscribe to emails updating them on comments posted to an article you’ve written. This is particularly helpful for people who are wanting to follow a discussion, but don’t want to check back all the time.
• ToDo List Plugin - Let’s you create a ToDo list in the dashboard of your blog, so that you can keep up with stuff that you want to do, like modify some part of your template.
• Wordpress Stats - Keeps track of hits, etc. for your Wordpress blog. Doesn’t track IP addresses, if you need that sort of thing, you still need Statcounter.
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - This plugin will walk you through an upgrade of Wordpress software when it comes out. It works very well, and you don’t have to be a geek to upgrade your software. By the by, upgrade your software, because not upgrading it leaves security breaches that can expose your blog to hacking.
• Wordpress Database Backup - Creates a backup of all your data so if something goes wrong and your host accidentally wipes out your blog, then you can reload it and not lose everything. I have been close on several occasions and have lost a few things that weren’t backed up. Nice to have everything else still here.
• WP-RSSImport - The other scraping plugin.

I know that downloading and watching video is a time consuming task, so I won’t give you hours of video, but I do want to show you what I see when I go overseas in just over 5 weeks.

As a result, I have set up to video blog. Below is the opening video, which you can dowload or stream, whichever you choose. I have also loaded it to youtube.com/12witnesses, but the quality bottoms out significantly. Of course, Wordpress and YouTube don’t always play nicely together, so I won’t depend on them to get you the videos.

I intend them to be short and worthwhile. Here’s the index for this one:

• Why I’m doing it
• Future pre-trip posts - tech and travel
• Run Time: appx. 2:31

 

 Vietnam Video Blog Opening [2:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

BTW, if you are picking this up in a feed and want to stream the video, click the “enclosure” link at the bottom of the feed. If you want to download it, right click the link and then select the “save as” option in IE and the “save link as” option in Firefox. It is a .mov file which you can import to your iPod, should you care to take me with you. All you have to do is import it in iTunes, right click on it to pop up a menu and then select convert for iPod.

[edit] Future videos will, I hope, be in mp4 format, which is what iPods use, so you can skip the conversion proces as I’ll do it myself. Your Quicktime player (which plays .mov) will play mp4 as well, so you should notice no difference on your computer.

Hey, something happened to my comments yesterday. The database was corrupted (I think by a spam trackback). I have a physical backup of most of my significant comments from years gone by, but it may be a while before it can be restored. We are awfully busy right now getting ready for Christmas and family.

Back with you soon.

Think Thom Rainer’s book Simple Church only applies to church? Apparently not.

I’ve been wanting to blog about our upcoming Mission Trip to Vietnam and the Hmong (the “h” is silent) church that we host in our church facility. The Hmong people group is one of the primary people groups among whom we will be ministering in Vietnam and our relationship with them here is just chockerbock full of God stuff.

That will have to wait for several reasons. I want to give it the time it deserves, I want to post a Phriday foto tomorrow and I have to post quickly now.

So why has it waited all this week? What does this have to do with Simple Church?

Well, it seems that I had installed a plugin to my Wordpress powered blog here called, “Bad Behavior.” This plugin helps keep spammers off of your sight by adding them to a blacklist when they try to spam your blog. All of a sudden, this script was running on anyone who tried to login to the administration page - me, the tech support guy at Bluehost (my hosting service) and even David Phillips was stuck. For a half a day, anyway, until he got to a computer and figured out the problem.

What we did was remove the plugin all together and - tada - 12 Witnesses is back in business. Yea.

While I was in Jackson for the Baptist Identity Conference, I had one script go crazy and start running up my load on the server, which caused the server to shut my blog down in order that I might not overload, crash or just not take more than my fair share of, the server resources.

In discussing the issue, I determined that I should go through and clean out a lot of the plugins that I have in my system. I don’t use quite a few of them and even more aren’t necessary.

Bottom line: The more scripts you have running in the background of your blog, the more likely you are to grind to a halt because something goes wrong or your resources become consumed and you are unable to perform the functions for which you were designed. Therefore, over the weekend I will be deleting all but the most necessary plugins that I have.

Simple Church? Simple blog.

This is not primarily about the BGCO annual meeting, but I am following up on some stuff from there.

I have been seemingly driven to a point of amazing clarity about the reality of our world and the ability of us - Christians, Baptists, any other number of smaller collectives - to reach that world.

When I went to observe New Bethany Baptist Church in Buford, GA (Pastor, Marty Duren), one of the unique things being done there was that the staff was studying a book together and they discussed it after the calendar portion of staff meeting. The book they were reading was “UnChristian” by David Kinnaman and the Barna Research Group. A couple of weeks ago, Marty called me and told me to drop what I was reading, pick up that book and read chapter 4. That was eye opening.

