Category Archives: Blogging

Hello World? Well. Hello, again.

Blogging

So, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. I’m not dead, though you would be forgiven for believing that my blog is dead. It is, really, in a way. Or perhaps comatose.

I had to upgrade WordPress to the latest version today and while doing so I realized, with great force, that it’s been two years since I’ve written here. Time, somehow, passed and when I “took a break” to focus on my new job, then my new kid, then my new (rented) home, each excuse just further cemented my inactivity from mere “time-out” into deadly inertia

It’s not that I don’t still have things to say. I do — just ask my friends. I never shut up! And if you are interested a a return to writing here, please feel free to leave a shout-out in the comments.

Though, I realize, I may be ruminating out loud into an echoing void because, after two years, who could possibly be listening?

In case you are listening and wondering about the redesign, the WordPress upgrade broke a lot of stuff, so I deactivated all my plugins and installed a default theme until I can decide what to do.

For what it’s worth, I would like to return to this. I just want to be deliberate about it. It may not be “Pentecostal Ruminations” any more. Or maybe it will be. Who knows?

The blogging world has changed since last I played in it, and I’m not sure I’m all that relevant any more. But, we’ll see!

What is up … blogging brother?

Blogging, Random Miscellany

So, it’s been a wee little while since I last posted. Some of you have contacted me via email to find out what’s happening and to be sure everything’s okay. I appreciate that — I really do.

So I was sitting here tonight with pretty much nothing to do except wait for the Super Bowl to begin and I thought I’d take the time to post a brief update via my little four-year-old PDA.

Here are the highlights: We are all nicely settled into my father-in-law’s home. I have a nice little private space in the basement where I can pay bills and work at a desk. (This is important because since I lost my job back in 2006 we’ve gotten behind in some bills. We haven’t totally caught up yet, but my recent two month’s of full-time employment really helped.) I’ve spent several thousand dollars in the past keeping creditors happy — and the well has about run dry again.

Meanwhile, I have an interview with a great potential employer on Tuesday. I’m praying that if this is the job God has planned for me that he grease the wheels, open doors, and grant me favor.

Also meanwhile — and more importantly — I’ve finally decided it’s time to start the ministerial credential application process. Yes, after graduating from Bible college in ’91, earning 22 hours of graduate work in seminary, after three years of volunteer campus ministry, and after almost two decades of hemming and hawing and seemingly justifiable delays, I am going to seek entering full-time ministry.

I clearly can’t beat ’em, so I may as well join ’em. ::grin::

Fortunately, I have the strong support of my family and friends and a very encouraging pastor helping make the decission easier.

Who knows? Come June or July I may well be Rev. Tatum and preaching all over Michigan!

So, please pray — not just for me, pray also for the poor people who will be subjected to me!

Meanwhile — it’s the kick-off.

Rich

Present, and half accounted for at TIMC…

Blogging, Random Miscellany

Internet Ministry Conference

As previously noted, this is my week for presenting at GospelCom’s meetup: “The Internet Ministry Conference.”

I successfully captured audio for today’s presentation: “Relationship Blogging.” So as soon as I can get my audio editor software working, I’ll upload it as an mp3 file, and I will also upload a flash version of the powerpoint file for your enjoyment as well.

I don’t think there was any video of this presentation, so I’ll spare you that!

Stay tuned for details.

Tomorrow I’ll be giving my “Integrity on the Internet” presentation. The presentation has been updated from my earlier 1998 version. Hopefully It’ll go well!

More later. But, meanwhile, for all who were interested in the books I mentioned, see:

Continue reading Present, and half accounted for at TIMC… →

The I Dig Jesus Meme: My Response

Blogging, Random Miscellany, Religion

I Dig Jesus!For the second time in my short life as a blogger, I’ve been meme-tagged by an evil blogging compatriot hoping to provoke me into playing a silly blog-tagging game, generating more content, and generally surrendering to mass hysteria.

Okay. I’m in! But only because I’m a sucker for attention. And because, like the “One Book Meme,” this question interests me, and I like it.

By the way, I was tagged by Carl Thomas over at the Revival Blog who, believe it or not, actually got a touch snarky with me in his post. This is a bit like playing touch football, only instead of being touched, or tagged, or merely pushed, you get a wedgie:

Rich — If he completes it, (remember that “imminent” post on Ted Haggard back in November of last year?) it will be in several months and contain thousands of words. Some pro-gay group will surely comment on it and tell how Carlton Pearson is the greatest man since Moses.

:: grin ::

Uh, thanks, Carl. I’ll get on that Ted Haggard post — eventually. And when I do, you’ll be amazed and disappointed simultaneously. Only I can pull off such a feat … and that’s why you read me.

Okay, so here are the rules, according to John Smulo, the originator of the meme:

  • Those tagged will share 5 Things They Dig About Jesus.
  • Those tagged will tag 5 people.
  • Those tagged will leave a link to their meme in the comments section of this post so everyone can keep track of what’s being posted.

With all that out of the way, here goes.

Five Things I Dig About Jesus

  • Jesus digs puns

    While G.K. Chesterton has noted, in Orthodoxy, that we never see Jesus laughing in the Gospels, much has been written on Jesus’ humor.

    Do you realize Jesus himself elevated the “low” art of the pun when he addressed the hypocrisy of Pharisees? In Matthew 23:24, Jesus imagined the Pharisees eating soup and criticized their foolishness, saying, “You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”

    Not a pun, you say? It’s not apparent in the English translation. It’s not apparent even in the Greek text. But when you consider that Jesus likely spoke in Aramaic, you see the essential irony in the pun: the word for gnat is galma. The word for camel is gamla.

    Or look at Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter: “[Y]ou are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” The pun is apparent in the Greek where petros is used for Peter and petra is used for Rock, but it’s also apparent when you consider the likely Aramaic term used: kepha is both the proper name and the term for “rock.” (For more, see: The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings by Robert H. Stein.)

    Jesus is a merry punster. I like that.

  • Jesus digs children
    Honestly, I didn’t have even the first inkling about this aspect of Jesus until I became a Daddy. Before having children of my own, I thought I loved kids but, really, I just liked the idea of kids, and nice well-behaved ones at that.

    Now that I’m a Dad I realize that nothing pushes your big, red hot-buttons faster than a little 3-foot tyke who defies a 6-foot, 300-pound daddy without an ounce of fear, and nothing melts a dad’s heart more completely than a little 3-foot tyke cuddling up close with a smile and a giggle. Fatherhood, I think, has taught me more about God than all my courses in Bible school and seminary combined. And now I read passages like Matthew 18:2-6, Matthew 19:13-14, Mark 10:15, and Luke 18:17 in a new light.

    It’s not that children are sinless and devoid of sneakiness — as every parent can attest. And I probably don’t fully understand what it means to be like a child in faith. But I do know that my children trust me and love me utterly in a way that I am still struggling to trust and love God. I know I must frustrate him in my rebellion like my own children frustrate me, but I’m so glad that Jesus loves kids, because it’s a promise of my Father’s own love for me.

  • Jesus digs stories
    I love the fact that while Jesus does teach pedagogically, almost all of his teaching involves the use of similes, metaphors, and stories. I don’t know why we don’t sit at the feet of the master teacher more often, but somewhere, somehow, we got off-track and started emulating Paul and his indicative/imperative style of teaching and correction. Not that there’s anything wrong with Paul, but whatever happened to balance? The overwhelming majority of Scripture is narrative. It’s story, poetry and parables.

    We should teach more like Jesus who not only told a lot of stories, but did a lot of his teaching one-on-one.

  • Jesus digs naps
    Hey, anyone who can sleep through a storm like a baby in a cradle on a flimsy boat on a roiling lake while waves break over the bow obviously is either seriously sleep-deprived (which I can identify with) or just takes seriously the afternoon imperative to siesta. (See Mark 4:37-39.) How can this not be cool? Every office worker, every pastor, every field-hand, and every truck driver needs to follow Jesus’ example here: Take a nap!

    And there’s nothing wrong with a comfortable nap, at that. Notice, in this passage, that Jesus was sleeping on a cushion. I don’t imagine many fishing-boats in those days had a lot of cushions on-board.

    Apparently, the Jesus I know and love came prepared to nap.

