Category Archives: Links

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]

Virgina Tech Massacre and … Repentance

Bible and Theology, Links, Religion

Cho Seung Hui

I’ve blogged on tragedy before:

But since the massacre at Virginia Tech, I’ve been at a loss for words. I’ve wanted to try to research this to put it into perspective for myself and perhaps my readers — as if anyone could. But it’s still too grisly and horrifying. I only know I’m already sickened of the politicizing going on around the tragedy.

So, I am relieved that a fellow Christian blogger has put what I think is the true proper perspective on this or any other tragedy. Kevin Stilley, of Encyclopedia Kevannica, writes:

Today and for the rest of the week every radio talk show and television news program will be discussing yesterday’s events at Virginia Tech. They will host philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and sociologists who will discuss the problem of evil ad nauseam. They will try their best to help the populace make sense of the senseless.

And, when they get tired of those topics they will move on to the political issues; — gun control, campus security, the cultural ramifications of violence in movies and music, etc.

On Sunday morning pastors will stand in their pulpits and explore such themes as the depravity of man, the comfort of God, trusting God when we do not understand, and more.

What a shame.

All of those issues are important and need to be repeatedly revisited and explored in depth, but ….

Jesus said that when we become witnesses to the unexpected tragedies of others to whom we are not personally ministering our response is not to be voyeuristic gawkers, philosophical soothsayers, or even theologians. It is a time for personal reflection and repentance.

It’s a great article, and a sobering one, putting our response into the proper perspective.

Encyclopedia Kevannica
“Our mishandling of the Virginia Tech tragedy“

I would simply like to add that when we are ministering to folks experiencing their own chaos, we should practice the proper response as modeled by Jesus … what Foursquare pastor Jerry Cook calls the Jesus Question:

Yet, here is Jesus Christ stepping out of eternity to reveal the only God there is, and He says, “I haven’t come to be served.” Now to me that doesn’t make sense. Again, my question is, If You haven’t come to be served, why are You here? Why did You come? Again His answer is, “I haven’t come to be served , but to serve.”

Immediately I begin to recall all the questions Jesus asked throughout the Gospels. Almost always they came down to this: “What can I do for you?” What were His first words to blind Bartimaeus? “What would you like Me to do for you?” What about the lepers? “What can I do for you?” What about the man at the pool? “What can I do for you?”

Indeed. How can we help?

How can I help?

[tags]BlogRodent, Cho-Seung-Hui, eric-brian-golden, massacre, murder, psychopath, rampage, sash-assembly-of-god, shooting, tragedy, virgina, virgina-tech, psychopath [/tags]

Christian Blogosphere Blogroll

Links, Random Miscellany, Religion

Christian Blogosphere
Michele, blogging at Reformed Chicks Blabbing and Life Under the Sun has taken over where the former “Christian Bloggers blogroll” (defunct since October, 2006) has left off. Her mission: Get every orthodox Christian blogger linked up. It’s an ambitious task. I’m here to help.

While not as selective nor exclusive as my own PneumaBlogs list, Michele does have requirements. If you want to join the Christian Blogosphere BlogRoll, visit her site.

Click here to view the blogroll right here right now. Then bookmark!

PneumaBlogs, PneumaSphere, PneumaSearch

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

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:

PneumaBlogs

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.

PneumaSphere

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.

PneumaSearch

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: Add to Google

Enjoy!

Rich

[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]

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 →

Making Firefox faster: editing your about:config

Links, Random Miscellany

Get FireFoxAs I mentioned previously, my workhorse laptop was stolen late December, 2006. Since then I’ve been using a much older laptop circa 1988. Okay, it’s not that old, but it’s a Pentium 4 with only 500 MB of RAM … and it turns out, my Firefox browser occasionally likes to suck up about 3-400 MB of that RAM in one sitting.

Of course, that might have something to do with all 47 of my favorite extensions (“My Firefox on crack: the best extensions I could find“).

Every time I install Firefox on a new machine, I wind up tweaking its registry settings to improve its page-load time and network connections to give me a better browsing experience. This time I needed to do the same thing, but also minimize some of the RAM I’m using. While doing the research for my tweaks, I thought I’d share my results with you in case you’re interested and brave enough to muddle around in the Firefox about:config settings. Also, I wanted to save my notes on my blog so I won’t have to trawl the Net again the next time ’round.

