12 Witnesses

Well, I guess you figured I am a little busy right now. I have wanted to blog, but not had time to even turn around.

I have asked my wife for the paper on school transition and when I get it from her, it will be the next thing up.

I’ll be back soon, I promise.

I am considering switching from Bloglines to Google Reader as my primary rss feed reader. If you don’t know what that’s all about, read this post: Pastoral Blogging, Pt. 7 (I hereby stop numbering them and will name them from now on…)

Anyway, this is not really brought on by Bloglines at all. It works well, adapts very well to the mobile internet on my Treo and is still the biggest feed reader. Google Reader is rapidly on the rise, however. The change is being brought about because My Yahoo homepage, which has been my homepage for a looooong time is trying to transition to keep up with iGoogle - another homepage, similar to My Yahoo. Well, Google also has online shareable docs, calendars, blogsearch, pictures (to compete with Yahoo owned, Flickr) and, of course, this reader. That’s just to get you started - there’s ALOT more.
Well, I am already using Google for those other things, excepting Flickr, so when Yahoo tries to force me to shift to its new beta My Yahoo page and I find that my email and fantasy sports teams are unsupported modules at the new version, so I switch back, but not without a hassle.

On a whim I check out iGoogle (available with free google account) and start adding modules. Guess what? I can check my email from the iGoogle homepage. Yeah my Gmail (google mail) but also MY YAHOO MAIL. I can check my Yahoo mail from the google homepage but I can’t from the new My Yahoo homepage. Errr…. Just a suggestion, Yahoo, be ready to roll before you start something like this.

Anyway, since it looks like I am going to be moving over to Google for a homepage, I might integrate my reader into iGoogle as well.

As I went through that process I found that I can import all of my feeds as they are from bloglines. In Bloglines, go to “edit” and at the bottom of the left hand column, click export feeds. Save the “export.opml” file to your hard drive and then upload it in the Google Reader. That simple.

Regardless of whether or not you switch, however, you might want to claim your feed at bloglines. It’s under My Account -> Publisher Tools. You need to find your feed, integrate some code and then authenticate.

In a mostly unrelated topic, I settled on an audio plugin to help with post Frank Page’s Q&A session with Tulsa Metro. It is PodPress, and it gives you tons of stats about downloads vs. plays vs. feed reads. Really good stuff, if you want to upload some audio. I tried another one, but it didn’t work. PodPress is low maintenance and clearly the way to go. it you want to get a little more high maintenance, you can list your audio at iTunes with Podpress, but even if you don’t, PodPress creates an rss feed that people can use to subscribe to audio that you upload. Bottom line: if they are on your blog, they can subscribe to your podcast, and if they aren’t, they are not likely to find you at iTunes because that is like a needle in a haystack. Of course, this plugin is for Wordpress blogs.

Be good. I’m going to see Marty next week, so I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll blog, set some stuff to drop while I’m gone or just take some time off. Most likely the latter, but we’ll see.

I’m sorry, but the answers I had hoped to post aren’t ready. Pastoral Ministry has most of my time right now.

It may be tonight or may be the weekend.

I’m putting off the response to the “Inviting the Lost to Church” post for a little bit. I’ll probably answer later this week, but I definitely have some thoughts - especially to what has already been posted. If you missed it, you might want to check it out or even add to the discussion here.

In the meantime, I am privileged to host a Q&A with our SBC President during the Tulsa Metro Association of Baptist Churches Leadership Dialog in conjunction with our annual meeting. Dr. Page and Dr. Milfred Minatrea will be with us this coming Sunday night for the annual meeting and the following day for the Leadership Dialog.

The Q&A will take place during lunch on Monday. Not wanting dead time with no questions, I have been asked to have several questions prepared to ask Dr. Page to get or keep the ball rolling, so to speak.

So here’s your chance. What would you like to ask Dr. Page?

Pointed and relevant questions are welcome. Agenda driven questions are not. Recognize the difference? I hope so.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

I’ll not be live blogging, obviously, but I will try and post the answers after the meeting.

Just for my own amusement and my family’s ability to get to my pictures online (some are of my family), I have created a photoblog as a subdomain. If you would like to access my photoblog, you can do so here:

photoblog.twelvewitnesses.com

With the help (as always) of David Phillips, this blog is a direct connect to a flickr account set up for just this purpose. It siphons off the photos, sets and recent uploads, as well as any I mark as favorites, which I have not done. The home page is a full sized picture of whatever I uploaded last, which you can cycle through backward at full size. An easier way is to look at the sets of pictures, which will launch thumbnail pages. If you click on a thumbnail, a larger size will appear and you can scroll through the set, forward or backward, if you like.