  • Jesus digs freaks and geeks
    In our antiseptically scrubbed and pathologically clean churches we still look down on folks who hang out with the “bad crowd.” In my own faith-sect, the Assemblies of God, many of our churches have membership bylaws forbidding members from attending places of “ill repute.” That, really, can mean any place another church member thinks is a bad place for you to be. Unfortunately, this can make our faith-walk more about reputation (image) not reality.

    When I worked at the A/G headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, my wife and I once invited a couple who worked with us out for a “date.” We caught dinner. After, the night was still young and we enjoyed each others’ company, so Jennifer and I suggested we go shoot some pool.

    While the husband was cool with it, his wife declined because she worked in the Human Resources department, and she had to be very careful to uphold the standards of the organization. She knew that the leadership would frown on her spending time in a place of “ill repute” where beer was quaffed, smoke inhaled, and unknown sin carried out in the dark corners of the billiards hall.

    But the Jesus I read about had dinner with collections agents. He spoke compassionately with divorcees, prostitutes, and adulteresses. He drank wine. He was accused of gluttony. Jesus hung out with people of ill repute in places of ill repute, and didn’t apologize for it. The men he called to be his disciples were from the working class, and from the reviled class. He hung out with hot-heads and traitors. He loved the meek and the powerless in society.

    If Jerusalem had been a high-school, Jesus probably would not have been at the popular kids’ table in the cafeteria. Unless, of course, he was criticizing their tendency to strain their soup for gnats while swallowing camels.

Meme Genealogy

I’m in the eighth generation of this meme. Each of my ancestors tagged five other people. So, at minimum, there are 48 others blogging about Jesus right now, with potentially hundreds more. Explore the following sites above or go directly to Smulo’s first post to see what others have written.

And now I tag…

  • Phil Gerbyshak – The “Make it Great!” Guy
    As our resident Tony the Tiger, Phil’s an eternal optimist and sure to come up with something encouraging and … uh  … grrreat!
  • Cynthia Ware – The Digital Sanctuary
    Cynthia’s forever blogging about the intersection of Church and technology. I think she should take a break and just tell us what she thinks about Jesus today. Have at it, Cynthia!
  • Jason Clark – Jason Clark
    Jason’s the newest member of the PneumaBlogs list of bloggers, and he seems to be a smart guy. Let’s see what his personal take on Jesus is.
  • John Laukkanen – ahavafriend
    Uncle John, as my son refers to him, isn’t really my uncle. But he is John, and unique. I am sure I will be enlightened by this maverick traveller’s perspective.
  • Christoph Fischer – my cup of coffee
    Christop is a smart and interesting blogger who seems to have fallen off the posting wagon lately. Perhaps this will prompt a little inspiration?

Have fun!

Your comments are welcome, and invited.

[tags]ahavafriend, alan-knox, blogrodent, bryan-riley, carl-thomas, christianity, children, children, christoph-fischer, cynthia-ware, dads, digital-sanctuary, evangelical, fatherhood, freaks, geeks, humor, humor, i-am-healed, ill-repute, jesus, jesus-christ, joel-brueseke, john-laukkanen, john-smulo, kathi-sharpe, love, make-it-great, mark-hadfield, meme, my-cup-of-coffee, nightwatch-blogger, phil-gerbyshak, puns, religion, vanessa[/tags]

Will also present for food: Internet Ministry Conference

Blogging, Random Miscellany, Religion

Internet Ministry ConferenceIt’s official: I’m presenting at the 2008 Internet Ministry Conference hosted by GospelCom.

Gospel Communications has teamed up with the Internet Evangelism Coalition and now the two conferences, GospelCon and the Internet Evangelism Conference, have been merged. The conference serves two dual purposes: one is to train GospelCom’s ministry partners how to use technology to do their ministry, whether it’s finding a useable open source CMS, using design to communicate effectively, or writing better post titles. The second purpose is to train believers to do evangelism and ministry more effectively whether it’s learning how to write your personal testimony more effectively, how to share your faith online, or how to use social networking tools wisely.

I’m delighted to be invited to present this year. I’d like to think it’s because I’m a superstar blogger and made a name for myself here at BlogRodent, but that’s not the case. The invitation came about by divine appointment.

As I’ve whined about frequently enough, I’m currently freelancing and doing free-agent consulting stuff. (In other words, I’m unemployed.) So, in the course of talking with potential employers, I contacted GospelCom for an open position they had for an online training developer position. 160+ resumés later, I was invited to be one of four final candidates to come visit the GospelCom headquarters in Muskegon, Michigan, to give a 15-minute presentation in order to demonstrate my “mad training skillz.” (Note the quotes, please. :-) )

If it tells you anything, I wasn’t hired. Happy Dance! On the plus side, though, the hiring manager, Brian Melles, said mine was the only presentation of the four that actually got him excited. He was so excited, in fact, that he extended an immediate (though tentative) offer to expand the presentation and to deliver it at this years’ Internet Ministry conference.

Wahoo!

So, now it’s official. I’m on the speakers’ page, and I’ve got two presentation tracks lined up.

The Blogging ChurchI’d tell you more about the content of my main presentation, but I’m still lining up permissions for the content to use. I’ll give a hint, though: I’ll be using a story from Brian Bailey‘s excellent book, The Blogging Church, to illustrate my theme.

Registration is open. The conference currently costs $300 to attend for two days, or $450 for the full enchilada (early-bird registration).

Will I see you there?

Here’s my entry on the speakers’ page.

Rich Tatum has been working with Internet and Web technology for over 15 years. While the Web was still young and populated by gophers and telnetters, he founded an Internet users group, served as the first webmaster for the Assemblies of God headquarters, and later served as webmaster, Internet operations manager, and online media managing editor for Christianity Today International. He currently freelances, writes Pentecostal commentary as the BlogRodent, and parents two great kids as either “Daddy” or “Mr. Pretzel-Man” with his lovely bride in an obscure Chicago suburb.

Sessions:

  • Influenza Blogging: Become a viral blogger by getting influential and relational
  • Integrity on the Internet

I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about this in the future.

Rich

[tags]Blog-Strategy, Blogging, BlogRodent, Brian-Bailey, Brian-Melles, Christian-Conference, Christianity, Conference, Faith, GodBlogging, Gospel-Communications, GospelCom, Gospelcon, Influenza, Influenza-Blogging, Integrity, Integrity-on-the-Internet, Internet-Evangelism-Coalition, Internet-Evangelism-Conference, Internet-Ministry, Internet-Ministry-Conference, Ministry-Online, Online-Evangelism, Online-Ministry, Presentation, Relationships, Religion, Rich-Tatum, The-Blogging-Church, viral-blogging[/tags]

Will Social Network for Food

Blogging, Random Miscellany, Work

As most of you who regularly visit know, back in November of 2006 I was laid-off from CTI. It wasn’t anything nefarious or antagonistic — CTI always has been and continues to be very good to me, still tossing occasional freelance work and article assignments my way. (Hopefully because of my skill, not out of mercy. Though mercy is good, too, and welcome!) When my project’s funding ran dry and I was out on the streets (well, more like in my skivvies, lounging around the house, generally making a nuisance of myself) I immediately signed up for a paid account at LinkedIN. I was sold on what it promised for professional networking and job searching opportunities.

Not yet disappointed

LinkedIN has not disappointed me. That isn’t to say it’s actually delivered on its promises. Rather, I’ve found that its usefulness is greater than just for the immediate emergency of landing a job.

No. I haven’t landed a job yet, but here’s what I have done. After filling out my complete work history on LI, I relieved myself of the burden of having to create a four-page resumé, instead I was able to focus on a more high-level “advertisement” of my skills and capabilities, leaving the heavy-lifting of the detailed former-job minutia to LinkedIN. Now, when I want to send a candidate package to somebody, I send them my PDF resumé along with links to my full professional history at LinkedIN, along with some references I’ve picked up along the way.

Hire Rich Tatum!
Rich Tatum's ResumeEvery potential employer has told me they were impressed with my resumé — and not a single interview has had to probe the nitty-gritty details of my previous job experience, because it’s all laid out in black and white over at LinkedIN, with plenty of details to back it up.