Continue reading Making Firefox faster: editing your about:config →

Killer squirrels attack. Oh, the irony.

Fiction, Links, Random Miscellany

Back SquirrelIn a completely non-churchy, frivolous post, I had to share this with you. My head is reeling with the story, and I’m amused that a piece of “creative” fiction I wrote doesn’t seem as far-fetched as I once thought.

First, the news item, via the BBC.

Last Thursday, a pack of hungry, killer squirrels (yes, that’s right — squirrels) descended from from on high to terminate with extreme prejudice a stray dog. The stray was, admittedly, annoying the hungry squirrels: loitering around their tree, barking at them with short-lived temerity. When the black squirrels finally had enough, they swarmed down the tree like ninja rodents, attacked the dog and literally eviscerated him.

When some human-folk came to investigate, they scampered off … some of them still clamping dog-meat in their jowls. Read about it here:

Continue reading Killer squirrels attack. Oh, the irony. →

A/G Podcasts? Maybe. But meanwhile…

Assembly of God, Links, Podcast/Media, Religion

MicrophoneFound yesterday on the AG-NEWS announcement list:

AG News wants to know if podcasts of sermons/messages by the local church is widespread.

Take the short AG News poll and let us know! Click here to begin…

I took the poll.

I listen to a lot of sermons and other spoken word content on my PocketPC. I load it up each week with chocolaty goodness and fill my mind while commuting the two hours I spend driving each day.

Here’s to hoping the A/G decides to promote podcasting by the local church. Though, not every church needs to (or should) podcast, it would be good to get some of our better preachers more exposure.

Meanwhile, check out my good friend John Abela‘s online audio initiative for A/G preachers at:

Continue reading A/G Podcasts? Maybe. But meanwhile… →

The One Book Meme. My Response.

Bookshelf, Fiction, Links, Nonfiction, Random Miscellany

I keep seeing these posts where memes get passed around, where one person “tags” another as an inducement to answer a list of questions. One is presumably supposed to answer the questions, post the response, and tag a handful of others.

I had been secretly glad that I’d never been tagged. And I also wondered, just how are you supposed to find out you’re on the hook?

Well. Never mind. There I was ego-surfing my blog, checking out the incoming referrers, wondering who’s linked to me lately, and there I find that Travis Johnson, fellow PneumaBlogger, has done gone and tagged me with the One Book meme.

An enterprising Ben Fernström, with way too much time on his hands, tracked down the beginnings of the One Book meme, wrote an entertaining narrative, and positioned himself as belonging to the 14th generation of this meme’s recipients.

Thus, ultimately, we have Benjamin Myers to blame for this post. I’m the 18th generation of this particular meme, but by a different route (see the note at the end).

:: sigh ::

Well, at least I’m one of the cool kids now!

So, here goes:

Continue reading The One Book Meme. My Response. →

Del.icio.us links for August 26, 2006

Links

Rich's Delicious LinksThese are a few of the things I’ve recently found interesting, but don’t have the time to properly blog on. I don’t necessarily like or agree with the links here, I just think they’re interesting. And just in case you do, too, enjoy.

(You can view past Del.icio.us links here or subscribe to my Del.icio.us feed here. Subscribe to Rich's Delicious Links)

[tags]BlogRodent, apologetics, assemblies-of-god, assembly-of-god, atheism, atheist, belief, biography, book-review, books, carlton-d-pearson, carlton-pearson, charismatic, christianity, court, critique, dateline-nbc, debate, Emergent-Church, EmergentChurch, Evangelical, faith, god, heaven, hell, heresy, illegal, lifehacks, mythis, narrative, outrageous, pentecostal, pentecostalism, persecution, postmodern, productivity, rationale, ravi-zacharias, reading, reason, religion, speed, speed-reading, stereotypes, tools, universalism, web-services, weird-news, worship, ZapReader[/tags]

Video Games: Violence In, Violence Out?

Links, Rage and Rants, Religion

This is a repost of a recent article for CTLibrary.com. Enjoy, and please post your reactions. (For a related post, see, “Violence and Entertainment.”)

Is mounting teen violence evidence of the effects of violent video games?
CHRISTIANITY TODAY LIBRARY | RICHARD TATUM | JULY 31, 2006

On Tuesday, March 24, 1998, two cousins, aged 13 and 11, soldiered up. Donning camouflage and armed with handguns and rifles, they hid in the trees near Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, while an accomplice set off the school’s fire alarm. The ambush came off with military perfection: firing only 27 shots, the juvenile commandos killed 4 middle-school girls, 1 teacher, and wounded 11 others fleeing the building.

