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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
I remember reading somewhere recently that much of the Christian Church acts more like a business than a group of people proclaiming Christ. Business models abound, performance management is the norm, programmes with outcomes, and so on. You have to wonder not What Jesus Would Do, but What He Would Think.
I know that business people like to look at the gospels and see business practices within them, but I don’t think the people who inhabited those events in the 1st century would in any way consider themselves as business people out for profit and the bottom line.
I guess there’s a place for something like the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, but in fact every Christian workplace should be good; it ought to go with the territory. Of course that isn’t the case; Christians inhabiting workplaces are human and wherever you get humans you get problems.
On the Best Christian Workplaces Institute’s site, there’s a link to an article entitled Strong people practices lead to healthy, growing churches . It makes for some strange reading.
United Methodist Church of the Resurrection came first in the Institute’s latest survey (2007) and ‘scored highest among churches in every dimension of the survey: Culture of Character, Capability and Competence, Commitment to Learning, Compensation and Climate for Action.’ Don’t all those letter Cs scare you off a bit?
Further down, it says, the church ‘also holds to a compensation philosophy that pays a competitive rate. However, they acknowledge that if they are going to be a learning culture and do what is best for the church, they shouldn’t always pay so much that it dissuades individuals from leaving if another ministry or working culture would better suit them.’ Hmmm, that seems just a little odd to me.
However, I may be the one who’s wrong here. I only know about what’s written in the article, and the intent of the article is to promote the excellence of the management in this church. It doesn’t say a great deal about the work of the Holy Spirit or discipleship (although that could be implied in their ‘constructively critical feedback’). And Resurrection isn’t the only church discussed. Check it out and see what you think.
I’ve spent the weekend writing pieces for the Triond site. It’s one of those places where once you’ve written the piece it stays there forever (whatever that means in terms of the Internet) and you keep getting (small) amounts of money for it.
Girl meets Trumpet, by Bukutgirl
I’d determined recently to write at least a piece a week, but haven’t been doing that due to other things getting in the way. So with the Easter break I’ve managed to do a bit of catching up on my ‘schedule.’
These four articles have all appeared in the last two days.
Blowing My Own Trumpet. This is a piece about trying to promote yourself on the Net. I’m taking yet another approach to trying to make my writing more visible.
Friends for Life. This one looks at some of the books on my shelves and concludes that some of them make better friends than the real people I know. Hmmm. This is a piece that never found a home previously.
The Delightful Lives at 44 Scotland St. Another 'rehash' - in the best sense. I've taken the four book reviews I've done of the four episodes in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland St series and woven them together into a long overview. It's called recycling.
Support Your Local Circus. This was written new and fresh yesterday after I went to see Weber Brothers' Circus in Mosgiel, one of the outer suburbs of Dunedin (the city I live in). It's a lovely little circus, full of energy and life, with clowns that are genuinely funny, and some wonderful Asian acrobats. And three absolutely crazy motorcyclists racing around and around inside what seems a very tiny metal globe.
So go read, people!
I have a son who programs and he’s done it since he was about eight or nine. Just took to it like a duck to water.
Now he does it for a living, and not only creates code, but also has to tidy the code up every so often. I’ve just found out from another source that this is called refactoring.
Refactoring is needed when a code has become full of guff and stuff and lots of alterations and improvements and rewritings and…well, you get the message.
One solution to a large amount of code that’s no longer looking its tidiest is to scrub the lot and start from scratch. Surprisingly that’s the wrong way to go about it. Though to me as an author, that shouldn’t be surprising. If I’ve written a long work in draft form and it’s still not right, the way to fix it isn’t to scrub the lot and start from scratch. Apart from anything you’ll lose many gems and good things.
What refactoring does is look at the code as it stands and see where improvements can be made, where shorthanding can be done so that the thing isn’t so cluttered.
Why I mention this is that I came across a post on the intriguingly-named site, Basildon Coder, which mentions that P G Wodehouse, the great writer of comedies, used to take the typewritten pages of his draft novels and pin them up on the walls around his office. Where the pages were deemed reasonably satisfactory, he would pin them high, indicating that they needed little further attention. Where the pages were needing more work, he’d pin them lower
and gradually deal with them. I’ve never heard this story before, and as far as I recall it doesn’t appear in his biography, Performing Flea, in which he does talk about his methods of working quite a bit.
