Tag: blogging

Confession: I have been a bad citizen of blogworld

A long time ago, in a virtual galaxy not so far from me, people used to comment on blogs as a blogging love language. I knew that, It was blog etiquette. Somehow that world passed me by. And I miss that.


Image Credit: Apparently there’s a conference called blog world. Who knew? (This guy)

I have commented much more sparingly than I used to. Others seem to have a similar blog comment malaise. I’m going to do my bit to hold up my end of the social (media) contract. And be more appreciative of the good content other people are writing that I’m thinking about.

Here are some links, rather than comments, as my first step towards rectifying this situation.

Andrew has pretty much killed Things Findo Thinks, replacing it with A Borrowed Flame. I liked this SLR camera simulator he found.

Anna at Goannatree has been writing about writing about writing. She’s posting about her PhD, which is about literature. Which is pretty meta. I enjoyed this post, which came hot on the heels of this one about a week of dissertation themed life in Scotland.

Al writes nice little posts, and I like them. His posts about Tim Chester’s posts about Social Media made me grumpy, not at him, at Tim Chester. So angry I commented on the first one. Also, his post about preaching at weddings is something I’m going to file away for the future.

Ali posted something last week about her near brush with a raving gunman in Sydney, and this week introduced me to The Tallest Man on Earth. She also tagged me in a book spine poetry meme which I will participate in once my books consist of something other than light reading on Corinthians and the Pentateuch.

Arthur and Tamie are getting ready to finish life in Melbourne, start life as parents, and start life in Tanzania. Their posts are fun. I liked this one.

Ben has a new theme. Which looks nice – though for some reason the first second after you load it the fonts are really effeminate, only to be replaced with the felt tip styled ones.

David posted a good little review of the 2 Ways 2 Live App, and a better post about marriage and stuff.

Izaac has been pondering preaching, I commented on two of those because I think the idea that word ministry is ONLY preaching is a bit spurious and doesn’t fit with the Bible’s picture of prophetic ministry, or the way Paul conceives of his teaching of the churches he cares for to include his life and sufferings.

Mikey posted about the search for black curtains, spiritually inspired cake, and excellence – following this discussion on Hans’ blog. Hans has an excellent post on Christianity and homosexuality too.

Steve at Communicate Jesus also reflects on the excellence thing.

Peter Ko posted on a strange issue (I thought). Apparently there are young Christians who think it’s a good idea for unmarried Christian couples to holiday together. Alone. And further, that it’s a bad idea for people to be “legalistic” about the issue. This isn’t legalism. This is wisdom. And thus, I became an old person.

Simone has been writing reports and musicals.

This isn’t a comprehensive list of the posts I’ve enjoyed from the blogs that I read, but I hope that in some way it makes amends for my poor online citizenship in recent times.

UPDATE: I completely forgot this one. Which was, indeed, the motivation behind providing a list to blogs I enjoy. Dave McDonald has started a blog tracking his fight with cancer, and the thoughts that go with it. This sensational letter to Sam Harris is a fine example of what he’s producing and why you should read it. Plus – it’s a great way to keep him, his family, and those around him, in your prayers.

June 9, 2012

Decreasing wisdom

Tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 (funnier if you pronounce it out loud and string the words together) I am visiting the dentist (who happens to be my younger sister), to have my wisdom teeth removed. Two of them. Up top.

I wasn’t worried about this at all until my boss had his wisdom teeth out last week in what can only be described as a dental horror story.  Now I’m feeling a little attached to these teeth and wondering whose bright idea it was to get the procedure in my one week of Easter break.

Anyway. Depending on how it goes, recovery time could be prime “improving my lagging post rate” time here and on my other blogs. This was going to be a post about why I’ve been posting so infrequently, but I’ve decided to summarise that in a picture, or two.

April 2, 2012

Happy sixth blogday to me!

I get this date wrong every year. I’m going to schedule the next few posts anniversary ahead of time. Anyway.

I’ve been blogging for six years. Here’s my first post, as it reads on St. Eutychus, here it is on my original Blogger blog.

Its been a fun six years. Blogging is one of my favourite pastimes. I’ve posted 5,404 posts with 8,916 comments. I still love your comments, and love that people want to read my thoughts, rants, liveblogs and follow my wanderings around the interwebs.

This also means it’s six years since I moved to Townsville, where many life changing things happened, especially my meeting of my wife, and number one blog reader, Robyn. Who used my blog to suss me out, and introduce me to her family – so its been pretty worthwhile on that front. Also, her ongoing patience with my countless hours playing around on the internet and fiddling with my blog are a huge part of the reason I’m still online.

Thanks for reading.

March 18, 2012

Bests of 2011

This isn’t necessarily indicative of release, it also includes stuff I discovered this year.