While most planned acts of violence in school are probably foiled, many attempts have been successful in recent years, including several well-publicized events. Beyond the immediate tragedy and bloody aftermath, one troubling aspect of these events is the lack of a profile for children prone to violence. Apparently, children “snap” into violence, and there’s simply no predicting the fracture.

But something is clearly causing a “tipping point,” driving children to violence in increasing numbers. The catalyst, many say, is violent media — specifically, gory video games that desensitize players to violence, train them in deadly shooting skills, and reward killing without consequences.

Continue reading Video Games: Violence In, Violence Out? →

My FireFox on crack: the best extensions I could find.

Links, Random Miscellany

Updated: On 9/12/06, I updated this list with my current active plugins.

Because Amy over at GentleWhisper asked nicely, I hereby share with you my fabulous list of FireFox extensions I could not live without. This is my list of plugins at home … my work plugins differ a bit.

A couple recommended exceptions that I don’t list here and which I haven’t gotten around to installing yet are Aardvaark (to modify page layout before printing or copying and pasting) and GreaseMonkey — which allows for select javascript to be run on any page, which makes the options infinitely varied. Oh, and RSSPanel (providing a nice floating menu with links to the sites feed entries and links to the feeds themselves) … which can actually be done away with once you get the proper GreaseMonkey script installed.

