Tag Archives: blog

A Look at the Highs and Lows of My Blog for 2008

31 Dec

As is customary during this time of year, we all have a tendency to look back at what 2008 had in store for us and look ahead to 2009.  A lot happened in 2008 and I thought I would do what many bloggers are doing of course and post of few of my favorite blogs posts, top posts, searches, and tweets for 2008.  What was the highlight of your year?  I think we tend to remember the mosts recent and forget about what happened in January or February of this year but that’s what is great about a blog, all you have to do is go back and look at your archives.

What Was the Highlight of 2008?

For me personally, my highlight was probably joining the staff of Cornerstone Church as their IT person in December.  This was something I had been looking at, praying about, and preparing for, for many years, long before I ever moved to Auburn.  What made it even better to me was how outstanding the existing leadership staff (Rusty, Josh, Brian, and Jack) was when I came on board, and I can’t wait to move ahead in 2009 with the goals set forth by the church and the Church body as a whole.

I have only had time to just get my feet wet through the month of December but looking ahead there are great things in store for this small, but growing, church body, and hopefully I can contribute to its continued success in leading people to know and serve Jesus.

What Was the Lowlight of 2008?

Can you have a highlight or a best without a worst? I know many who believe this to be true, that you don’t have to have the existence of evil to good but that is for another post.  Probably the low point of 2008 for me and my immediate house was when we lost my mother-in-law Georgia to cancer.  It was not something I will ever forget, and is something I remembered in one form or another every day from April to this day.  I learned a lot, prayed a lot, and miss her as well.

Best of the Blog in 2008

These are some of the best according to me stats, but I am also picking the blog posts that I liked the best, which is not something stats will tell you.  It is interesting that stats will only tell you exact numbers, not feelings, so enter a feeling into the equation and it will change everything.

My Favorite Posts of 2008

Top Posts by View

Most Active

And as a bonus, the top searches.  This one is always weird to me.  If you pay attention to your searches (much deeper than this) you will see that people find your blog in some of the strangest ways, but yet the information is still relevant.

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Is Your Favorite Faith Based Blog on This List?

2 Sep

What are your favorite faith based blogs you read?  I have a few different categories in my mind of blogs I read.  I have a total list, which includes some of my friends blogs and some of my favorite faith based blogs, and more I just flip through on a daily or weekly basis.  I have a few blogs I read (this would be across all categories) that are really bad, but for some reason I have some fascination with what they will post next because the blog is so bad (poor design, format, sentence or grammar structure and so on).  I call these train wreck blogs because I can’t help but read them for some reason.

I won’t mention any of my personal favorite train wreck blogs but there is one blog I have been reading quite a bit called TonyMorganLive.com which has a lot of fresh, well written content, plus his job listings are interestingg reading to me.  I have to give my blogroll award to Brody Harper who has one of the best blogrolls on the side of his blog and he always has something interesting going on over there (see his latest Positive Post Tuesday-Outdoor Encounter).  Below you will find my current faith based blogroll for today, Tuesday, September 2, 2008.  This list below is static, but my list changes daily.  For the most current and up to date list, see Faith Blogroll.  Is your blog on this list?  No?  Well post it in the comments so we can all take a look and add it to our feed readers.

The list above is obviously in alphabetical order, but it is a list of blogs I frequent.  There are so many that I have not come across yet, but to those above, thanks so much for putting so much effort into your blogs, I really enjoy reading them.  Keep in mind, even if you never receive a single comment, there are people who read your blog, so write your posts with that in mind.

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Learning New CSS Stylesheets, Themes, and Design Code

1 Jun

I neglected by blog posts this weekend and instead opted for a new design, look, or fell, or whatever. I was trying to consolidate some older pages, and make it a little easier to get around the information I have posted already.  I am still putting the finishing touches on some of the graphics but you get the idea now. I would love to hear what you think about the new design, what can be improved or changed. This is a busy week coming up, our new study over at the Damascus blog is starting in Romans and will be posted on Tuesday.