Best Music

Best Concert
Boy and Bear, supported by Jinja Safari was pretty amazing. But I can’t go past Gotye playing live at the Powerhouse in Brisbane. Sonic gold. The Whitlams playing with the Queensland Symphony was also pretty special.

Best Album
There were a few cracking releases this year. Gomez. Gotye. Radiohead. Jinja Safari. The Fleet Foxes. Boy and Bear. I’m going to give it to the Fleet Foxes by a whisker – but only because Gotye got best concert.

Best Film and TV

Best TV Series

Community. Hands down. Is probably my second or third favourite comedy series of all time. Up there with Black Books and Arrested Development.

Best Movie

In a year where the Transformers franchise stormed back to form with more alien robot carnage than you can poke a stick at, and when I caught the highly entertaining Scott Pilgrim vs the World, the best movie I saw, hands down, was Four Lions.

Best Books

Biography – Steve Jobs
Funny – The Brick Bible
Fiction – the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire series.

2011 on St. Eutychus

My highlights:

Your Highlights
The ACL posts linked above did well, they were some of the most popular posts this year. Also ranking well:

  • Why I bought Logos not Accordance (and part 1)
  • A Guide to Missionary Dating
  • Guy Mason’s Sunrise Interview
  • Driscoll on Video Games

    • Google’s Highlights
    My Armchair Guide to Planking
    Dance Like Thom Yorke T-Shirt
    The Origins of a Fake Martin Luther King Quote
    Instagram Web Profiles

    Favourite Tags
    Tumblrweed
    Taxidermy

    Stats
    63,051 visitors made 87,160 visits and 119,111 page views.

    January 2, 2012

    Predictive Subtext: A writing assistant I’d actually like

    Gary found this comic which pretty much would have circumvented 90% of discussion on last week’s worship post…

    From Dork Tower…

    October 27, 2011

    On blogging and “tone”

    So. For those of you not following along with the discussion on yesterday’s post about worship… here’s an update.

    I wrote that post with a healthy dose of irony. I thought. And I was aiming for humour, rather than offence, when adopting the persona of an “angry young man” essentially writing to a bunch of other “angry young people” and calling them old. I was trying to call out those people who were once advocators of change for being a bit stuck in the rut of that advocacy when things have changed. I also thought it was funny that the issue at hand dealt with music – which I thought was universally understood to be a marker of generational change…

    And, in order to be noticed, I adopted hyperbole. I ironically wrote a reactive polemic against reactive polemics, calling for nuance. I thought that would be relatively clear.

    But it turns out, once again, that the Internet isn’t very good for that sort of stuff. Even though I think that blogging is a medium different to other mediums (ie content is spur of the moment, geared towards the sensational, provocative, not completely thought out and referenced, opinionated, a contribution to discourse, etc), and think the reader has as much responsibility to consider the genre when responding as the writer does to consider the reader when writing… I think this post failed. People responded to the style, rather than the substance. And so, I edited it. You should read the post and join the discussion.

    I am sorry that my post was not clear, and I’m sorry that it was possibly an offensive caricature of particular positions (again, ironically, because I would argue that almost all reactionary/polemic based stuff, especially on the internet, relies on caricatures and straw men).

    Also, I am sorry if you’re 35 and I called you old, or if my post offended you in myriad other ways. But I guess my one response is – don’t let the offence get in the way of engaging with the issue, or be an excuse for dismissing the substance of the post or its criticism of your position.

    October 21, 2011

    Roboblogging…

    Jason Kottke runs one of the finest examples of the curated link blog out there. He manages to find and post some of the most interesting stuff online before just about any body else. Now, somebody built a robot version of Kottke… it’s an interesting experiment.

    I don’t think of St. Eutychus as a link blog. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s a content blog. Sometimes it’s a soapbox. But my inclination towards link blogging waxes and wanes. It’s a great way to keep content flowing without investing significant time into posting, but you also get to a point where your curatorial or editorial senses are dulled. There are things on the Internet that don’t excite me as much as they used to. Everybody’s sharing stuff. Some people are sharing everything (I’m looking at you 22 Words)… Kottke describes this malaise beautifully in a piece about the robot version of himself…

    “Some days, you just don’t want to do it,” Kottke says. “You look at so much stuff everyday and it all becomes kind of the same—all equally interesting or uninteresting. It’s hard to maintain that sense of discovery, that little hit that you get when you find something that you haven’t seen before. I’ve posted 15,000, maybe 20,000 links since I started. I’ve been whittling down the discovery space of things that are going to be new and interesting.”

    Here’s Robottke – the machine version of the link blogger…

    October 4, 2011

    A lull in blogworld…

    All the people based blogs I read (except Al’s, Findo’s, Gav’s, and Gary’s, and to a lesser extent Arthur and Tamie, and Sophie, at the Fountainside, who tend to post on a more disciplined substantive regime anyway) appear to be going through the motions of blogging, or not at all,* at the moment. Come on people. Harden up. Drop us a bone. Especially those of us who use the internet to procrastinate.