  • A9 SiteInfo 1.0 (This puts a little icon in your location bar for the sites that support the extra info [like mine!] that gives you quick access to various areas within the site and quick links to futher information.)
  • Aardvark 1.1 (Ardvaark lets you remove unwanted elements from a page before you copy and paste or print.)
  • About site 0.4 (Provides more information on a site via your context menu.)
  • Advanced Search Sidebar 0.1.8.2 (Nice utilty to improve searchability via your sidebar. Honestly, I don’t use this one much, but it’s there, just in case.)
  • All-In-One Sidebar 0.6.4 (Provides a neat sidebar function for many tools that otherwise wouldn’t show up in the sidebar, plus a whole lot more.)
  • BetterSearch 1.12 (This improves the output of various search engine websites, providing alternate links to other search engines, and more.)
  • Blogger Web Comments 1.3 (This updates the status bar if other blogger.com posters have linked to a particular page. Clicking on it brings up their comments.)
  • Bookmarks Synchronizer 3 1.0.2 (This allows me to synchronize my bookmarks with my FTP site on tatumweb.com–or any ftp site–then I can download them on any other browser using the same plugin. In some ways, this has been superceded by Google’s browser sync, but I still use it, especially since it allows me to keep my bookmarks on my website here: http://tatumweb.com/xbel.xml.)
  • Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics 1.0.1 (A quick test of my actual ISP speed.)
  • BugMeNot 1.3 (Allows me to quickly bypass many newspaper login site forms.)
  • Cacheout! 1.10 (Allows me to query web archives of heavily used or 404’d pages.)
  • coComment 0.2.3.0 (Allows me to track my comments online and quickly see what’s been responded to whether it’s on my site or elsewhere.)
  • Codetch 0.3.7.20060518 (Nifty, quick HTML editor.)
  • CoLT 2.1.1 (Like Copy URL+, this provides a context menu item that allows you to create automatically formatted hyperlinks so you don’t have to do all the rearranging when pasting a link into your blog or a comment form.)
  • Compact Library Extension Organizer (CLEO) 1.0 (works with FEBE to package any number of extensions/themes into a single, installable .xpi file.)
  • Copy URL + 1.3.2 (A quick way to copy the title, selected text, and URL of a page … very useful when I’m emailing somebody a recommended page, or commenting in a blog.)
  • CustomizeGoogle 0.49 (Like BetterSearch, it modifies Google’s search page to my liking.)
  • Data Analytics 0.1.7 (Import, analyze, an extract tabular data from web pages. Haven’t really found a lot of use for this yet.)
  • del.icio.us 1.1 (Allows me to quickly tag pages for Del.icio.us.)
  • DOM Inspector 1.8.0.6 (Techie web page mechanics.)
  • Download Accelerator Plus Integration 8.0.6.5 (Ability to quickly download single files more quickly or multiple files at one swoop. Similar to Down Them All.)
  • Download Manager Tweak 0.7.1 (Modifies my download manager page, not really useful now that I’m using a download manager.)
  • Download Statusbar 0.9.4.1 (Similar to above, but it brings the download status up to the statusbar.)
  • DownThemAll! 0.9.9.6.3 (A built in download manager for Firefox.)
  • Enhanced History Manager 0.5.8.05 (Makes a much nicer history manager, especially when I’m trying to find that site I surved on a couple weeks ago and can barely remember it’s name.)
  • Feedview 0.9.8 (Makes RSS feeds pretty and much easier to read.)
  • Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE) 3.0 (Allows you to quickly and easily backup your Firefox extensions and rebuild extensions individually into installable .xpi files.)
  • FireFTP 0.94.3 (Free FTP client, very reminiscent of WS-FTP. There are better FTP clients out there, like Beyond Compare, etc. but this is free and useful.)
  • Google Browser Sync 1.2.20060802.0 (Sync your bookmarks, search history, and cookies with another browser via Google. I turn off the cookies sync.)
  • Google Notebook 1.0.0.5 (Neat way to bookmark sites without making them bookmarks. This is where I store stuff I want to research and delete the links to later on. It’s a notepad, too, so I can store research snippets and full-text paragraphs. It’s sort of a reminder space for me. Nice thing is, it’s stored on Google so it’s available at work and at home simultaneously.)
  • Google Toolbar for Firefox 2.1.20060807W (Just what it says it is!.)
  • Greasemonkey 0.6.5.20060727 (This is an interesting tool and invaluable once you get used to it. It’s like a super-extension that runs javascript on every page you visit–or only on select pages if you desire. With GM you can add widgets to your favorite pages, remove unwanted elements from the display, add new functions like improving search results with keywords and links to other search engines, automatically hyperlink scripture text, and more, more, more.
  • History Menu 0.44 (Divides my history menu up into days and weeks into the past.)
  • Html Validator 0.7.9.3 (Automatically validate the HTML of every page you visit. When you want, you can examine the errors and warnings. Useful if you’re fiddling with your blog all the time, like I can never seem to stop doing.)
  • Hyperwords(tm) 1.3.1 (A nifty context menu word lookup / reference utility.)
  • IE View 1.3.0 (Just in case I need to see a page in IE, I can pop over to it via the context menu.)
  • Image Toolbar 0.6.3 (Puts an annoying but useful toolbar over images to save, expand, copy, email, etc.)
  • InfoLister 0.9e (A plugin that generates this basic list. Handy for when you want to try to sync plugins across browsers. But there’s a new plugin that actually will export your plugins so you can install them elsewhere that I haven’t tried yet.)
  • LinkChecker 0.4.5 (Test the hypertext links in the page you’re viewing.)
  • Linky 2.7.1 (Validates links in a seperate tabbed window.)
  • Live HTTP Headers 0.12 (Techie view of the server and browser communication bethind the scenes.)
  • lori [Life-of-request info] 0.1.0.20051225 (This puts info in your status bar telling you exactly how long you waited for the first byte, last byte , page size, and number of requests for every page you visit. Yeah, it’s more information than a mortal needs to know, but it was useful when figuring out why my web pages were loading so slowly. It won’t tell me, however, why I write so much.)
  • Mozilla Archive Format 0.6.3 (Allows you to save HTML pages as HTML, MAF, or MHT.)
  • MR Tech Disable XPI Install Delay 2.2 (Quickly install plugins because, you never know, that five seconds could be spent writing a blog post.)
  • NeedleSearch 3.1.2 (For any website that provides a search query, you can add it to your search toolbar. Need to search Bible Gateway, add it to the needlesearch by performing a search at BibleGateway in three steps. Google search, image searches, newsgroup searches, and more.)
  • Options Menu 1.1 (This provides a menu to get at all your extensions options without having to click through on each extension to find options to modify.)
  • PDF Download 0.7.4 (Choose whether to download a PDF link, view it in browser, or send it to the application.)
  • People Search and Public Record Toolbar 1.0 (Toolbar with extensive links to various free and paid online databases allowing you to stalk nearly anybody online.)
  • Platypus 0.64 (Works with Greasemonkey. You can remove elements from any page and modify it to your heart’s desire, then turn the result into a Greasemonkey script that will run automatically every time you return to the site.)
  • Resurrect Pages 1.0.1 (Provides an one-click way to grab the archive of a slow-responding web page, can pull it from Coral, Google Cache, Internet Archive, and others.)
  • RSS Editor 0.0.9.1 (Quick tool to edit standalone RSS text files.)
  • Send Page By Email 0.1.0 (Quickly and easily send the web page you’re viewing without having to load GMail or your email client.)
  • Slim Extension List 0.3.1 (This makes the extension list much easier to read and browse.)
  • StumbleUpon 2.83 (Yet another social networking toolbar like Del.icio.us. However, this isn’t as much about bookmarking as it is about random discovery of content enjoyed by like-minded web surfers. It has two great benefits, after it learns what you like, it helps you discover great related content that you are very likely to enjoy. The other benefit is for bloggers who want their content found by strangers. Get your pages added into the stumble database and Stumbleupon will literally drive traffic to your blog.)
  • Tab Mix Plus 0.3.0.5 (This puts a close control button on every tab, which is handy, and provides some other controls, even handier.)
  • Text size toolbar 0.5 (Don’t really need this now that I’m accustomed to using CTRL-+ and CTRL–, but it’s nice to have in the toolbar for when I’m feeling keyboard lazy.)
  • VideoDownloader 1.1 (Can open up a popup window with links to the source media for the videos embedded in a Web page, like YouTube, etc.)
  • View Source Chart 2.4 (Nice way to view the source of a page with all it’s nesting and confabulation.)
  • ViewSourceWith 0.0.8 (Send the source to my favorite text editor, or anything else.)
  • Web Developer 1.0.2 (An indispensible techie toolbar that I wouldn’t live without. It’s varied options are astounding in their usefulness and variety. This is my first install every time.)
  • WordPress.com Sidebar 1.5 (Nifty sidebar to get at administrative functions on WordPress. Only works on your WordPress.com blog, though.)