Transparency and Accountability

What LinkedIN provides me with potential employers is transparency, accountability, and authenticity. Yes, any yahoo can invent a work history. But when you’ve published it online and placed it in a network where a single click of a button can easily find current employees working for that old company who might be willing to verify details, it’s harder to be sneaky and deceitful. Plus, it helps if your personal network of professional contacts includes former employers and managers named in the work history —which is the case with me. So, the normal paranoia and suspicion that can sour a job interview has been delightfully lacking. I think my online information-packet strategy has helped with that, and LinkedIN has been a valuable part of the experience.

Socially acceptable end-runs

Another benefit to using LinkedIN has been the ability to contact employees within a target company to inquire about corporate culture and the work environment. I did this when I went to interview at the McDonald’s corporation, and made a connection with a fellow believer who works there, and we enjoyed several nice email exchanges. Since interviewing at Awana, I’ve added a couple more contacts to my network. One LinkedIN contact actually led to a job offer, which I had to turn down.

And contacting a Vice President at Zondervan through LinkedIN led to a face-to-face job interview last week.

Now, again, I haven’t found a job. So, in once sense, LinkedIN hasn’t helped at all. But I’m not worried. It certainly hasn’t hurt, and while it may be hard to measure its benefit, I do think it’s helped.

Are you lookin’ at me?

Now, finally, LinkedIN has added a new feature (in beta) that helps me actually see how hard my profile is working (or not working) for me. While I can’t get traffic or stats info from my profile’s views and hits, I can finally see how much activity my profile’s seen over the last couple of weeks, and I can even get a sense of who’s looking at me.

Enter the “Who’s viewed my profile?” feature, recently announced on the LinkedIN blog, “Guess who’s viewed your profile?“

Now I can finally get an idea of what visibility my profile has for people who may be looking for new hires. Here’s what my profile views panel looked like tonight:

LinkedIN: Who's viewed my profile?

Some of these folks, like Awana and MagnetStreet, I definitely know who they are. Some of the others are clearly recruiters trolling for job candidates and Rolodex entries. But I wish I knew who was looking at my profile from the media production, broadcast industry, and religious institutions. Unfortunately, to protect visitor’s privacy, I cannot.

Maybe LinkedIN will allow users to change their privacy settings so they can optionally leave footprints behind, as well.

Close

Well, that’s enough about LinkedIN. Give it a whirl. For what it’s worth, I’m also trying out a combination system that promises to offer some of LinkedIN’s functionality, it’s a mash-up of FaceBook and job-search boards called Jobster. Something else worth trying out.

If you’re interested, check out my Jobster profile, or my FaceBook profile. And feel free to link with me on any of the social networks I belong to (ProfileFly).

Regards,

Rich
[tags]Awana-Clubs-International, BlogRodent, Christianity-Today-International, FaceBook, Jobster, LinkedIN, LinkedIN-blog, MagnetStreet, McDonald’s-Corporation, ProfileFly, Rich-Tatum, Zondervan, employment, freelance, friends, hire-me, job-applications, job-description, job-interview, job-interviews, job-networking, job-skills, networking, profile, profiles, resume, social-networking, social-networks, unemployment, web-2.0[/tags]

Shameless Self-Promotion: Blogger’s Choice Awards

Blogging, Random Miscellany

My site was nominated for Best Religion Blog!

Okay, I’ll fess up. I am a shameless self-promoter. Yes, I blog for the writing and for you, my Gentle Readers, but it’s also nice to get feedback and see real-world data that makes the feedback … um … exciting.

So, some time back I nominated my own site, yes this site right here, in the “Religion” category at the Blogger’s Choice Awards (I waited till now to mention it because Alexa, which generates the thumbnails for the contest, kept pulling in a screenshot for my site that was showing a brain-dead URL.) I am sure this self-nomination is a mark of my own immaturity. And I’m okay with that — while also recognizing there’s probably something there worth analyzing … someday.

Do I think I have a lollipop’s chance in kindergarten of actually winning? No. But it’d be fun to see how many of you pop on over there to vote. And then nominate yourselves. Get yourself in the list, come back and comment here, and I’ll vote for you, too!

Other GodBloggers I know are far better than I am. They’re more experienced, better-educated, better-read, and generally better looking. Probably nicer-smelling, too, with actual hair.

I think bloggers like the winningly witty Julie R. Neidlinger, the irascibly theological Dan Edelen, the diabolically enthusiastic Phil Gerbyshak (though not a Religion blogger per-se), the omnisciently observant Cynthia Ware, the atomically sharp Peter Smythe, the pastorally pensive Mark Lauterbach, the scintillatingly lucid Rob Wilkerson, and the pseudonymously erudite Oengus Moonbones are all far better religion bloggers one and all. (Sorry if I didn’t name you, I had to end the purple prose madness somewhere!)

But, hey, a blogger can dream, right? (“They like me! They really like me!”)

So, feel free to vote!

Rich

[tags]award, Bloggers-Choice-Awards, BlogRodent, Christianity, Cynthia-Ware, Dan-Edelen, Evangelical, GodBlog, GodBlogger, Julie-R-Neidlinger, Julie-Neidlinger, Mark-Lauterbach, Oengus-Moonbones, Pentecostal, Peter-Smythe, Phil-Gerbyshak, religion, Rob-Wilkerson, self-nomination[/tags]

Blog Stats: Get your info-jones on with weblog traffic metrics

Blogging, Links, Random Miscellany

Table of Contents

If you’re like me, you want to know whether anyone’s eating the meat you grind out from the butcher shop of ideas called your blog. Sure, there’s some measure of pride and ego involved: as your stats move ever upward your sense of confidence inflates proportionately. So does your sense of importance and pride. We all want at least a little touch of fame.

Problem is, unless you get a lot of comments on your blog, it’s difficult to know how many subscribers you have reading your feed, or which posts are getting the most attention, or whether your visitors are first-timers who never return, or old die hards who just can’t get enough of your tasty cuts. Yes, traffic analysis is more than just pretty charts, it’s a window into the effectiveness and impact of your writing — and promotion.

Good news: There are a number of free metrics, stats, and performance tracking packages to help you see out what’s going on with your weblog (or website). Just beware, though, mining your blog trackers for insights can get addictive and it often has very little return value for all the effort expended. However, if you’re looking to improve your blogging tactics, you need data. And for that, I highly recommend the following:

Automattic Stats for self-hosted WordPress
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Automattic Stats for self-hosted WordPress
Andy Skelton has just released this brand new plugin for WordPress sites, and it looks very, very promising (see also his “Day One” report, and Carthik Sharma’s review). As of today, if you are a WordPress blogger, you can piggyback on the WordPress.com blogging community’s very own metric system and, like Google Analytics, you don’t pay a dime, and there’s no server overhead to slow your site down.

According to the plugin’s documentation:

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

And it’s a very nice interface, indeed. Check it out, and enjoy!

FeedBurner
http://www.feedburner.com/

FeedBurner
I think every blogger should use FeedBurner for delivering their feed because:

  • You get a cross-browser, cross-feed-reader way to provide one-click subscription options.
  • FB adds value to your feed items and posts with widgets that allow users to email the entry, find related content elsewhere, and even rate your posts.
  • FB just plain cleans up your feed so that practically any reader on the planet can handle your feed.
  • Plus, if you change your feed URL or your blogging platform, users don’t have to resubscribe. You just point your FeedBurner feed to the new URL.

That’s all good for your readers, but there’s more: For you, the blog owner, you finally get real, useful, stats about how many subscribers you have to your feed, what they’re paying attention to, and what the trends are in your subscribers’ activity. And that’s all good. And it’s free! If you pay for the pro version, you get even more data, more stats, and more options about the URL you deliver your feed from.

Google Analytics
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics
There really isn’t a more comprehensive stats analysis package available for free anywhere else. If you’re a statsaholic and you need to know the relative performance of every page on your site, if you want to know what’s the top entry or exit page, if you need to track your advertising goals (it integrates with Google AdSense, naturally), or if you want to know more about the “paths” users take through your site. Oh, you can also see the “bounce rates” for individual pages, which tells you which “entrance” pages are also the “exit page” for visitors. If a visitor clicks through your site to another page, it’s not a bounce. But if a visitor lands on a page and then exits, it counts as a bounce. I haven’t seen this metric anywhere else, and it can tell you whether a particular landing page is converting visitors to readers, or not. Very helpful. For infoholics, Google Analytics is your drug of choice.

