Random updates

December 22, 2005

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.

Quaker Map Hack

May 26, 2005

To the best of my knowl­edge this is the first Quak­er Google Maps hack, show­ing the meet­ing­hous­es of down­town Philadel­phia. Click on the thumb­tacks for details; click on the satel­lite view for a cool view! Like much of the web it looks much bet­ter in “Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. Hack cour­tesy of the extreme­ly exper­i­men­tal “MyGmaps”:http://mygmaps.com, data from “Quakerfinder.org”:www.Quakerfinder.org. Here’s my short list of “Google Map Hacks”:http://del.icio.us/martin_kelley/map.
Although I love Quak­erfind­er, it should be not­ed that Google does almost as good a job list­ing area “Friends Meet­ings” via their “local search” feature.