Enjoy!

[tags]BlogRodent, FireFox, FireFox extensions, FireFox plugins, Aardvaark, GreaseMonkey, javascript, RSSPanel, A9 SiteInfo, Aardvark, About site, Advanced Search Sidebar, All-In-One Sidebar, BetterSearch, Blogger Web Comments, Bookmarks Synchronizer 3, Broadband Speed Test, Diagnostics, BugMeNot, Cacheout!, coComment, Codetch, HTML editor, CoLT, Compact Library Extension Organizer, CLEO, xpi, Copy URL, CustomizeGoogle, BetterSearch, Data Analytics, del.icio.us, DOM Inspector, Download Accelerator Plus, Down Them All, Download Manager Tweak, Download Statusbar, DownThemAll, Enhanced History Manager, Feedview, RSS feeds, Firefox Extension Backup Extension, FEBE, FireFTP, FTP client, WS-FTP, Beyond Compare, Google Browser Sync, Google Notebook, Google Toolbar, FireFox, Greasemonkey, History Menu, Html Validator, Hyperwords, IE View, Image Toolbar, InfoLister, LinkChecker, Linky, Live HTTP Headers, lori, Life-of-request info, Mozilla Archive Format, MAF, MHT, MR Tech, Disable XPI Install Delay, NeedleSearch, Google search, Options Menu, PDF Download, Platypus, Resurrect Pages, Google Cache, Internet Archive, RSS Editor, Send Page By Email, Slim Extension List, StumbleUpon, Tab Mix Plus, Text size toolbar, VideoDownloader, YouTube, View Source Chart, ViewSourceWith, Web Developer, WordPress.com, Sidebar[/tags]

Del.icio.us links for August 12, 2006

Links

Rich's Delicious LinksThese are a few of the things I’ve recently found interesting, but don’t have the time to properly blog on. I don’t necessarily like or agree with the links here, I just think they’re interesting. And just in case you do, too, enjoy.

(You can view past Del.icio.us links here or subscribe to my Del.icio.us feed here. Subscribe to Rich's Delicious Links)

[tags]BlogRodent, canada, Christianity, Fiqh, Hadith, Islam, Muhammad, Muslim, peace, religion, Sira, violence[/tags]

Blake Bergstrom, pitched tents, and the fake FCC fine

Links, Random Miscellany, Things going awry!

Remember the “pitch his tents” sermon by Blake Bergstrom? No, tell me you haven’t forgotten about the youth pastor who insisted that Lot pinched his bosom … several times–and then nearly passed out from embarassment. Well, then refresh your memory over at “When sermons go awry“, first, because the followup here is priceless.