TanTan WordPress Reports
The only problem, however, is that there is maybe too much information. So if you use Google Analytics and have a WordPress blog, I also recommend Joe tan’s excellent “Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin,” which provides a simple high-level overview of the most important metrics from Google Analytics. It plugs in to your WordPress blog and adds a “Reports” link to your Dashboard for a quick snapshot of the trends for daily visits, daily page views, average page views per visit, popular content, and more. Plus, if you use Feedburner, it will give you a quick subscriber report for your burned feed as well.

The best part about these two options is that neither adds any processing or database overhead to your WordPress site. Too many other WordPress stats plugins explode your database. This doesn’t because you’re not using your database, you’re using Google’s. Want to bet Google’s going to have nice, fast servers that don’t bog down every half hour?

QuantCast Internet Ratings
http://quantcast.com/

Some people like the Alexa stats system, and I check Alexa out from time-to time. But Alexa stats are really unreliable metrics since it only pulls in data from registered toolbar users, and its stats are extrapolated (i.e.: it’s a guess) from that small, self-selected demographic of users.

So, lately, I’ve been using QuantCast, which provides some interesting demographic details for a website. For example, according to QuantCast, here are my site’s demographics summary:

Tatumweb.com has 6,150 monthly unique visitors, 4,054 (66%) reside in the U.S. The site caters to a more educated/highly educated, primarily male audience.

The demographics information is interesting. It remains to be seen, for me, whether it’s truly useful or not, but if I were going to sell ad-space on my blog to another ministry, this would be useful information to include in a proposal.

Others…?

There are other free metrics systems I use (see my “stats junk” link at the bottom of the page), such as SiteMeter and StatCounter. I like SiteMeter quite a bit, but others have complained about it, and sometimes the counter does load slowly. So, SiteMeter may be going through growing pains. StatCounter is a good viable alternative offering a basic free account and a more detailed paid account.

I also use Technorati, The Truth Laid Bear, BlogTopSites, ChristianTop1000, and IceRocket’s BlogTracker.

Another tracker I’ve been using lately was created by my friend and fellow PneumaBlogger, John Abela. It’s The Top 100 Christian Blog Websites. However, it’s currently only tracking four blogs, and John’s not sure how many bloggers he really wants to add to his tracker, since that could hog server resources. Feel free to contact John if you’re interested, but you might want to wait a while, in case he gets deluged with requests due to this mention.

Finally, I use a WordPress plugin to create a Google-compliant sitemap for every post in this blog. This plugin notifies Google every time I update the site, and that kicks off a Googlebot session to come spider BlogRodent and add new pages to the vasty Google Index. This plugin is the Google Sitemap Generator provided by Arne Brachhold and it’s been very good to me.

A bunch of useful measurements are provided by Google via the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, which provides an eyeful of reports. Some similar reports might be available through your host’s cPanel, but it’s convenient to have it here at Google too. Reports like what pages are generating HTTP errors, which pages return a “not found” error, which pages are timing-out, and which URLs are simply unreachable. This is all good, because it points out what’s broken and should be fixed (when you have the time and aren’t jonesing on traffic data). Plus, these are reports external to your own site’s weblogs, which is a useful third-party verification of problems your site may not be catching.

Top-Linked Pages
at BlogRodent

But there’s more. Google nicely provides a Links page showing you every page it’s indexed from your site with a number in the right-hand column tabulating all the pages outside of your site which link to it. Click on the hyperlinked number and you get to see who’s linking to what page. Nice.

Google lets you download a spreadsheet of all the pages that are linking to every page in your site. Using this, I did a little spreadsheet magic, deleted all the inbound links from my other blogs and from my feed, and quickly found the top ten most frequently linked posts on BlogRodent — apart from the PneumaBlogs page (see sidebar at right).

That kind of data is very useful, and not found anywhere else that I know of.

Comments? Additions? Your favorites?

You might disagree with my picks here. And you might quibble that a number of these tools are WordPress-specific. Well, feel free to add your kudos, criticisms or dissent via the comment form. All takers welcome!

Rich

[tags]AdSense, AdSense-tracking, Alexa, analyitics, Andy-Skelton, Automattic, blog-hits, blog-stats, blog-strategy, blog-tips, blog-traffic, blogging, blogging-tips, BlogRodent, BlogTopSites, BlogTracker, data-analysis, detailed-stats, feedburner, free, free-hit-counter, free-stuff, free-web-counter, freeware, google, google-analytics, hit-counter, how-to, IceRocket, infographics, internet-ranking, internet-ratings, invisible-counter, javascript, measure-traffic, measuring-performance, measuring-traffic, metric, metrics, metrics-service, performance-metrics, quantcast, ranking, ratings, site-traffic, SiteMeter, StatCounter, statistics, stats, strategy, Technorati, traffic, traffic-analysis, traffic-analyzer, traffic-measurement, traffic-metric, traffic-monitor, traffic-statistics, traffic-stats, traffic-trends, trends, truth-laid-bear, TTLB, unique-visitors, visitor-stats, visitors, web-metrics, web-tracker, weblog-traffic, website-metrics, website-traffic, webstats, WordPress[/tags]

Should Ministry Leaders Blog?

Blogging, Rage and Rants, Random Miscellany

Hat tip to Michael Davis for alerting me to this question posed over at Total Leadership: “Should Ministry Leaders Blog?” Here are my thoughts…

A blogger with a “why” beats one with only a “how”

KeyboardBlogging can be a waste of a leader’s time if he doesn’t know what he’s doing or why he’s doing it. (Especially why.)

I would never suggest a leader start blogging (or podcasting) unless they’ve already been reading some choice blogs and are starting to get some idea of what value a blog can bring to a ministry or to one’s life. Rushing into blogging without first experiencing it is like convincing someone to preach who’s never heard a sermon in their life. Sure, it might be comical or even refreshing — once.

A few blogging bennies…

For some, blogging can be a kind of spiritual discipline, helping hone thoughts and to dig past the sometimes surface thoughts of hurried Saturday-night sermon prep. It provides a database of sermon themes related to your deeper concerns. It aids writing — requiring clarity and concision. It keeps you in touch with other influential people, and exposes you to criticism and commentary, sometimes kudos. Leaders need all of that.

Too few leaders have opportunities for strangers or even friends to comment and speak into their lives or provide feedback. Blogs with comments enabled are a great way to help provide that. It brings the leader out of the ivory tower. Blogging can be truly incarnational. Leaders need this, too, but it’s frightening because they’ve never had it.

I like to think of Paul the Apostle as the original proto-blogger. His missives dealt with current events, addressed failings in the Church, provided solutions, commented on trends and dangerous ideas. He “blogged” from prison, he blogged on the road, he blogged with the help of a peripheral writing device: an amanuensis.

And his words have become a significant part of our thought-life today many, many years later. Talk about the “long tail!”

If you are a leader and you are intentionally not blogging, you are ignoring one of the most influential media currently available to you.

Banking your thoughts

Blogging, in some ways, is like an interest-bearing savings account. As long as your ideas are only spoken, they’re being spent as soon as you generate them — just like spending your entire paycheck the very week you get it. But if you can “bank” some of those thoughts, they’ll go to work for you on your behalf, influencing more than just the handful within earshot. And like money in the bank, your blog-published ideas compound their influence week after week after week.

Do you have what it takes?

On the other hand, maybe not every leader should blog. After all, it does require a specific set of skills that many of our leaders simply don’t have: the ability to write clearly, the ability to engage an audience, the ability to be consistent, to provide something worthwhile and interesting with regularity, the ability to take criticism and respond irenically, the ability to respond to current events in the real-world, the ability to be transparent, and the ability to turn on a computer and use it.

But some of those guys aren’t leading. They just happen to be standing where the crowd’s facing.

If you’re a ministry leader and you’ve intentionally ignored using Internet technology to augment your message and vision, please ask yourself why. You may have very good reasons. And it may not reflect poorly on you at all. For example, I really don’t see Billy Graham picking up the keyboard to blog nowadays, and he’s not diminished one whit by not blogging. And maybe guys like Dallas Willard, Tim Stafford, and Jack Hayford don’t need to blog: publishing houses are already happily killing trees to extend their reach through the printed page. (But I’d sign up for their blogs so fast my keyboard would melt!)