I’ve enjoyed taking pictures since I was a kid. My Mom was a professional photographer, so I grew up around it.

I use a Canon Rebel xti DSLR to take the pictures and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to process the RAW data, which is the way I record the digital data.

Flickr now also receives photos through email. This will allow me to post pictures I take with my camera immediately to my photoblog, which I look forward to doing. Camera phones have revolutionized culture, it seems. If you have a flickr account, you have a secret email address that will receive your photos. Login to flickr and go to www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/.

Wait, there’s more. The photoblog is photoblog software, but I might also like to upload pictures from my treo to this Wordpress powered blog - the main domain site - and post a short article to go with it. I can do that, too, though it is a different process. It also works with blogger, typepad, moveable type and other blogs styles.

If you would like to post to your blog from your phone, you have to first set up the interface with flickr and your blog. You can do that by going to www.flickr.com/blogs.gne and following the process there.

After you get that set up, then go to www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/blog/ and get the add on to your secret email address that will receive your email picture, post it on your flickr site, and then send it all to your blog as well.

Should be fun for random “out and about” posts, but also could be interesting when live blogging a conference.

Enjoy.

[HT: Mark Ghosh]

Sorry for not posting right now.

I’m not feeling well, and just don’t have the energy to compose thoughts.

Back with you in a few days.

For whatever reasons, my blog bit the dust last night. The interesting thing about it though was that I was contacted by a couple of church members right away to let me know. Then I had a few bloggers let me know.

Frankly, I am thrilled to death that my church members were reading my blog and were doing so more diligently than those in the blogosphere I have come to know over the last couple of years. Not that I don’t care about a diverse readership. I do. But mostly I am thrilled that I am making some inroads into the lives of our church family through this blog.

Honestly, I am writing more with them in mind all the time, so this has been an affirmation.

I won’t lie and say that my pride didn’t rise up and tempt me when I went from 7,000 hits a day during the SBC and 1,500 per day on average to about 250 to 350 per day now, depending on what I write. That statcounter can be useful, but it can also be idolatrous.

Anyway, I am grateful for those who think I have something thoughtful to say nowdays and truly appreciate your dropping by.

The blog seems to be running all right now. I am going to write a post tonight about the funeral I did this morning and have it drop tomorrow morning. It was a military funeral and it was incredible to experience the wash of emotions. Well, I don’t want to spill it all now. Come back tomorrow and check it out.

Let’s just get one more thing straight about my blogging, shall we?

I am not quitting, nor am I slowing down. I am shrugging off the political weight that I have carried and the public demands that such carries with it.

I actually am looking forward to blogging more in the near future. I am, however, going to be changing my subject matter. As you will note from my last post, I am going to start highlighting stories that I find in the news and commenting on them. Previously, the stories were all about the SBC and our current situation. Now they will be about many other things, with the SBC in an appropriate balance as well.

In order to do that, I set up my bloglines (feed reader) to grab certain headlines that may be of interest to me as the subject of future blogs. You can do that doing a news.google.com search or a blog.google.com search and then subscribe to the feed for your search criteria that appears on the page with the results. This will feed new news stories or blog entries, respectively, into your feed reader.

If you don’t have a feed reader yet, it is way past time to get one and learn to work it, don’t ya think?

Well, sit back and enjoy the ride. Look forward to seeing you soon.

I am cleaning out my feed reader. After a while, you just have to start pulling some of the things you don’t read all the time. Honestly, I track those blogs I really like in a folder of “live bookmarks” on the bookmark toolbar in Firefox. There are five there and I check them a couple of times a day.

If you don’t know what a live bookmark is, your browser has an option when you click the rss feed chicklet:

(umm… if you don’t know what an rss feed is, you should probably read my previous posts on this subject, but I’ll give you a reprieve and offer this cool link: video - rss explained in plain english [ht: Desiring God Blog]

Most of the time, I use bloglines, but for those select few blogs, I opt for a live bookmark which is a drop down menu that shows the latest posts. It updates mui pronto and I don’t have to log into bloglines and sort through all of the other feeds that I don’t want to read at the moment.

Which brings me back to my original purpose. Sometimes you have to weed out feeds you aren’t reading. A lot of times, when you decide to subscribe to a feed, you feel sort of obligated to hang in there. Listen, there are plenty of times I have read an incredibly thoughtful post from someone and thought, “Hey, there’s gonna be more of this good stuff.” Generally there is, but too often, it is a long time coming. Sorting through their other posts waiting for the really good stuff is why I got a feed reader, so I could skim.

When I got back from camp, though, and found 300+ feeds waiting on me, I had had enough. I spent a couple of hours on my couch just sifting. By the time I finished, it was midnight and I was supremely irritated from the process. I’m glad everyone was asleep, or I would have been likely to have snapped at my family just for being alive at the moment. When something puts you in that frame of mind, it is time for a change.

Also, I am dumping almost all of my SBC politics feeds. I used to keep track of what everyone was saying because I had to be current. Truth be known, I had pretty much quit reading most of them months ago unless someone linked to them. I was skimming, but my heart has been out of it for a while.

At this point, I have a hard time keeping up with just the stuff coming from SBC Outpost, and I’m a contributor.

There have been a few, more thoughtful blogs, to which I am subscribing, and I thought you might like to know who they are.

Tops of my new interest is Emily Hunter McGowin. That girl knows her stuff and is deep like big water.

Lu has caught my interest and secured a feed in bloglines. She is a former missionary and current Nashvillian. She likes her blogging so much, she is willing to pay to do it (she uses typepad). Who am I to talk? I own my own domain.

Joe Ball is the Student Ministry guy for the Kentucky Baptist Convention and a long time friend. He keeps me hooked up with thoughts on Youth Ministry at Despising None Blog and Podcast.

Finally, I recommend to you an old blogging ally and someone who has made a huge leap from SBC politics to serious cultural engagement and thoughtful cultural commentary/conversation, Kevin Bussey.

Along with these changes, and more, expect my blogroll to change. Almost every SBC politics is going to come off of it. Please don’t get your feelings hurt you are there and get dropped. All things must grow and change and 12 Witnesses is doing that, as well.

[edit]

What the heck!!! I forgot to commend to you the fine blog of Timmy Brister, Provocations and Pantings. Timmy rocks with some massive depth, but also will give you phenominal knowledge on photography, family and life. I guess I forgot him because I have been reading him for a while, but in editing my blogroll, I realized I had never added him. My bad, TB.

After 19 years in various positions of Youth Ministry, I am the Lead Pastor at my new church of now one year. There are a lot of things about Youth Ministry that I really miss. I miss hanging out with teenagers. Honestly, they are fun and funny. Generally. One of the things I don’t mis is the drama. Every Youth Group has its drama queen, and yes, typically it is a girl. That’s probably a good thing, as a male drama queen is an entirely different problem.

I always said that camp was my favorite thing to do in Youth Ministry. It’s usually a week of great worship, combined with teenagers making decisions for the Lord. I was always challenged, too.

This week, marking exactly one year with my new church, Skelly Drive Baptist Church in Tulsa, I am going to camp.

You see, our church goes to the legendary Falls Creek near Davis, Oklahoma. Falls Creek has a storied past of which I have heard for years, but had never seen for myself. I heard it said one time that during a point several decades ago, half of the “Foreign Missionaries” on the field had made their commitment to serve as missionaries at Falls Creek. I am sure it was not quite that high, but it is sure that many had made their commitment there. Dedication to service has been a hallmark of this camp for years. The above linked website quotes, “More missionaries have experienced their call to a lifetime of service at Falls Creek than at any other place on the face of the earth.”

On top of that, Falls Creek is the largest Youth Camp in the world. There will be about 6,000 campers there every week through the summer. The BGCO has just finished the indoor Tabernacle that has been in the works for the better part of a decade. This is its first summer of use. Prior to this, 6,000 kids had to meet in the outdoor tabernacle, which was a roof and one back wall and it was hot, to say the least. At least they got a/c before I got there.

And, yes, this is an enormous chapel that will actually be used to capacity on a regular basis, just for all those who were thinking it and wondering whether or not I would say it. Just for kicks, see if this looks familiar.

Anyway, I’m off to camp. I’ll let you know if it was everything its supporters claim it to be.

I have several things written and set to drop throughout the week. Tomorrow is a post I especially hope you read.

I hear that there is some Internet connectivity at Falls Creek, so I am not out of the discussion, but limited. I hope we all have a great week.