Blake still has a job, fortunately, but his employers aren’t above never letting him live it down. Recently, the film crew of Prank 3:16 showed up with several hidden cameras and wired the church offices for sound. Continue reading Blake Bergstrom, pitched tents, and the fake FCC fine →

Del.icio.us links for August 9, 2006

Links

Rich's Delicious LinksThese are a few of the things I’ve recently found interesting, but don’t have the time to properly blog on. I don’t necessarily like or agree with the links here, I just think they’re interesting. And just in case you do, too, enjoy.

(You can view past Del.icio.us links here or subscribe to my Del.icio.us feed here. Subscribe to Rich's Delicious Links)

  • State of the Blogosphere, 08/08/2006 (Technorati)
    – Technorati tracking 50 Million+ blogs
    – Blogosphere over 100x bigger than 3 years ago.
    – Blogosphere doubling in size every 200 days
    – 2+ blogs created every second, 18.6 posts per second (2x last year’s volume)
    – ~70% of the pings Technorati receiv&hellip
  • AOL’s disturbing glimpse into users’ lives | CNET News.com
    An AOL researcher inadverntly released a database of 21 million search queries to the Web. It’s been snagged and is providing a valuable trove of sociological search behavior … and potential privacy intrusion if the ID numbers are ever associated with u…

[tags]2006, AOL, behavior, blogging, blogosphere, BlogRodent, charts, data-mining, graphs, ideation, integrity, internet, privacy, psychology, search, search-engines, security, sociology, statistics, technology, technorati, trends, web[/tags]

Del.icio.us links for August 7, 2006

Links

Rich's Delicious LinksThese are a few of the things I’ve recently found interesting, but don’t have the time to properly blog on. I don’t necessarily like or agree with the links here, I just think they’re interesting. And just in case you do, too, enjoy.

(You can view past Del.icio.us links here or subscribe to my Del.icio.us feed here. Subscribe to Rich's Delicious Links)


[tags]apologetics, atheism, belief, BlogRodent, charismatic, Christianity, church, churchgrowth, culture, DanEdelen, demographics, Evangelical, faith, gadget, hardware, judgmentalism, maps, megachurch, pentecostal, politics, religion, series, statistics, storage, tech, technology, theology, USA, USAToday[/tags]

Del.icio.us links for August 6, 2006

Links, Random Miscellany

Rich's Delicious LinksThese are a few of the things I’ve recently found interesting, but don’t have the time to properly blog on. I don’t necessarily like or agree with the links here, I just think they’re interesting. And just in case you do, too, enjoy.

(You can view past Del.icio.us links here or subscribe to my Del.icio.us feed here. Subscribe to Rich's Delicious Links)

  • How do we deal with pastors using pornography? (Andy Rowell)
    Useful article with great links. For more than just pastors. Excerpt: The Assemblies of God “has identified five stages of porn use, each with its own required restoration process. * curiosity: requires three months professional counseling. * experimental


[tags]A/G, addiction, addiction-internet, AOG, assemblies-of-god, assembly-of-god, blogrodent, computers, curiosity, integrity, internet, internet-additiction, internet-integrity, leadership, links, morality, pastors, porn, pornography, recovery, rowell, sin, xxx[/tags]

Del.icio.us links for August 5, 2006

Links, Random Miscellany

Rich's Delicious LinksThese are a few of the things I’ve recently found interesting, but don’t have the time to properly blog on. I don’t necessarily like or agree with the links here, I just think they’re interesting. And just in case you do, too, enjoy.

(You can view past Del.icio.us links here or subscribe to my Del.icio.us feed here. Subscribe to Rich's Delicious Links)

  • Salvo Magazine, faith, science, and pop culture critique
    From Christianity.ca Review by Denyse O’Leary:

    “Editor Bobby Maddex, working under the Fellowship of St. James, which also produces the ecumenical thinkrag Touchstone, has tossed out the usual dull faith-and-science stuff. He has produced a magazine o


[tags]apologetics, atheism, BlogRodent, Christianity, critique, culture, faith, magazine, postmodern, publication, reason, science[/tags]

Da Vinci Code Conversations, Redux

Links, Podcast/Media, Random Miscellany, Work

Da Vinci Code ConversationsAfter two weekend-long video-editing sessions we finally went live with the new online training course anticipating the Da Vinci Code film opening next week on the 19th. It’s called “Da Vinci Code Conversations,” and it’s intended to give viewers a brief, birds-eye-view of the major contentions in Dan Brown’s novel and — presumably — the film.