But it’s easier than falling off a pulpit

But if you’re checking out of the “blogging craze” because it’s the domain of teens and Gen-Xers, or overwhelmingly nerdy, or seemingly too difficult to master, I invite you to give it another thought. Sign up for an account at WordPress.com and start flailing away. Really, it isn’t hard, and you can start doing it in about five minutes.

Ride the long tail and prosper!

Rich

[tags]amanuensis, billy-graham, blog, blog-tips, blogging, blogging-benefits, blogging-skills, blogging-strategy, blogging-tips, blogrodent, church, dallas-willard, engage-an-audience, jack-hayford, leaders, leadership, leadership-blogs, long-tail, michael-davis, ministry, ministry-blogs, ministry-leader, ministry-leaders, ministry-leadership, paul-the-apostle, podcasting, purpose, rich-tatum, spiritual-discipline, spiritual-disciplines, strategy, technology, tim-stafford, tips, total-leadership, vision, wordpress.com, write-clearly, writing, writing-tips[/tags]

New Feature: In-Line Editable Comments

Blogging, Random Miscellany, Site Updates

Hello, Gentle Readers.

If you’re part of the one-percenters who comment here from time-to-time you might be happy to know that I have enabled a feature to edit comments after you’ve posted them, and you don’t even have to leave the page! (Thanks to Ronald Huereca.)

Come on, leave a comment and give it a whirl! You know you want to.

I’ve set the tool to allow you to edit your comments for 90 minutes after you’ve submitted it. I have no idea what the system will do if you’ve never commented before and your missive winds up in the moderation pool. But it would be useful to find out. (Hint.)

Rich

[tags]AJAX, blogging, BlogRodent, comments, editable-comments, WordPress[/tags]

Top 20 Bloggers (PneumaBloggers, that is)

Blogging, Pentecostal, Random Miscellany

Top 20 Bloggers (PneumaBlogs)
For some time I’ve wanted to provide some sort of real-world ranking system so that those of you who want to know who the “big fish” are can find them, and so those of you who have successfully worked your blog into the stratosphere would get a little praise for your effort.

After thinking about it and hacking around with some online tools, I finally have an easy way for me to quickly determine the Technorati Ranking of every blogger on my PneumaBlogs list. (The Technorati ranking is determined by the number of links to a site by other bloggers within the last few months. So it’s sort of like a “vote” by other bloggers.) Upon seeing the results I was surprised at some of the lesser-known bloggers making it to the top of the heap.

Congratulations!

Continue reading Top 20 Bloggers (PneumaBloggers, that is) →

Why Julie Blogs: On writers, writing, and blogging well

Blogging, Bookshelf, Nonfiction

Julie R. Neidlinger

I love it when writers I enjoy get reflective and journal their process — when they slice open their artistic arteries and bleed out on the page, revealing what courses through their hearts. That’s why I enjoy [reading] writing books like Stephen King’s memoir on writing, as well as David Morrell’s, Ray Bradbury’s, Anne Lamott’s, Frank McCourt’s (though more about teaching than writing), Nancy Kress’s, a collection of essays on writers and their public mortification and, of course, Orson Scott Card’s excellent work.

Continue reading Why Julie Blogs: On writers, writing, and blogging well →

39 Tips to Improve Weblog Traffic and Visibility

Blogging, Links, Random Miscellany

View the SiteMeter Stats for BlogRodent
Here are some tips I’ve learned from nearly two years of blogging and consistently raising my site’s traffic from month to month, often doubling it from previous months. Compared to some, I’m a rank newbie and have no business offering you any sort of pseudo-sage advice, but whatever I have to say below has already been said by others smarter than me. Most of it is hard-won insight that has worked for somebody somewhere, sometimes even me.

Continue reading 39 Tips to Improve Weblog Traffic and Visibility →

On Blogging: A Challenge to Pentecostals

Blogging, Rage and Rants, Random Miscellany

KeyboardI want to say a few words about the power of blogging on a personal level. And I want to challenge my fellow quiet Pentecostals and Charismatics to pick up the keyboard and begin writing.

Words have Consequences
A friend on an email message group recently asked me about the effectiveness of ministering through a blog. So I’d been thinking about that when a couple things landed in my inbox that encouraged me and seem to illustrate the answer to his question. Writing in a public forum — whether blogging, managing a web page, or crafting freelance articles for a newspaper or magazine — can have an effect.

First up, from Amber, who sent me a nice note via my online contact form:

« I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your blog.  … Your blog is always honest and open, you don’t shy away from even the hard stuff in your comments. After joining the Assemblies at 16, I soon discovered that opinions and controversy and doubt are all too often a flag for that person needing to “get saved” again.

I have just recently left the Assemblies … but a part of it is still in me, hopefully the good parts. And honestly, I think all of those good parts are what you portray here at your blog.

Thanks for being there and restoring a little of my fragile hope for humanity. »

Continue reading On Blogging: A Challenge to Pentecostals →

Using Windows Live Writer (beta)

Blogging, Random Miscellany, Site Updates

Okay, so I’m trying out the Windows Live Writer — because I’m a sucker for new tools and I’m always on the lookout for the better (free) blogging tool. Besides, Amy at GentleWhisper made me do it. …

Installation

The install went okay … the second time. The installer wants to add the Windows Live toolbar to Internet Explorer. I initially opted for it, but after Live Writer failed to read my blog settings, I uninstalled everything and started over — this time without the toolbar.

On the second install I de-opted for the MSIE toolbar, since I rarely use MSIE anyhow. This time, Live Writer started up nicely and read my blog settings without halting. Not sure why the toolbar would’ve made a difference. Not sure if it did or not, but second time was the charm.

Setup

After installing,

Continue reading Using Windows Live Writer (beta) →

BlogRodent turns one: top 10 posts, plus top ten lessons.

Blogging, Random Miscellany

If you’re just interested in the top ten lessons, skip ahead.

Yowie, it’s been a busy couple of months. Since I went on vacation in early June my life has been very full. I’ve had a lot of video editing to do, and I’ve been taking work home to do it on my laptop — since it seems so hard to get anything accomplished at the office. (Is it ironic when your boss agrees that the worst place to do work is at the office?)

Meanwhile, I’ve been wringing my hands over my blog. I’ve been too … absorbed in everything else to dredge up the energy to post anything substantive, but over the past couple weeks I’ve at least made sure to moderate comments and track stats. So, BlogRodent hasn’t really fallen off my radar. It’s just that I’ve fallen off the face of the Earth. In fact, I’m waiting for video to finish rendering right now … so with a few minutes on my hands, I thought I’d post a retrospective.

I think milestones are important. I’d been waiting for the one-year anniversary of BlogRodent so I could celebrate it with an anniversary post. Naturally, because I am time-insensitive — my employers would say I’m time-comatose — June 20 passed without comment. I’m about to rectify that.

What happened on this blog on that day one year ago? My first “Hello World” post, nervously titled, “This is easy,” and a throw-away mention of the adult Christian education class I was teaching at the time, “Do Heaven and Hell exist?” Frankly, there’s nothing to recommend either post for your reading pleasure. But lot has happened since then and I hope I’ve made some improvement.

Let’s talk about what’s been good, bad, and what I’ve learned as a newbie Pentecostal blogger.

Continue reading BlogRodent turns one: top 10 posts, plus top ten lessons. →

Eichenwald blasts bloggers. Is that a fact or is he reporting again?

Blogging, Rage and Rants, Random Miscellany

Kurt EichenwaldYou may remember how New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald discovered the seedy world of teenage webcam porn, and how his investigation became personal when he encouraged the subject he was interviewing—Justin Berry—to give up his sordid life, turn State’s evidence, and kick drugs. Eichenwald has since been in the hot seat for violating traditional journalistic ethics in that he became part of the story. Some claim he lost his objectivity and tarnished his legitimacy as a reporter not a story-maker by becoming personally involved and influencing the story. Eichenwald’s response is straightforward and direct: journalism doesn’t mean “we are required to check our humanity at the door.”

So, being in the eye of the ethical storm he can, presumably, objectively report on the conditions there. He recently gave an ethics lecture at Marquette University, titled, “A Delicate Balance: Objective Journalist, Engaged Citizen.”