However, it’s a great idea. Many teach-yourself-to-write books have a similar approach to dealing with overall structure of a novel. Each scene and its details are jotted down on a 5 x 3 card and these can then be laid out or shuffled around until things begin to fit together.
I remember Anne Lamott writing about how she and one of her editors did the same sort of thing. One of her novels just wasn’t working, so it was all laid out on the floor, section by section, and worked over and over until things fitted where they belonged. Sounds tedious, but it’s actually very productive.
And far more effective than doing it on the computer.
For a while I’ve been wanting to be able to download videos (like those on You Tube) so I can incorporate them in blog posts. While doing a bit of searching today I found that there’s a site - in fact it’s more of a program - called vixy.net. Here, you can copy the URL of a particular video you’re interested in and it will turn the video into an MP3 file. Don’t ask me how it does it; I’m just an amateur, you might remember.
However, it’s more economical time-wise to download the program from vixy itself because you get more speed sorting it on your own computer. This might also involve downloading .Net 2.00 (if that was the name), but that’s no big deal, though surprisingly it took a lot longer than downloading vixy, which was on my computer in a matter of seconds
[ Click here to read more ]
I read an article on ProBlogger the other day (a site that I’ve now subscribed to so that it appears in the toolbar at the top of my browser) which talked about the advantages of using the Google Analytics traffic sources/keywords section. It’s similar in a way to HitTail which I’ve talked about in this blog before, but it gives a slightly different approach to the use of keywords.
One of the things the article discussed was the bounce rate, something that GA shows quite clearly. Seemingly, if the bounce rate is well below the 100% mark it’s all to the good. 80% and upwards is less so. The keywords that come around 50-60% are the ones to check out.
Initially GA only gives you the ‘top ten’ keywords. These are fine, and should get some focus on your blog, but it will give you as many as 500 words that have been searched for, and this is where the bounce rate factor comes more into play
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One of the irritations of using computers and all the things that accompany them, such as printers and speakers and other peripherals, is that you have umpteen plugs and wires floating around the floor.
I remember when I lasted shifted the shop I used to run (the Christian bookshop where I’d been manager for some 15 years) my son and another geek did all the sorting out of the computers in the new building. I was pleased to find that they’d well and truly tidied up all the wiring, taping it together and making sure it ran along the back of benches and counters and was well out of the way.
I wait with anticipation for the day everything sits on the desk wirelessly. It’s around the corner, I know, so it’s possible I’ll get a chance to used it before I become too old to tap on the keys anymore. (By which time, of course, we may well all ‘type’ by using our voices
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On a blog site with the rather curious name of The Composed Gentleman, I came across pictures of Furniture of the Future. These exhibits were entered in a competition organised by the Singapore Furniture Industries Council. The annual Furniture Design Award is held in conjunction with the International Furniture Fair Singapore/ASEAN Furniture Show at the Singapore Expo.
Okay, (you can see photos of the winning designs by clicking on the link alongside the title of this post) this furniture was exhibited in 2006, but what I find surprising is that instead of the designers thinking about the current state of the world, climate change and such, they seem to have gone for designs that really show nothing but a curious awkwardness in terms of practicality.
The winning exhibit is a ‘chair’ with the title Come Fly With Me. It has long wing-like features on either side of the person sitting, and is made out of what looks to be a plastic-type material. The man sitting on it seems chirpy enough, but I can’t believe that the chair would be comfortable for sitting in at length
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Just came across the site, Holy Rollerz Christian Car Club. Its main claim to fame is that it’s altogether different from most car clubs, where the car is the god. Here Jesus gets His rightful place amongst the BMW wheels, the SUV compacts, the Nissan 350Zs, the Katana 600s and so on.
Obviously if you don’t think Jesus and driving go together, this isn’t the place for you. However, they’ve got several video clips on the site that talk about how the group came together (one of the founders was in prison involved in the White Nazi ‘club’ initially) and these are impressive without being over-the-top.
In one of these, the Atlanta chapter of the Holy Rollerz was interviewed by the American Bible Society early in 2007. The focus was on how two of the leaders, Gus and Brian, came to know each other while Brian was still in prison, and what the club stands for now. Towards the end of the video clip they talk about community, and how community is at the basis of how they live and work together
[ Click here to read more ]
Polluting, genetic engineering, obscene riches, taking drugs, abortion, paedophilia and causing social injustice join the original seven deadly sins defined by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century: pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and sloth.
If you ever thought Wikipedia wasn't up with the play, then note that the very recent announcement by the Vatican that there are now another seven deadly sins added to the longstanding original list is already on Wikipedia. It seems to me that this often maligned site gets better and better. And it also doesn't seem that long ago that it was only a baby on the scene. Crikey: I can remember it when it hardly contained anything at all
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Internet wealth strikes again. There’s no doubt it’s still a place to make heaps of money, if you’re of a mind to. This week in the Forbes list of the wealthiest people around, the youngest billionaire is Mark Zuckerberg, who set up the social networking website Facebook in his college dormitory room four years ago,. Zuckerberg is only 23. He’s worth $1.5bn.
If Zuckerberg had been a billionaire before 1975, and lived in England, his
fortune would have been worth a million million. As it is, it’s only worth a thousand million. Still, that would keep most of us in pocket money and luxury vacations
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I mentioned Everything2.com in the last post. It isn’t a site I’ve ever discovered in the past. I thought at first it was a site explaining words, but it’s much broader. As they state: Everything2 is a collection of user-submitted writings about, well, pretty much everything.
There you have it. The posts are all heavily-linked to other material on everything2, so that it kind of goes round and round in circles. Some of it is clever crude, some of it is quite esoteric, some of it is intellectual to the degree that I didn’t get too deeply into it, and some of it is just plain silly. (What? You didn’t expect silly
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Well, as a result of looking up Primera labels on the Net, I now know how much a Nissan Primera car is worth. Such is the joy of being led off in another direction while interknetting - yes, I know the term is surfing, but I like interknetting better – it’s kind of like knitting and netting rolled into one.
You have to wonder where words like ‘surfing’ come from in their Internet context. Well, actually you don’t have to wonder. The Internet is a self-referencing system, and here’s the information I’m looking for, courtesy of Brad Templeton, who seems to go in for this sort of thing
[ Click here to read more ]
Happy Sheep? Does this strike you as a name for a site that grabs you and entices you and makes you want to put all your classified ads on it?
I guess it has its points: happy is always a good word, if not the strongest adjective in the world, and sheep are associated with New Zealand in a big way. But they’re also seen as pretty dim and scatterbrained. Maybe not so good?
Considering how many sheep there are in New Zealand it’s surprising we’re not known by that name instead of ‘kiwis’, but plainly ‘sheep’ has too many weak connotations
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I used to have the site, Arts and Letters Daily, as my opening page on the browser. For some reason I stopped doing this a while ago, and haven't been checking out the site as much as I used to. (Though the downside of looking at the site is the fact that you're bound to get very sidetracked from whatever it is you're supposed to be doing.)
Anyway, returning to AALD today, I discovered that they've got a sister site, Climate Debate Daily, which is an even worse distraction.
On the left side of the page are links to a host of articles supporting the idea of Global Warming - or as the site states: Essays and research supporting the idea that global warming poses a clear threat to humanity, that it is largely caused by human activity, and that solutions to the problems of climate change lie within human reach.
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I’m changing the focus of my Random Notes blog, the more arty blog that I write. (The link is listed down below, as always.)
What focus, you ask? You mean there’s been a focus?
All right, I’ll admit sometimes the focus might have been a bit obscure; that’s the nature of a blog entitled Random Notes, as you might expect. It isn’t surprising to find posts about theater seating and travelling in Asia and all manner of other things in a blog that’s random. However, even though a few of these random element might remain – indeed will remain – I want to do something about the creative side of things
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