Not having screened the film, everybody is guessing as to how much of the book’s more controversial elements made it into the screenplay, but we’re pretty sure it will involve the major highlights of this course since the plot largely depends on it:

  • Emperor Constantine was a lifelong pagan who fabricated Christ’s divinity at the Council of Nicaea in order to further his political ambition.
  • Virtually everybody knew Christ was a mere mortal until Constantine cooked up this divinity myth at Nicaea.
  • Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, and had children by her, who survived him to found the Merovingian dynasty.
  • Somehow, this mere mortal understood he was creating a worldwide church, and therefore intended his wife, Mary Magdalene, to be its founder.
  • That the Priory of Sion is an ancient secret order devoted to protecting the evidence for the truth behind the myth at any cost.
  • That the Opus Dei Catholic order is a bunch of crazed zealots.

The course addresses each of these issues briefly, but with enough depth that anyone taking the course would have enough fodder to manage a conversation about the issues with after-film dinner guests. Plus there are the additional materials provided with the course, including a recommended resources list, that will help the viewer delve even deeper, if one cares to.

If you’re interested in knowing more, I’m linking to our newsletter podcast, the homepage promotional video, and the high– and low-bandwidth sample videos to give you a taste of what I’ve been slaving over, and what you might find interesting over at my day-job website:

You can download the “Da Vinci Code Conversations” podcast here, or listen online:

[audio:http://boss.streamos.com/download/christianitytoday/ctc/dvcc/ctcourses-da-vinci-code-conversations-nl.mp3]

Here’s the “Da Vinci Code Conversations” homepage promotion.

Here are the sample videos, at high bandwidth (311kbps) and low bandwidth (56kbps).

As usual, enjoy! Regular posting will resume again, shortly.

Rich

[tags]apologetics, BlogRodent, Da-Vinci, Da-Vinci-Code, Dan-Brown, DaVinci, online-training, online-video, Pentecostal, podcast, The-Da-Vinci-Code, video-training[/tags]

Da Vinci Code Conversations

Links, Random Miscellany, Work

I haven’t been blogging much of late because nearly every waking hour for the past three weeks has been focused on the imminent launch of the latest online training course I’ve been tinkering with (no—more like beating myself senseless against) at work.

I’m responsible for selecting and preparing content for one of ChristianityToday.com’s websites: CTCourses.com (short for ChristianityTodayCourses.com, natch). So far, since our launch in early January, 2006, we’ve managed to push two courses out the door, one on how to host small groups, featuring Brett Eastman, and another free course on managing email overload, featuring Kevin Miller (my supervisor at CT, freshly ordained Anglican priest, and also author of a book on managing information overload).

Da Vinci Code ConversationsTomorrow, if all goes well, we’ll be launching the third course, and we hope it’ll be a big draw and a big benefit to site visitors. We’re launching “Da Vinci Code Conversations,” dealing with the controversy over Dan Brown’s book, of course, The Da Vinci Code. It’s a 50+ minute online course, covered in seven sessions, replete with streaming video, an online note-taking tool, synchronized PowerPoint slides, downloadable extras, an online quiz, a message board, and more, more, more.

So, am I flogging my day job here in my personal blogspace? You betcha. I think the online course interface we’ve designed is the best currently in business. (Unfortunately, it’s also Internet Explorer only.) We’ve gotten rave reviews from users who’ve caught on, and we really hope the course interface benefits the body by providing online training and education in a format that’s easy to use and convenient for today’s crazy schedules. Like mine.

So, if you’re interested, and if you are looking for a good hour-long overview of the core controversies presented by Dan Brown’s mega-blockbuster, and if you want to prep yourself for after-dinner conversation when you’ve watched the film, head on over to my other site (CTCourses) and check it out. If you don’t see a link to the newest course right away, wait another day and try again. Or just sign up for the newsletter and free membership to be notified when things are live. (Membership is free, most courses are paid.)

Rich.

[tags]BlogRodent, Pentecostal, Da-Vinci-Code, Da-Vinci, Da-Vinci-Conversations, CTCourses, online-training, streaming-media, christian-training, online-learning, Christianity-Today, training, Evangelical, apologetics, Bible, Dan-Brown[/tags]