Apparently, at some point, Eichenwald spun a riff about the difference between blogging and journalism:

Eichenwald said that while he was involved in Berry’s case, his writing has always been objective. He began his lecture by saying that journalists should keep their thoughts and their opinions out of their published work.

“When I’m talking about the difference between facts and truth, facts and knowledge, it’s the difference between a journalist and a blogger,” Eichenwald said. “A journalist is dealing in facts. Bloggers deal in their own truths, which may or may not be based on facts.”

Okay. Eichenwald’s a bright guy. I respect him, think he’s a fine writer, and a brilliant investigator. And while opinion and commentary do not a journalist make, he’s got his head in the proverbial sand if he thinks journalism doesn’t by nature convey opinion.

Every journalist, every writer, every blogger, diarist, podcaster, speech-writer, novelist, essayist, and every five-year-old with finger-paint-stained digits brings to his or her work a point of view that is unique to that person. No matter how objective one tries to be, it is impossible to escape the subjectivity of one’s own point of view. The selection of a story, alone, betrays objectivity. When a train crashes one reporter focuses on the engineer’s safety record while another focuses on maintenance records. Both reporters may actually dig up objective facts, but the very selection of which facts pursue imply an opinion and point of view. Then there’s the relative weighting of various facts against the other, the decisions over what information to leave out, what to put back in, what to open with, bury in the middle, or close with. Which third-party quotes to use—and let’s not forget how quotes can be inadvertently or intentionally skewed by the attitude and eloquence of the interviewer.

I could recite more here, besides. But consider an example recently cited in GetReligion.org, “But she was wearing a short skirt…”

“Rahman, 40, has become the poster boy for the Christian right and for religious freedom. Closer up, however, the picture painted by the local police who arrested him shows a candidate not quite ready for family values. Rather, a portrait emerges of a deadbeat dad with psychological problems who couldn’t hold down a job, abused his daughters and parents and didn’t pay child support.”

The quote comes from Rachel Morarjee, writing for Time magazine “Abdul Rahman’s Family Values.” GetReligion writer Mollie Ziegler questions the slant of the piece, revealing how just “reporting the facts” doesn’t avoid bias, spin, and opinion:

First, what is this “poster boy for the Christian right” business? Does the Christian left not care about Rahman’s fate? Or, if it does, does it get to be camped in the religious freedom camp? Why, then, does the Christian right get its own nonreligious freedom category?

Second, for all we know, these scandalous accusations against Rahman could be true. For all we know, for that matter, Rahman could have tortured small animals, robbed dying widows and taunted disabled children. But last time I checked, Rahman was not facing a death sentence for being unemployed, etc. He was facing a death sentence for converting from Islam. Printing the allegations, which have nothing to do with the international outrage his plight has caused, is about as appropriate as printing the sexual history of a rape victim.

No one was arguing that Rahman should live because he was a good person. Instead, people were arguing that Rahman should not be killed for converting from Islam. While more information about Rahman is needed and desirable, I’m not sure statements from the police reports that led to his life-threatening situation are the best character witnesses. What’s more, the reporter never speaks with anyone who may find the police statements questionable. She also never speaks with anyone who thinks the allegations are irrelevant to the Muslim apostasy problem. It bears repeating that this issue is not going away just because the Italian government provided Rahman with sanctuary.

Let’s face reality, Kurt, and own up to the truth: News is not objective. Now, say it with me, “News is not objective.” Repeat it … once more … “News is not objective!”

Now, admittedly, that’s only my opinion. I could be wrong. But since I’m just a blogger, all I need is “my own truth.”

Links:

[tags]Abdul-Rahman, bloggers, blogging, BlogRodent, commentary, ethics, GetReligion.org, journalism, Kurt-Eichenwald, Mollie-Ziegler, Time-magazine[/tags]

The Oprah tsunami hits my blog

Blogging, Links, Random Miscellany

Looked at my traffic logs a couple days ago…

Who died and left me all their traffic? It’s not like I blogged on Britney Spears or Anna Kournikova or anything lately. Did I?

Oh … wait … It’s gotta be Berry.

Since I blogged about Justin Berry (the former “camwhore,” now believer, now States’ witness, now media sensation) a while ago (here and here), I already had pretty good search rankings for my post, and it’s been a steady, popular page. But yesterday our local Chicagoland media-mogul diva Oprah Winfrey blew the roof off my blog just by inviting two guests on her show, Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald—the reporter who outted him, saved him, and now “handles” him.

Look at the graphic at the right. This insane Mt. Everest of traffic spikes is entirely due to increased visitor traffic via Google from searchers looking for “justin berry” or “justin berry porn,” or “Justin Berry cam pics,” and so on. Everyone’s landing on that first, old post, and there’ve been a flurry of new comments. Some gushing with excitedness to the point of typographic cardiac arrest, and others targeting Berry with distrust and cynicism.

I knew Oprah had become a major force in the book publishing world with her Book Club picks (see “The Oprah Effect: Version 3.0” and “The Oprah effect: two scholars independently assess the book club that changed everything”), but I had no idea there was this tidal wave of web traffic that splashed about with her every move.

So, apart from blogging about popular hotties, is this one more blog traffic-building strategy? Blog Oprah’s attention-space? Watch her website for upcoming shows and get the search engine rankings as quickly as possible?

Sure, the traffic is transient and lemming-like, but it’s just like surfing a tsunami. Web tsurfing. Oprah style.

Wild.

[tags]blog-promotion, blog-traffic, BlogRodent, Justin-Berry, Oprah, Oprah-Winfrey, Pentecostal[/tags]

Plugins used on Blogrodent

Blogging, Random Miscellany, Site Updates

Updated: See, instead, a live list of plugins, here.

For any who care, here are the plugins currently in use here on BlogRodent. I turned off BAStats for a while to improve performance, but then installed WP-Cache and performance improved so dramatically I’ve turned it back on for a test. However, if you use BA-Stats, yourself, you should know that there are serious performance hits as your database grows larger and larger. I may still have to turn it off as traffic here grows. We’ll see.

Akismet 1.12
“Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service.” (This has caught a ton of comment-spam since I installed it, however, there have been some concerns raised lately that spammers could be using Akismet themselves to “game” the system. Some bloggers are reporting untoward amounts of false positives lately.)

Archivist 0.1
“Selects a defined number of (random) posts from the archive and shows them on the front page.” (You’ll see the results from this plugin as item number three on the blog’s homepage. It should change every time you load the page.)

BAStats 1.0ß build 8
“This plugin calculates statistics for a WordPress weblog.” (This is the best at-a-glance stat reporting tool I’ve found. I’ve used StatTraq, but found it to be too resource-intensive—no better than BAStats. However, Owen has discontinued developing this plugin. Use at your own risk.)

BDP RSS Aggregator 0.2.0 (pre-release 3)
“RSS Aggregator — collate RSS feeds and summarize to a page.” (This is what drives the PneumaBlogs page.)

Comment Quicktags + 1.1
“Inserts a quicktag toolbar on the blog comment form.”

Exec-PHP 2.0
“Allows or [?php ?] tags inside of your posts to execute PHP code.” (Without this, I couldn’t do anything with BDP RSS, or a few other plugins.)

Favatars 2
“A system to show favicon.ico files as avatars: ‘Favatars’.” (You can see these little icons in the comments section. Cute.)

Flash Filter Plus 1.0
“A filter for easily inserting Flash applets and AsySound into posts.” (There are other ways to do this, but Owen’s applet here suited me best.)

Follow URL 1.0
“This plugin strips nofollow tags from your comments and comment author URL, which are inserted by default in WordPress.” (I moderate my comments, so I see no reason to deprive my commenters from good Googlejuice.)

Google Sitemaps 2.7.1
“This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.” (Keeps Google coming back time, and time, again. Since Google searches are a primary driver for traffic here, it makes good sense to keep my Google listings up-to-date.)

Identify External Links 1.2
“Searches the text for links outside of the domain of the blog. To these, it adds class=’extlink’ and target=’_blank’.” (This allows me to put the little arrows beside external links—in case you hadn’t noticed.)

Obfuscate E-mail 0.9
“Obfuscate e-mail addresses in text and links via hex and ASCII code substitution while retaining the appearance and functionality of hyperlinks.” (Just in case somebody gets crazy and posts an email address in a comment.)

Post Updated R1
“Display notice/date/time of when a post was last updated.” (Just more good metadata.)

