Random updates

Just a quick note to every­one that I haven’t post­ed more late­ly. It’s a busy time of the year. I’ve had my hands full keep­ing up with arti­cles and links to the “Chris­t­ian Peacemakers”:/quaker/cpt.
I’ve also been doing some free­lance sites. One is launched: “Quakersong.org”:www.quakersong.org, the new online home of Annie Pat­ter­son and Peter Blood of _Rise Up Singing_ fame. It’s just the start to what should soon be an inter­est­ing site.
Geek-wise I’ve been inter­est­ed in the Web 2.0 stuff (see “this Best Of list of sites”:http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm, link cour­tesy “C Wess Daniels”:http://gatheringinlight.blogspot.com/). I’ve talked about some of this “back in June”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/i_dont_have_anything_to_say_either.php but it’s get­ting more excit­ing. In the Fall I was asked to sub­mit a pro­pos­al for redo­ing the web­site of a Quak­er con­fer­ence cen­ter near Philadel­phia and it was all Web 2.0‑centric – maybe too much so as I did­n’t get the job! I’ll post an edit­ed ver­sion of the pro­pos­al soon for the geeks out there. Some of the new tech stuff will under­gird a fab­u­lous new “Quakerfinder.org”:www.quakerfinder.org fea­ture that will allow iso­lat­ed Friends to con­nect to form new wor­ship groups (to launch soon) and even more is behind the dreams of a new “Quakerbooks.org”:www.quakerbooks.org site.
In the mean­time, I encour­age every­one to order “On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Ministry”:http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/1 – 888305-38‑x, the new book by New Eng­land Year­ly Meet­ing’s Bri­an Dray­ton (it arrived from the print­ers yes­ter­day). It’s being billed as a mod­ern day ver­sion of “A Descrip­tion of the Qual­i­fi­ca­tions” and if it lives up the hype it should be an impor­tant book for the stir­rings of deep­en­ing faith­ful­ness we’ve been see­ing among Quak­ers late­ly. While you’re wait­ing for the book to arrive in your mail­box, check out Brook­lyn Rich’s “Test­ing Leadings”:http://brooklynquaker.blogspot.com/2005/12/testing-leadings-part‑1.html post.

6 thoughts on “Random updates

  1. “On Liv­ing with a Con­cern for Gospel Min­istry… while wait­ing for the book…”
    Please clar­i­fy. Do you mean “wait­ing for your order to arrive in the mail,” or do you mean, “wait­ing for the book to become avail­able for sale” ?

  2. I’m real­ly excit­ed about then new Quak­erfind­er! (: Once I fin­ish school (per­haps soon­er depend­ing on how my sched­ule feels this spring) I’d like to start doing Quaker-related web design…
    Also, do you have any links on how to well-organize one’s deli­cious tags? You seem to have a sophis­ti­cat­ed sys­tem set up.

  3. Hi Zach: Let me know when you’re free to do the work. I’m occas­sion­al­ly asked to do some­thing and when I have to turn it down for one rea­son or anoth­er I’m imme­di­ate­ly asked if I know any­one. I’d be hap­py to give you a plug.
    Since I men­tion Web 2.0 in the post I sup­pose it’s fine to get a lit­tle geeky in the comments:
    For most of my Del​.icio​.us book­marks I have cat­e­gories and sub­cat­e­gories split by peri­ods, i.e.:
    religion.buddhist
    reli​gion​.catholic
    religion.christian
    I do this so I can make use of Fire­fox’s Foxy­li­cious exten­sion and keep them all order­ly: Foxy­li­cious will pull them into Fire­fox’s Book­marks fold­er with cas­cad­ing menus built around the categories.
    As any­one can see by dig­ging into my book­marks, I run my three Blog Watch­es (Non­vi­o­lence, Quak­er, and Chris­t­ian Peace­mak­er) off of Del​.icio​.us. For exam­ple, the “Quak­er” tag sends some­thing to the Quak­er Blog Watch. I’ve recent­ly added sub­cat­e­gories to this. Their tags look like this:
    *.20something
    *.alien­ation
    *.bestof
    (etc)
    I give them all an aster­isk pre­fix so that they’ll show up alpha­bet­i­cal­ly at the top of my list.
    Since Del​.icio​.us pro­vides RSS feeds for each tag, I can lever­age all this into self-updating pages and auto­mat­ic dai­ly emails.
    It would be a fair­ly sim­ple job to splice togeth­er these feeds so that I could share the Blog­watch com­pil­ing with oth­ers, which I think will be the inevitable next-step.
    First though, I’m stay­ing up late tonight (real­ly late, maybe all night) crank­ing out a paid free­lance gig. Back to work now!

  4. Though not that geeky — your note to Zach was most­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to me and I find del​.icio​.us most­ly con­fus­ing to under­stand — I do look for­ward to a new and improved Quaker​books​.org. Not that is’t hor­ri­ble, but it could use some updat­ing around func­tion­al­i­ty and style.

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