    The current state of affairs makes me sad.

    Come on Ben. Simone. Izaac. Scott. Post something. Anything. GIVE ME CONTENT…

    I’ll start taking note of all those articles that say blogging is dying otherwise.

    * I realise and acknowledge the irony that I am a contributor to this general state of affairs…

    September 29, 2011

    Back, to the future…

    Ahh. Melbourne. Coffee. Home. Essays. Sermons. That’s the story of my life this week. We left Melbourne yesterday, and that was the last real holiday I think we’ll have before our family gets a new addition.

    So, in the next few days blogging will be a little sporadic. I’ve got three sermons to write before this weekend. One on Psalm 122 for my trials for license (complete with a 3,500 word exegesis paper), one on social networking and what it teaches us about the human desire for relationship (for another church’s youth group on Saturday), and one on Paul’s method of connecting the gospel to culture (based on Acts 17) for church on Sunday.

    Plus, I’ve got a tutorial presentation paper and essay on the Psalms to prepare for the first week back from holidays (next week). So that’s an ouch.

    Anyway. Here’s some photos from Melbourne to tide you over.

    This dessert was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

    And this was the best pork belly ever… both were from Axil Coffee.

    Reviews of our caffeinated long weekend in Melbourne are up on thebeanstalker.com (I’ve got a couple more to go)

    September 28, 2011

    Stay Calm…

    I’m on holidays for the next couple of days. And on college mission after that. I can’t promise I’ll blog in the next two weeks at all. But I’ll try. It’ll just be sporadic. In the meantime… don’t be alarmed by the absence of new content. I’ll be back.

    August 30, 2011

    The Internet is boring this week…

    Anybody got anything worth reading. Or watching. Or listening to. Please point me towards some content.

    August 4, 2011

    Blogging and marriage…

    There’s some sort of deep and meaningful truth here.

    Via Tumblog: Lost in Cheeseland.

    July 24, 2011

    The real McCoy…

    My friend, and soccer buddy, Brad McCoy is back on the blogging horse. He’s posted literally a dozen times in the last few days. Maybe work is boring him or something – but it’s good to have life in the bones of that blog. He writes about fun political things and ethical things and other things. His post on a Christian response to gay marriage is right up my alley – I’m glad to find other people out there who have a similar position on the issue to me. It’s reassuring. I like to comment there, though I worry that I’m turning into one of those pedantic argument pickers that nobody likes…

    So you should go and throw your two cents in the ring too. Or in his cap. Blogging is a little like busking. Sometimes.

    This is not a photo of Brad, it is a photo of a busker in Christchurch.

    Sometimes blogging is just about keeping one’s balls in the air… profound.

    April 12, 2011

    What is a blog: trying to bridge the generation gap

    It is becoming more and more apparent to me, as I talk to people from the pre-blog generation, that there’s a bit of a genre problem when it comes to blogs, and what they are. For me this means I need to tread a little more carefully, lest I say something, under my own brand/name/banner that’ll come back to bite me. This post is going to become part of my disclaimer. Have you read it? You should. Because at some point if you’re going to engage with a text (and blogs are texts) you should be doing it on its terms as well as your own. Context is king.

    But there is a lesson here for non-bloggers too – the onus isn’t entirely on the blogger to take people who don’t understand blogs into account. We have to consider such an audience, but we’re not writing to that audience as a primary audience.

    Blogs are, by nature, opinionated, personal, and sometimes controversial. They are, by nature, quickly produced, biased, and not peer-reviewed. The more people fail to take this into account the harder life will be for bloggers.

    But, on the blogger side of the fence, posts are permanent, googlable, searchable on RSS feeds and site searches, and available to the public.

    If we want people to stay accountable about what they write (ie write under their own names), and we want to read what they write, then we need to not hold words that in the past would have been quickly forgotten against people. Or, at least, we need to make some attempt at understanding the genre before we impose our own anachronistic cultural readings on a situation.

    Nothing I’ve said has come back to haunt me yet (except maybe one time where I mouthed off a bit about why a particular ministry wasn’t for me). I’ve been pretty careful with what I’ve said, and I’d stand behind it. But that doesn’t mean words can’t be twisted, misunderstood and abused – and at some point, the onus is on the reader not to do that.

    That is all.

    March 21, 2011

    Happy Blog Day To Me… My blog is five.

    My blog turned five yesterday. I thought it was today. But I checked. Here’s my first post. Sure, it has been called a few different things, and things have changed since the old blogger days. But there’s continuity. 4,600 posts of continuity.

    I don’t think, when I started out, that I knew what I was getting myself into. Or how much I’d come to enjoy being a blogger.

    March 16, 2011