Recent Comments 1.18
“Retrieves a list of the most recent comments.” (See it in action in my sidebar at the right.)

Recent Posts 1.07
“Returns a list of the most recent posts.” (See it in action in my sidebar at the right.)

Redirect Old Slugs 0.3
“Allows you to change your post slugs without breaking the old ones (which will redirect to the new one!)” (Useful, because I sometimes need to shorten my post URLs.)

Related Posts 1.3.3
“Returns a list of the related entries based on keyword matches.” (See it in action at the bottom of any post.)

Scripturizer 1.5 fork
“Changes Bible references to hyperlinks.” (This is handy because then I don’t have to hard-code my BibleGateway references. Keeps my scripture cites honest and accurate.)

Search Meter 1.1
“After you have activated this plugin, you can check the Search Meter Statistics page to see what your visitors are searching for on your blog.” (Just in case you’re really, really interested in something I haven’t blogged on, I can satisfy your searching needs. Big Rodent is watching!)

SimpleTags 1.1
“Allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the tags. … Supports multiple words within tags. Also allows in-post tagging of words by enclosing them in tags.” (Also makes my blog much more visible to Technorati. See it in action at the bottom of most of my newer posts.)

Smart Archives 1.01
“A simple, clean, and future-proof way to present your archives.” (Does just what it says. Nice.)

Subscribe To Comments 2.0.2
“Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.” (I like this because it allows you to participate in a dialog without having to set up a feed entry for every post you comment on.)

Subscribe2 2.2.0
“Notifies an email list when new entries are posted.” (Only a few people have noticed this, perhaps because most of you are subscribing via feed readers, which is good. However, not everybody uses a feed reading client, and it’s nice to have options.)

WP-Amazon 1.3.2
“WP-Amazon adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon to your entries. This plugin adds a button called “Amazon” on the post page.” (Just in case you want to buy the book, I can more easily search for it and link to it on Amazon.)

WP-ContactForm 1.4.2
“WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.” (Without needing a mail client, not like you don’t have one. But then, I don’t have to post my email address here, either!)

WordPress Database Backup 1.7
“On-demand backup of your WordPress database.” (Just. In. Case.)

wp-cache 2.0.17
“Very fast cache module.” (Wow, wow, wow. Boy does it ever work as promised!)

wpPHPMailer 1.6.1
“Enable WordPress to send e-mail via SMTP instead of via PHP’s mail() function (aka sendmail).” (Without this, I couldn’t get email out of my server and into your inbox. Works like a charm.)

[tags]best-plugins, blogging, blogging-tools, BlogRodent, favorite-plugins, plugin, tech, WordPress, WordPress-2, WordPress-plugins[/tags]

Hard questions for Christian bloggers

Blogging, Rage and Rants, Religion

Updated 01/09/2006: See my reference to Dan Edelen’s recent post, below.

Last Tuesday, I was asleep at the wheel when Eric Reed over at Out of Ur invited Dr. Craig L. Blomberg to post a thoughtful article on blogging and the Evangelical blogosphere. I finally saw the post today, and thought it worth sharing.

It’s easy to read Blomberg’s post as entirely critical. It’s not. But he does ask some hard questions worthy of consideration. His post, indeed, may be a sort of litmus test for motives: if you see it as overly critical, perhaps you’re the inspiration for his questions? I quote, below, a few excerpts, but the whole post is worth reading. My response, posted to the site, follows.

If Marshall McLuhan was even partly right that “the medium is the message,” then what message does the medium of blogging send? …

And what of the choice to solicit responses to a blog posting on a particularly controversial subject? With unprecedented ease of access comes the temptation to “shoot from the hip” and respond with little thought or care for how one comes across. Are “Christian” blogs noticeably better in this respect? Or does the lack of a filter for all but the worst of responses almost inherently set up the readership for having to deal with extremists (in either tone or content) on both sides of a divisive issue? Of course, one can learn a lot from seeing how the far ends of a spectrum react. But is the church of Jesus Christ edified and built up? Are non-Christians who choose to peruse the conversation likely to be attracted to the faith? Will mediators and peacemakers win out over the rabble rousers? I’m not yet convinced that the answers to any of these questions are affirmative. …

Besides, what messages are we sending when we allow bloggers or those who respond to them to post almost any linguistic utterance at will for all the world to read? To the undiscriminating, surely the answer is that even the most meaningless, intimate, hateful, crude or careless thought deserves an outlet enabling others to talk back. From a non-theological perspective, this is the ultimate demeaning of human language. From a Christian perspective, it may be an offense to the Word who alone gives human communication grace. But then, you might not be reading these words if it weren’t for a blog site. So am I overreacting?

—From: Leadership Blog: Out of Ur: The Blessing of Blogs: Is the New Media Good for the Church?

And my posted reply:

Perhaps I don’t take a contentious enough stab at things in my blog posts, perhaps I don’t have a wide enough readership to attract contentious commenters, perhaps my audience is unusually peace-loving, or perhaps each blogger has a totally unique experience in this regard. But the comments on my blog post are almost all positive contributions to dialog.

And it’s the dialog I enjoy the most. I invite and respond to criticism because I recognize that my handle on Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Christianity, and morality is not the only valid point of view. I may, in fact, be wrong. I welcome the dialog.

I view my blog as a place where I am learning what I think, and I get the blessing and benefit of others helping me along the way. In my intellectual journey, I have explored topics and ideas I would not have plumbed without a willing reading audience. My blog is, in this sense, a spiritual discipline.

I also view my weblog as an instrument of change. My writing is already changing me. Further, I hope that my views will change those who read. Maybe they’ll agree, maybe they’ll disagree. But maybe, just maybe, they’ll view things slightly differently now than before.

I see Paul the Apostle as a sort of epistolary proto-blogger. When circumstances warranted a post, he addressed issues head-on in public forum writing with letters that would be read aloud to his audience. We don’t have the replies (comments) to enjoy–we can only infer them–but there is no doubt that his audience responded to his posts with disagreement and calls for clarification.

I’m no St. Paul, none of us are. But there is much to commend open dialog and response.

Finally, Out of Ur is not typical of most new blogs. You have the visibility and built-in audience out of the gate that most bloggers do not enjoy. More, your audience is already more variegated than the typical slice of the blogosphere represented at most religious blogs. Birds of a feather blog together, but Leadership and Out of Ur reach a wider spectrum of opinions and ecclesiology than my BlogRodent blog or almost any other Evangelical blog I know of.

And the results are fascinating.

Keep up the good work, Eric.

Rich Tatum

(For some reason, I thought Eric Reed, Leadership journal editor, had written the post. :: sigh :: I didn’t realize my error until moments after I hit “submit.” My overall content would’ve been the same regardless.)

Blomberg admits, up front, that the entirety of his experience with blogs is as an observer, and his participation till now seems to have been limited to interacting in the comments section of the Out of Ur weblog. So, his critique is that of an outsider, not a committed participant. I suspect that colors his view—his exposure would tend toward a narrow, unrandom sample of the blogosphere. Of course, running a weblog exposes you to a narrow, unrandom sample as well, but it’s a different kind of slice giving a more authentic view.

In other words: Blomberg’s view is a tourist’s view. The residents will likely disagree.

Updated 01/09/2006: Dan Edelen blogging at Cerulean Sanctum, has had it. Having only tangentially entered the cessationist vs. charismatic/pentecostal debate that raged over the last half a year or so, he’s finally fed up and has declared the whole mess a stinking black hole of nothingness: “The Godblogosphere’s Black Hole.”

Perhaps I overlooked this debate and its combatants in my thoughts above. I only barely entered the fray with a spare mention in “Charismatic Heresy” that got picked up in the Theological Pillowfight compendium maintained by Rob Wilkerson at Miscellanies on the Gospel. But I have consciously avoided getting into the debate precisely for these reasons: it was too divisive. Maybe, someday, I’ll post my rationale for believing what and why I believe on cessationism versus continuationism, but it’ll be for my own purposes, for my own benefit, and for yours (if you care!). If dialog ensues, I’ll be delighted. But if it descends into straw-man and ad-hominem arguments, I’ll shut the comments down.

