Introducing Zippy the Wonder Snail

Yes, it was inevitable: my partner-in-OFB-and-Bible-study-crime Jason and I are now podcasters. 🥳 Check out Episode 1 of Zippy the Wonder Snail at ZippytheWonderSnail.com. We talk on the Gospel of John, Taylor Swift’s Folklore, blogging and even NFT’s. It’s already available on Spotify, TuneIn and Amazon Music podcast directories; Apple’s Podcast Connect has been down for the week, so it isn’t there yet, but will be when it can be.

Still Here

It occurs to me that the last week was probably the biggest gap in my blog that has existed in over a year. I'll be back to full speed soon. I have something new to post about tomorrow.

Thanks again to all of you for your prayers and support with regard to my grandmother's passing.

To Cast a Pod?

I'm pondering if I should dip my toes in the Podcasting waters. Tonight I worked up an entire 20 minute podcast and put it all together in GarageBand — including music — in about an hour. It was rather fun. But I'm not sure if I can commit to regularly taking out the time to do a podcast; unlike a text entry like this, podcasting requires a larger block of uninterrupted time (even if it might not require more time as a whole). When I'm writing a blog entry, I might be interrupted every few minutes, but if I'm recording myself, I cannot be interrupted as easily.

For that matter, I've listened to a few podcasts, and beyond the enjoyment I've gotten at putting voices to the words of the bloggers who are podcasting, I have not found myself becoming a regular listener. It is not a matter of whether the podcast was good, but I've found I simply do not have a lot of periods of time in which listening to a podcast is convenient (unlike text blogging).

Those two reasons make me think perhaps I won't publish my first (and perhaps only) stab at podcasting.

Not an Oven MIT

Go take the MIT Weblog Survey, I did.

Thanks go to Christopher for finding this.

Tomorrow

I wrote up a nice post tonight, but I did not get it quite done, so I guess you'll just have to wait until tomorrow for it. Sorry. I'm refunding a portion of your monthly subscription fees in exchange.

Trip Down Memory Lane

Perhaps it was the fact that, despite forgetting to write about it, my blog turned two on March 4. Maybe it was something else. But, I spent a little while tonight browsing the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine looking at some of my favorite blogs back when I first discovered them. In particular, I was looking at the two blogs I've been reading the longest that still exist: Sakamuyo and What in Tarnation!?!?!?.

It was interesting to look back into what Kevin and Christopher were saying in 2002. It was interesting to see what the respective sites looked like at the time. Sakamuyo was still in its green theme with Kevin talking about his new hard disk on which he was going to install two or three GNU/Linux distributions (Kevin has since betrayed the PC world and switched to Mac). On the other hand, I took a look at WIT as of November 2002, when I first started reading it, and Christopher was answering a Friday Five about thanksgiving (incidentally, that post was the first one I commented on at his site).

That's definitely one of the great things about WayBackMachine — it's really neat to get a snapshot of the way things were a few years back. Maybe reminiscing about web sites is a geeky thing to do, but when you've come to think of the people behind the sites as friends, maybe its not. It is sort of like a blending together of a photo album and old news paper clippings. Or something like that. A nice thing to do on a Saturday afternoon when nothing else terribly urgent had to be done.

Call for Blogs

This message is for two requests. As I announced a few months ago, FaithTree.com now allows users to place their favorite blogs on their customizable front page, just like you can local and national news, tech news, Bible quotes, local weather etc. You can find the few that I put up right here. I didn't add all of my blogroll, although I am planning to.

1. My first request is to hear from you about some of your favorite blogs that you think might make a good addition to FaithTree.com's listings. Maybe picking your top favorites would be best, but if you can't decide, that's alright. Just let me know what you like.
2. The other request is that, if you like the idea of seeing a customizable Christian home page that can take blogs as feeds, that you might consider mentioning this post on your own blog so that I can gather a good selection of blogs for this project.

The only real catch is that the blog must be Christian and agree with Christian Scripture as interpreted by historic Christian belief (the Apostle's Creed and Nicene Creed are a good base for this judgement). Essentially, anything that would go on Blogs4God can go on FaithTree.com's blog selection. This may change in the future (perhaps some secular blogs will be allowed), but for now that's the safest way to insure that the blogs meet our guidelines for content.

Once a blog is listed, it will be given a unique ID. If the blog owner wants to make it easy for people to add the blog to their FaithTree.com home page, they can follow some simple instructions on how to do so. This all works much like it did on the old “My Netscape” that existed in the days when Netscape was still a force to be reckoned with. If you are interested, please indicate so and I'll post about that.

Thanks for your help with this project!

I made it!

Well, if I don't count the fact that my one post was a comment/post “in exile” while the server was down on the 16th of October, I have succeeded in posting every day this month. I've been meaning to attempt this ever since Christopher accomplished the same feat in February.

Hope everyone had a nice Halloween yesterday. Did you get many Trick-or-Treaters? I probably had 35-40… my uncle, who lives near by, got about 80!

Having a WITty Day

Well, Christopher is busy this week, so he invited me (as well as some really great bloggers, a few of which are on my blogroll) to “sub” for him. I just put up my first post; it's about reading blogs. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, so why not stop by and give your comments, here.

Mysterium Tremendum

Well, I ran into a new blog tonight called Mysterium Tremendum. It looks pretty interesting, so you'll now find it on my blog roll.

What really caught my attention was the title. It is derived from Rudolf Otto's statement “mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (which roughly means trembling and fascinating mystery), a description Otto used to describe Holy or numinous experience. It's a good statement, I think, for describing the experience of the Holy and if the name of a site can be any kind of indication, it ought to signify a good new blog starting up.

Anyway, uiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur. (Ten points to the first commenter who knows what that means).