Some amazing things were revealed to me. Primarily, though, that the things we often do as “evangelism” are actually counter productive. Check this quote from a section of myths and realities (pg. 71).

Myth: Anything that brings people to Christ is worth doing.

Reality: When you are talking dollars, there is no price too high for a soul. But the problem isn’t just cost. In our research with some of the leading “mass evangelism” efforts, we found that often these measures create three to ten times as much negative response as positive. [emphasis Kinnaman] In other words, imagine your church is considering mailing Bibles or videos or other Christian materials to homes in your community. Our research shows that the “collateral damage” of doing so - those whose impressions of your church and of Christianity would be more negative as a result - is significantly greater than the positive impact on those who will respond to these efforts. Moreover, such mass evangelism efforts are most effective with marginally churched adults, while outsiders are usually the ones who respond most negatively.

In other words, our effectiveness is with people who are already church members, but who don’t attend. So we can get them to switch to our church and not attend there. Brilliant. On the other hand, the backlash among lost people means that the things we often do in the name of evangelism actually serves to distance the lost further from the Gospel.

Hmmmm.

Then, I went to the BGCO and heard something about us declining. I have received confirmation from Randy Adams - prompt and very helpful - of the decline of Southern Baptists. Here is a quote from an article that was published in the Baptist Messenger (OK’s Baptist Paper):

In 1980, baptisms recorded by Oklahoma Baptist churches totaled 24,803. In 2005, that total had decreased to 15,916, a decline of 36 percent. When examined in five year increments, one discovers that the decline has been quite consistent over the 25 years, with largest drop occurring between 1980 and 1985. Even more telling is the fact that Oklahoma’s population has increased by 17 percent over the same period, a total of 522,594 people. Thus, the decline in baptisms is approximately 50 percent when population growth is considered. That means that we are baptizing half as many people today, as a percent of the population, than we did twenty-five years ago.

The numbers are even more telling when examined by age-group. The decline is steepest in the 18-29 age grouping, dropping from 6,226 baptisms in 1980 to 2,184 in 2005, a sickening 65 percent decline. Next is the 9-11 age-grouping, where baptisms have dropped from 4,687 to 2,798 for a 40 percent decline. In the 12-17 age-group the decline is 7,014 baptisms to 4,282 for a 39 percent decline. Among the 30-59 age-group the decline begins to flatten out at 12 percent, from 3,792 to 3,322. The only areas of increase in baptisms are those under six years of age, with a seven percent increase to 148 baptisms, and those over age 60, with a 13 percent increase, totaling 676 baptisms.

Upon hearing this, the fire that was being kindled in my mind about our ability (or lack thereof) to reach the lost had begun to be fueled. On top of that, I was directed by some church members to an article in the Tulsa World, Southern Baptists: New Law Won’t Change Ministry, about a resolution I was proud to support. The resolution was basically that we would put the Kingdom first when ministering to the lost - regardless of their situation. This is in response to HB 1804, which is designed to combat those who employ or aid illegal immigrants. The problem is that churches that “minister” to illegals could potentially be prosecuted for doing so - or that is the concern, anyway. The gist of the resolution is that we support the government, but ministry is our command in the Kingdom and the Kingdom (and the people to whom we are sent) are our first priority.

The interesting thing about the story is that it gives a bullet list of other resolutions at the end of a very positive piece and readers who are now allowed to comment take the opportunity to absolutely trash Southern Baptists, until one or two step in and mention the Disaster Relief work that Souther Baptists do. Check ‘em out. It’s eye opening.

As a result, I prepared my Sermon for this week: All Things to All People. Obviously, it is about giving up our rights to spread the message in a way that is comfortable to us. We are, in fact, compelled by Scripture to spread the message in a way that is effective at the sacrifice of our comfort.

At the end of the evening on Saturday, I was finishing up my power point when I went to check on my wife, working on a Grad School project. She was watching a You Tube video and it was, to be blunt, challenging to the core.

I want the video to be the last thing in the post so let me write my conclusion first. The world, our culture, is running away from us at light speed. It isn’t coming back. If we don’t drop every hint of baggage right now and sprint toward the future, we will be irrelevant before we know it. It is hard to recognize this reality, because life is still a lot like it was 50 years ago - lights, indoor plumbing, cars, phones - or even twenty years ago - microwave ovens, home computers, etc.

Anyway, we must recognize that we are rapidly changing. We can’t row a boat in an airplane age. In fact, we need to recognize that water, in this analogy, no longer exists, and boats only cause us to look insane to those around us. Don’t believe me?

Watch this: