ThreeParts

Silence.

John — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:02:38 +0000

I really don’t enjoy blog posts like this. But I can’t let my blog sit here with no activity for this long without saying something about it.

I have not abandoned my blog by any means. However, this last month has been more hectic than I could have predicted. Work, family, freelance opportunities, memorial services, dogs, travel, and other factors have taken my attention off of my ‘normal routine.

I have some great posts in the works, including a two or three part interview with Tim Schmoyer of Life In Student Ministry.

I can’t wait to get back in the swing of things.

More to come…

How Does Your Website Look As A Graph?

John — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:37:54 +0000

A long time ago, I saw this service and had since forgotten about it. However, now that I have a website that is updated from time to time (hey, I’m trying to get better), I thought it would be intersting to see what it looks like as a graph. This doesn’t really have any purpose, other than that it’s kinda fun for us nerds. There’s a description of all the colors here.

When Christians Are Copycats With Social Technology

John — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:54:54 +0000

There’s something that really gets to me, and I’ve been seeing a lot of it lately – when Christians take a ’secular’ idea, slap a new name on it, and call it their own. Specifically, I want to talk about social networks. Excuse me while I rant.

There are some very good applications for Christian social networks. I understand that parents, for instance, may want a safe social networking site for their kids to join rather than MySpace. If the network is faith-based, such as Tangle, we can assume that it will be safe and reinforce the values we hold and that we share with others on the site. There is a lot of value in something like this when it is done well. Though Tangle is basically a Christian MySpace, it executes its purpose extremely well. For this reason, I respect and support it. It looks professional, has significant funding behind it, is very functional, and is a great place to find information and friends based on the topic of Christianity.

But you have to draw the line somewhere – and figure out where value and outright copying intersect. And when they do, stop what you are doing. Please.

I have never used Faithout.com – and I have no intention of doing so. Sure, the developers are far more talented than I, being able to build a platform where people can connect and build community. However, I don’t understand using those talents to put something together that – frankly – has already been done before (and done much better). The title of the site reads “Christian Facebook Alternative”. They have a sister site called Xians that is – you guessed it – a Faith-based MySpace. A quick glance at the design is truly telling of how much of a copy it really is. To the site’s credit – they don’t claim to be original. However, that doesn’t make it right.

This raises some bigger questions from a ministry standpoint. Are we really supposed to segregate ourselves from everyone else? NO! Yes, we need fellowship. But must we commit and entire website to copying the largest social network in the world? That seems to be one of the worst ways I can think of to represent Christians on the web. “Look at those Chrisitans. There they go, stealing our ideas again. Oh well. Guess we’ve come to expect it.” Faithout has over 7,000 users (no telling how many are actually active). So if you sign up for this service, and not others – just remember that there about 175 million more users on Facebook that you are missing out on connecting with.

I’m a strong believer in small groups in the literal sense. Great churches thrive on community. It’s how Jesus lived life with the disciples. But Jesus didn’t go build his own ‘Chrisitan community’ to remove himself from the world. He did however create small groups in the world that then influenced the world. Why should social networking be any different?

I recently read/heard someone say that using social media should extend your existing business model, not change it. This makes me think of the church – we meet a few times a week, but as the body, we go to work, go to school, go to sporting events – you name it, we do it. Because we live in this world too. We don’t only go to Christian sporting events because we’re scared of something we might see, or the people that might be at secular ones. I think I’ve made my point.

Please, let’s use the heads on our shoulders to be creative. Let’s influence. Let’s take advantage of the HUGE networks that already exist and build community there.

I’m not saying that Christians should be doing this thing better that anyone else. All people have gifts. Let’s just let the people with the original idea, gifts, and enough funding be the people who do it. Then let’s be a part of it.

Would You Use A Student / Youth Ministry Hashtag? #StuMin

John — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:11:40 +0000

I woke up this morning to find @3amjosh asking this question on Twitter:

Little did I know that there’s been a kid’s ministry hashtag (#kidmin) in use since February 3rd – and it’s been fairly widely adopted. So why haven’t us student ministry people been using one? Well, for one, it might be because of the method that we choose to update from. With so many people using SMS to update their status these days, it becomes a chore to A) remember to use the hashtag and B) fit it in with the other content of our tweets. Also, at one point should we use it and and what point should we not? Just because we in one way or another work in student ministry doesn’t mean that all of our tweets should be labeled that way, does it? Don’t get me wrong – I think it’d be great to aggregate all student ministry tweets. The best possible would be just like Zappos does it, having people in student ministry submit their usernames to be included in the stream. I don’t have the programming skills or time to set something like this up, but it would be great if someone out there did.

Until what I’ve just described happens, Josh, I, and several others have agreed on #StuMin, which keeps in line with #kidmin. Spread the word in tweets worldwide! Copy and paste the tweet below! You’ll be able to track the use of this Twitter hashtag here or here.

RT @StudentMinistry: The people have spoken. Use #StuMin in your tweets about student ministry! Please RT! http://cli.gs/NvZa1P

ThreeParts Now Uses Facebook Connect For Comments

John — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:30:39 +0000

UPDATE: I’m now using Disqus to manage my comments, which allows for Facebook Comments.
Deleting will cause all previous comments not to be displayed. Don’t worry – you haven’t lost them, but they just won’t show up on previous posts.

If you’ve read any tech news this morning, you’ve probably heard the buzz about Facebook’s new commenting widget for websites. After reading this great post about installing it on a self-hosted Wordpress blog, I was able to quickly get it up and running. However, the post does misinform soon-to-be widget installers on a few things.

First of all, in step three, it says:

Open index.php with notepad or Dreamweaver from your Wordpress theme and add: xmlns:fb=http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml for php you can add:
xmlns:fb=”http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml”;
?>

This is misleading. In most wordpress themes, this line of code should be placed in header.php, near the top. Also, Wordpress doesn’t typically pull in this line of code with PHP. Rather, you should add it to the existing HTML tag, so your final line of HTML should look something like this:

Secondly, it does not describe where to place the new Facebook comment script in single.php. The answer is simple: find , delete it (see update at top of post), and replace it with: