As will be obvious to anyone seeing this, the QuakerRanter has been seriously redesigned and moved off the Nonviolence.org server. I plan to talk about the technical underpinnings soon on “MartinKelley.com”:martinkelley.com. In the meantime “email me”:mailto:martink@martinkelley.com if there’s any horrifying glitches.
h3. Update, 9/1/06:
My visitor logs picked up a very interesting new Google entry for my site that highlights the power of keywords and tags that are running on this new site. More over on Martinkelley.com in the immodestly titled post “I am the King of Folksonomy”:http://www.martinkelley.com/blog/2006/09/i_am_the_king_of_folksonomy.php.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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The Wonders of RSS feeds
August 11, 2006
RSS
Syndication feeds are small web files that summarize the latest posts
to a particular blog or news site. They’re a central repository of
basic information: title, author, post date, a summary of the post and
sometimes the whole post itself. You can open these files directly (here’s the raw file for this blog) but you’ll see there’s a hierarchy of coding that makes it visually uninteresting.
Syndication
feeds are the lingua franca powering all the cool new websites. It
doesn’t matter what blogging platform you use or what operating system
you’re on: if your software provides an RSS feed I can mix and match it and use it to pull in content to my site.
Examples 1: Photographs: I email all of my adorable kid pictures to the photo sharing site Flickr,
which then provides a syndication feed (“here”). I use a little fancy
patch of coding on my website to pull in the information about the
latest photos (location, caption, etc) so that I can display them on my
homepage. Whenever you go to my Theo age you’ll see the latest Flickr photos of him.
Example 2: Bookmarks. I also use the “social bookmarking” system with the odd name of del.icio.us.
When I find a page I want to bookmark, I click a Delicious button in my
browser, which opens a pop-up window. I write a description, pick a
category or two and hit save. Deliciouis then provides an RSS syndication
feed which I can use to pull together a list of my latest bookmarks and
display it on my website. Wave a few magic wands of complication (pay
no attention to the man behind the curtain!) and you have the main
trick behind Quakerquaker.org.
I’ve simplified both examples a bit but you probably get the point. Syndication feeds are the secret behind blog readers like Bloglines and email subscription services like the one’s I provide for quakerquaker.org.
New to me is the concepts around the Well-Formed Web. As described by Kevin Donahue
“The layman’s premise of the Well-Formed Web is that each site will
have drill-down feeds — a top level feed, item specific feeds, and so
on.” What this means is that you don’t just have one single RSS feed on a site (your latest ten posts) but RSS feeds on everything.
Every category get its own unique feeds (e.g., the last ten posts about
web design) and every post gets its own unique feed tracking its
comments (e.g., this feed of comments from my “Introducing MartinKelley.com” post).
It certainly seems a bit like overkill but computers are doing all the
work and the result gives us a multi-dimensionality that we can use to
pull all sorts of neat things together.
Giuseppe Beppe: Il podcast della famiglia
February 24, 2006
Sorry for the quiet on the blog front. I’ve been busy, busy. My Second Month has seen an FGC committee meeting in Greensboro, the “Food for Fire” Powell House weekend and a deadline for the Gathering Advance Program. I’m sure I’ll be more talkative soon, promise promise.
In the meantime, I’m online in another realm. Mia Consiglieri Joe G interviewed me for Beppepodcast #24: “Martin Kelley, Quaker Blog Father”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/beppepodcast-24-martin-kelley-quaker.html (“subscription here”:http://beppe.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=62209). Molto buon, il mio figlio. Bello! Bello!
QuakerQuaker.org, new home to the blog watch
January 3, 2006
I’ve moved the Quaker Blog Watch material to a new website, QuakerQuaker.org. It’s more-or-less the same material with more-or-less the same design but the project has become popular enough that it seems like a good time to send it off on its own. I hope to find ways of making it more collaborative in the near-future.
You can subscribe to the QuakerQuaker Watch via Bloglines or to the daily email by following the links. If you’re already following the Watch in a subscription reader, you should change the source of the feed to http://feeds.quakerquaker.org/quaker if you don’t want to miss out on any future innovations. If you have the Watch currently listed in your blog’s sidebar you won’t have to change anything.
At some point when the dust of the move has settled (and I have the new Quakerfinder.org launched as part of my FGC work), I’ll take a moment to wax philosophical about the evolution of this project and will toss out a few ideas about where it might go in the future. In the meantime, let me know if anything is broken, confused or grammatically mangled.
A kind of retrospective history of the project is available on the “quakerquaker thread”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/quakerquaker/ of the Ranter.
It’s witness time
December 2, 2005
Hi QuakerRanter friends: I’ve been busy today covering the Quaker response to the Christian Peacemakers Teams hostages. Two sites with a lot of overlapping content:
- Quaker Blog Watch page focused on the hostages
- “Nonviolence.org statement and list of responses
Both of these feature a mix of mainstream news and Quaker views on the situation. I’ll keep them updated. I’m not the only busy Friend: Chuck Fager and John Stephens have a site called Free the Captives — check it out.
It’s always interesting to see the moments that I explictly identify as a Friend on Nonviolence.org. As I saythere, it seems quite appropriate. We need to explain to the world why a Quaker and three other Christians would needlessly put themselves in such danger. This is witness time, Friends. The real deal. We’re all being tested. This is one of those times for which those endless committee meetings and boilerplate peace statements have prepared us.
It’s time to tell the world that we live in the power that “takes away the occasion for war and overcomes our fear of death” (well, or at least mutes it enough that four brave souls would travel to dangerous lands to witness our faith).
Quaker Blog Watch by email
October 18, 2005
It started when I began bookmarking the more interesting Quaker posts I ran across over the course of the day. That turned into the sidebar on the “Quaker Ranter”:/martin homepage, which then turned into the “Quaker Blog Watch”:/quaker page. Now, as an experiment, I’m making it available as a daily email:
More info here: “Quaker Blog Watch by email”:http://www.nonviolence.org/quaker/email/
I do recognize that this site has mutliple fan bases. While I was on paternity leave a colleague emailed me to ask when I would post more pictures of Baby Francis. I looked and saw that it had only been ten hours since I had uploaded the last picture to my Flickr account. Aaayyee!, the danger of increasing expectations! Well, you can now get a daily email containing any new pictures of “Baby Francis”:/francis or “Big Kid Theo”:/theo: go to either of their homepages for the sign-up form (they share one subscription). One small step in self-indulgent parenthood, ain’t technology great?
Two Years of the Quaker Ranter and Quaker Blogs
October 10, 2005
An amazing thing has happened in the last two years: we’ve got Friends from the corners of Quakerism sharing our similarities and differences, our frustrations and dreams through Quaker blogs. Disenchanted Friends who have longed for deeper conversation and consolation when things are hard at their local meeting have built a network of Friends who understand. When our generation is settling down to write our memoirs — our Quaker journals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chapter about becoming involved in the Quaker blogging community.
When I signed off on my last post, I promised I would continue with something on “blogs, ministry and liberal Quaker outreach.” Here’s the first of the follow-ups.
As I settle in to my second week at my new (and newly-defined) jobs at FGC, I wonder if I be here without help of the Quaker Ranter? I started this blog two summers ago. It was a time when I felt like I might be headed toward membership in the lost Quaker generation that was the focus of one of my earliest posts. There were a lot of dead-ends in my life. A couple of applications for more serious, responsible employment with Friends had recently gone nowhere. Life at my monthly meeting was odd (we’ll keep it at that). I felt I was coming into a deeper experiential knowledge of my Quakerism and perhaps inching toward more overt ministry but there was no outlet, no sense of how this inward transformation might fit into any sort of outward social form or forum.
Everywhere I looked I saw Friends shortcoming themselves and our religious society with a don’t-rock-the-boat timidity that wasn’t serving God’s purpose for us. I saw precious little prophetic ministry. I knew of few Friends who were asking challenging questions about our worship life. Our language about God was becoming ever more coded and sterilized. Most of the twenty-somethings I knew generally approached Quakerism primarily as a series of cultural norms with only different standards from one yearly meeting to another (and one Quaker branch to another, I suspect) .
With all this as backdrop, I started the Quaker Ranter with a nothing-left-to-lose mentality. I was nervous about pushing boundaries and about broaching things publicly that most Friends only say in hushed tones of two or three on meetinghouse steps. I was also doubly nervous about being a Quaker employee talking about this stuff (livelihood and all that!). The few Quaker blogs that were out there were generally blogs by Quakers but about anything but Quakerism, politics being the most common topic.
Now sure, a lot of this hasn’t changed over these few years. But one thing has: we now have a vibrant community of Quaker bloggers. We’ve got folks from the corners of Quakerism getting to know one another and hash out not just our similarities and differences, but our frustrations and dreams. It’s so cool. There’s something happening in all this! Disenchanted Friends who have longed for deeper conversation and consolation when things are hard at their local meeting are finding Friends who understand.
Through the blog and the community that formed around it I’ve found a voice. I’m evolving, certainly, through reading, life, blog conversations and most importantly (I hope!) the acting of the Holy Spirit on my ever-resistant ego. But because of my blog I’m someone who now feels comfortable talking about what it means to be a Quaker in a public setting. It almost seems quaint to think back to the early blog conversations about whether we can call this a kind of ministry. When we’re all settling down to write our memoirs — our Quaker journals — a lot of us will have to have at least one chapter about becoming involved in the Quaker blogging community. In Howard Brinton’s Quaker Journals he enumerated the steps toward growth in the ministry that most of the writers seemed to go through; I suspect the journals of our generation will add self-published electronic media to it’s list of classic steps.
When I started Quaker Ranter I did have to wonder if this might be a quickest way to get fired. Not to cast aspersions on the powers-that-be at FGC but the web is full of cautionary tales of people being canned because of too-public blogs. My only consolation was the sense that no one that mattered really read the thing. But as it became more prominent a curious phenomenon happened: even Quaker staff and uber-insiders seemed to be relating to this conversation and wanted a place to complain and dream about Quakerism. My personal reputation has certainly gone up because of this site, directly and indirectly because of the blog. This brings with it the snares of popular praise (itself a well-worn theme in Quaker journals) but it also made it more likely I would be considered for my new outreach job. It’s funny how life works.
Okay, that’s enough for a post. I’ll have to keep outreach till next time. But bear with me: it’s about form too and how form contributes to ministry.
PS: Talking of two years of Quaker blogging… My “Nonviolence.org turns ten years old this Thursday!! I thought about making a big deal about it but alas there’s so little time.
Add Quaker Blog Watch to your site
August 16, 2005
A few months ago I started keeping a links blog that evolved into the “Quaker Blog Watch” (formally at home at “nonviolence.org/quaker” though included as a column elsewhere). This is my answer to the “aggregation question” that a few of us were tossing around in Sixth Month. I’ve never believed in an uberBlog that would to supercede all of our individual ones and act as gate-keeper to “proper” Quakerism. For all my Quaker Conservativism I’m still a Hicksite and we’re into a certain live-and-let live creative disorder in our religious life.
I also don’t like technical solutions. It helps to have a human doing this. And it helps (I think) if they have some opinions. When I began my list of annotated Quaker links I called it my “Subjective Guide” and these links are also somewhat subjective. I don’t include every post on Quakerism: only the ones that make me think or that challenge me in some way. Mediocrity, good intentions and a famous last name mean less to me than simple faithfulness to one’s call.
There’s no way to keep stats but it looks like the links are being used (hours after I stumble across a previously-unknown site I see comments from regular Quaker Ranter readers!). Here’s the next step: instructions on adding the “last seven entries of the Quaker blog watch to your site.” I imagine some of you might want to try it out on your sidebar. If so, let me know how it works: I’m open to tweaking it. And do remember I’ll be disappearing for a few days “sometime soon” (still waiting, that kid can’t stay in there too long.)