In case you haven’t noticed, over the past several days I’ve been trying to bring my “Pneuma” pages up-to-snuff within the new design and to make them all a bit more usable.

Just now I’ve added a third page to my collection: PneumaSearch. Yes, that’s right, I’ve gone crazy with the whole “Pneuma” prefix, just like I’ve irrationally appended “Rodent” to everything else. I guess, in the tradition of Web 2.0 mash-ups, I’m the PneumaRodent. But that may be carrying things too far. (Talk to my editor about it.)

Anyhow here’s what’s new:

I’ve finally gotten around to evaluating everybody who’s been asking for consideration, and it shows. My paltry list of 70-80 PneumaBloggers has shot up to 130+. That number could change daily, or weekly.

Also, previously, I’ve used the built-in “BlogRoll” or “Links Manager” function of WordPress to manage my ever-growing list of Spirit-filled bloggers. But, no more. The WordPress link management system is just too unwieldy for this sort of list, and it’s too difficult to output and format things just the way I like it. Sure, if I were a crack coder, no problem. But I’m not.

So, after spending hours and hours attempting to fit every online blogrolling tool I could find into my format and needs, I’ve given up. I’m now going old-school and using an Excel spreadsheet to maintain all my information, from email addresses, blog-owner’s names, URLs, and even my pithy descriptions. Who knows, some day maybe I’ll add rankings and ratings.

The upshot of all this for you is that it’s now easier for me to maintain my list and insure it is always kept up to date. Now I can add a blogger, save my spreadsheet, and with a few simple actions, I can have an updated link list out on the site within minutes.

Please, check it out. And notice that nifty little homepage and feed icons. Feedback welcomed.

First: note the obsessive fascination with suffixes. And, yes. I’ve changed the name of the page to PneumaSphere.

Second: This page, too, wasted several hours of research-time trying to find the ideal online aggregator just so I could display a “river of news” for the most recent items from my link list. After trying a dozen aggregation and re-feeding sites, I’ve come back to my old standby, the BDP RSS Aggregator. It’s a sweet application and does nearly everything I need it to do, except manage my linkroll list (see above). So, for that I use Excel. I could bore you to tears with my travails in finding a usable online aggregator, but, well, nobody cares. If you, for some reason, do care, contact me. I’ll send up a prayer for you.

And, finally, my latest addition is a custom Google search of only the bloggers listed in the PneumaBlogs catalog. This, my friends, is very, very cool. For the first time, you can search within only the best of the Spirit-filled blog-world. This is amazing, and I invite you to give it a try.

My only problem with this is, really, the way it breaks my template (or doesn’t play nicely with my template). This may necessitate spending some time with my template files to make them resizeable and more liquid, but all-in-all, it’s still useful.

And if you want to add the PneumaSearch Google Gadget to your Google start page, click here:

Enjoy!

[tags]aggregator, AOG, Assemblies-of-God, Assembly-of-God, association, BlogRodent, blogroll, Charismatic, Christian, Christian-Bloggers, Church-of-God, custom-search, Evangelical, FaithBloggers, Foursquare, GodBloggers, Google, Great-Blogs, linkroll, online-tools, Pentecostal, PneumaBlogs, PneumaSearch, PneumaSphere, re-feed, Religion, Religious[/tags]

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Rich Tatum