I believe in civility. And where participants in a forum cannot censor their immature egregiousness, I believe in imposed censorship. I believe in debate and dialog, but I don’t believe in anarchy. I believe in growing in knowledge through the give-and-take of opposing viewpoints, but I don’t believe in disharmony of spirit.

If there is any lesson that could be learned from Acts 2 by the continuationist and cessationist debate participants it’s that God works through his church in unity. Nobody could say with a straight face that the early church was in one accord philosophically or doctrinally on every point. But to ignore the critical need for spiritual, emotional, and volitional unity is to deny ourselves the empowerment we need to act as change agents in these last days. And whether or not you take the charismatic/pentecostal view on things, on that, at least, I hope we agree.

Wherever two or more are gathered together, there will be at least three opinions present. The trick is to cooperate in mission and purpose (love the Lord with all your heart, mind and soul, love your neighbor as yourself, evangelize, baptize, and make disciples) without getting stuck in the mud of disagreement over specifics.

Black holes suck.

[tags]blog-culture, blogging, blogosphere, BlogRodent, cessationism, charismatics, continuationism, Craig-Blomberg, Craig-L.-Blomberg, criticism, culture, Dan-Edelen, debate, Evangelical-blogs, Internet-culture, Out-of-Ur, weblogs[/tags]

Most popular blog posts in 2005

Blogging, Random Miscellany, Site Updates

I thought I’d take a look back on the last six months, since I began blogging here, and see which of my posts received the most attention from you, my patient readers. The results are in, and I am dutifully sharing them, despite the fact that this post will only serve to draw more attention away from my other, equally deserving but under-noticed, blogerature. (Yes, I know. It’s not a word.)

Continue reading Most popular blog posts in 2005 →

Pneumablog has been posted.

Assembly of God, Blogging, Links, Pentecostal, Random Miscellany, Religion, Site Updates

Hi.

Here’s my current list of active Pentecostal, Charismatic and Assembly of God bloggers. I hope you enjoy it. And feel free to add to it with your comments.

   PneumaBlogs: Select Pentecostal/Charismatic Bloggers

Rich.

[tags]assemblies-of-god, assembly-of-god, blogger, blogging, BlogRodent, charismatic, church-of-god, foursquare, god-blogger, god-blogging, godblog, godbloggers, godblogs, pentecostal, pneumablog, pneumabloggers, pneumablogging, pneumablogs, spirit-filled[/tags]

Unto … the uttermost parts of the blogosphere

Assembly of God, Blogging, Pentecostal, Random Miscellany, Religion

(Updated with accurate URLs for Frank N. Johnson’s websites.)

I am not sure if this is just a meme without substance, or if the idea has actual merit. But the cliche rant among tech- and media-savvy Christians is that the Church world is always slow to adopt new technology. The claim is that we missed it with film and now Hollywood “owns” the field, to the exclusion of overt Christian influence. We missed it with radio, and now we’re relegated to the low-end of the FM dial where we must solicit donations, or the AM dial where nobody listens to talk radio. We missed it with music, and at any given time the state of the art in the Christian music scene is 10 years behind the secular industry. They say we missed it on the Web, which is boldly dominated by the secular dot.coms and the porn purveyors.

I’m not sure. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. I’m thinking that the music world owes Christianity a huge debt for keeping music alive through the medieval era with strong monastic musical and chanting traditions. I’m thinking rap, blues, and R&B owe a lot to the spiritual songs birthed and nurtured by the slaves who clung to their hope in Christ through song. I’m thinking that the printing world owes a debt of gratitude to Gutenberg and others who transformed the creation of literature for the sake of more effectively printing Bibles.

But, I could be wrong.

I saw a piece, today, from ContraCostaTimes.com, titled, “Blogosphere evolving with vlogs.” It describes the latest phenomenon on the web: video blogging, or vlogging. First was the Internet, then there was the Web with attractive easily navigated pages, then came weblogs—nothing more than a website with an easy-to-update CMS component—then came podcasting, and now video blogging.

And it seems there are some churches out there using it already.

The article quotes a friend of mine, A/G minister, Frank N. Johnson calling the church to really take advantage of the medium, and do more than simply post service times online:

“Too many churches now use Web sites only to present service times, staff biographies and other facts,” said Frank Johnson, a licensed Assemblies of God minister and the founder and principal administrator of Strategic Digital Outreach, a new ministry in California that helps churches and other ministries do electronic outreach and evangelism.

“If the church could catch a vision for using video technology to present an authentic presentation of the life of the church — not rehearsed videos, but spontaneous records of conversations, laughing with one another, weeping with one another, people sharing their lives, etc. — the average person might take notice,” Johnson wrote in an e-mail interview.

“I would love to see churches start using their Web sites to present video profiles of people within their congregations so that the average person could get a sense of what the life of the church (not the organization, but the people — the true church) is really like.”

I like that. It dovetails with some ideas I was giving a pastor friend of mine out in Colorado a couple weeks ago. The easiest thing to do is put your church bulletin out there. But what if the pastor gave the church secretary his sermon outline and manuscript before the service so that people could come prepared? How about making the outlines and text part of a blog, so others could comment? How about automatically pushing the recorded sermon out as a podcast for folks who couldn’t make it that service, and so visitors could hear the kinds of messages they’ll get at that church? That’s the first level of stuff that can be easily done.

How about sending your volunteer tech team out with a flash recorder and a microphone and interviewing one person each week in the church and getting their testimony out there as a podcast? Interview them over lunch or at work. Make it real. How about videotaping it and putting it out there as a vlog and featuring it in the Sunday night service? Make it part of a blog site and invite a community to form around the personal testimonies of your people recounting how they came to faith in Christ and describing how the power of God has changed their lives? How about inviting the staff ministers to post midweek thought pieces that reveal their ministry focus, their purpose, what drives them, and updating folks on the news of the week? If you’re concerned about privacy and stalkers, put it behind a sign up screen with confirmed email addresses. How about inviting mature believers in the church to join the community as guest bloggers, posting their thoughts, advice, and commentary? How about specialized blogs for long-term Christian ed. courses including notes, outlines, commentary, asides, and question-and-answer interaction? How about a gallery featuring the best of your church member’s artwork, photography, short stories, and essays? How about special-interest blogs run by church members that form communities around hobbies and professions? A surfing blog, a health-and-wellness blog, a tax-season blog, a stay-at-home-moms blog, a youth sports blog, and on and on.

All this is possible. But, as the meme suggests, I don’t see many churches experimenting with this. Some have, to be sure, but they’re not publicized or talked about much. Is the experiment a failure?

As Brett Eastman says in his small groups materials, “God wants the Church to get larger and smaller at the same time.” With megachurches (churches over 1,000 attending) continue to multiply, I would think the Internet is a great way to create and foster community when it’s impossible to know everybody’s name when going to the “big church” services.

The Internet should never replace face-to-face fellowship and hospitality. But surely there’s a place for truly taking advantage of this communication medium to share the good news that the Kingdom of God is at hand.

For more thought on this, I urge you to read Frank Johnson’s white papers, “A Strategy for Local Internet Outreach” and “Effective Church Websites for Emerging Generations.” Oh, and check out his blogs: ProdigalGod.com, and Strategic Digital Outreach.

Final thought: Referring to the title of this post entry: To those of us who are Pentecostal or Charismatic, if we are truly filled with the Spirit, then we will be missional in our thinking and lifestyle. We will be change agents in our culture and in the arenas where cultural dialog occurs, like St. Paul on Mars Hill. If there was ever an era where we should not shy away from technology but use it to full advantage, it is in this burgeoning Internet-enabled millenia. Don’t leave it to the pornographers and peddlers of commerce. It’s half an hour’s work to set up a blog on a website, and the cost can be as low as $5 a month. Get your thoughts out there. Tell your testimony. Engage culture. Speak to issues. Believers are called to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, strength, and body. We too easily forget that loving God with our minds means using our intellect, sharpening it, honing it, and using it to communicate. Witness for God does not merely happen by “living my life so that others can see Christ in me.” It also means doing what the word implies: witness. Your words must get out there whether as waves breaking on men’s ears, ink poured out on paper, or bits and bytes slung through the ether. There’s a dearth of Spirit-filled bloggers out here. Come on in. The water’s fine. Just avoid the sharks.


[tags]blogging, BlogRodent, church-blogs, church-websites, frank-n-johnson, godblogging, religion[/tags]