Learning to Use a Stylesheet and PHP

Over time I have had to learn how to use a CSS or Stylesheet and some basic PHP.  As I have leaned more and more code I have found a bit of freedom to be able to change and adjust things to be exactly the way I want them to be, and in the process be able to mess things up as well.  I would really recommend learning as much code as you possibly can, over time, it will be invalueble to you since everything runs on code.

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Add Value to a Blog by Offering an RSS Feed in Reverse

7 Nov

Scott Fillmer Starred ItemsHow many feeds to you have in your reader? All of them, right. I just hit the 300+ mark this week and counting, so I don’t quite have all of them yet, but I am working on it. Have you ever subscribed to what someone else is reading instead of what someone else is writing?

Have you ever offered a feed for your own shared or starred items? If not, you might want to consider adding one of these less used features and give some added value to your readers. I am always fascinated with what others are reading, not just with what other bloggers are writing and I subscribe to a few reader’s feeds. These are not always easy to find because not to many people post their reader feeds, and I am not sure how well this works in any reader other than Google Reader.

How Shared Items Work

Google Reader SettingsThese feeds come in the way of the shared items in a users readers. When someone reads a feed and clicks on the shared link at the bottom of the feed it sends out its own feed based on that user. It also provides an actual page where those feeds go, but who needs that if there is a feed. It works the same with starred items, but these are usually private feeds. To make it public, you just need to go to manage feeds => tags, then just change sharing from private to public. Once you do that you will be able to view the public page and add a clip (or widget) to your site.

Why Offer This To Your Readers

You may ask why anyone would want to offer this in the first place? It doesn’t monetize your blog or site, this feed doesn’t even keep the visitors on my site, it takes them somewhere else, and it isn’t something you wrote. Well, that is probably why you don’t see to many of these feeds anywhere. But, I do think it gives your reader some added value that you don’t find on many other blogs.

Your Name Follows the Feed

When you create this feed link, either in feedburner or just the long url provided by Google, you add your name to the feed. For example, the feed for my shared items is http://feeds.feedburner.com/chipseo-shared and when the visitor adds the feed to their reader, the name of the feed, Scott Fillmer’s shared items in Google Reader, follows.

Feed Name Follows SubscriptionEvery single time the user looks at the feed, it shows the name of the feed and puts a little reminder in the mind of the reader as to where the feed came from. One of the feeds I subscribe to is called “rksmythe’s starred items”. He updates his starred items a few times a day so even if he didn’t post an article himself that day, I am reminded of his blog, My Blog Utopia.

Updated More Often Than Post Schedule

As you can imagine, these feeds will be updated a little more often than a normal posting schedule, unless you only read one good article a day. This adds to the readers list of “things to read” but it also puts your blogs name in front of the reader much more often than it would if the reader were only reading your once a day (or less) articles.

Offer Something a Little Personal to Your Readers

Some of us try very hard to stay on topic and write serious articles or copywriter material for all our posts. This will give you an opportunity to let go a little bit and show something a little more personal to your readers. I think we all like a little insight into the lives of the blogs we read, and offering something like this will show your readers there is a real person behind the screen.

Find Different Blogs You Have Never Read

One of the advantages from the subscribers perspective is that no one is going to share or star the exact same items, so you often find different blogs and sites you have never seen before. I am amazed at how many high quality blogs I have come across that were found just because someone else starred or shared the article.

Scott Fillmer RSS Feed IconsI do find it very interesting to see what other people read, and I learn quite a bit by looking at a different perspective. So, if you haven’t tried offering a feed from your Google Reader give it a try. At least I will be able to add another reader feed to my list and get to see what you read, you already know what I read.

You don’t have to do something that takes over your blog or something as overwhelmingly obvious that competes with your normal feed icon. I use two very small rss icons aimed at the more savvy users. I figure those who can see it and understand what it is are the readers I wanted to offer this feed to anyway.

What do you think? Do you subscribe to a reader feed? Did you know this was even an option?

Update: The Google Blog just published an article, Attack of the 20%’ers, that goes show some detail about how to use these features, if you want some further reading on the subject.

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