I’m a little nervous soliciting Quaker humor but it’s become part of my job description… Friends Journal is devoting a whole issue to “Humor in Religion” next April. The writing deadline is January 7. A frightfully serious list of things we’re looking for is below.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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Friends Journal Listening in on our Quaker conversations
May 28, 2015
On Twitter earlier today, Jay T asked “Didn’t u or someone once write about how Q’s behave on blogs & other soc. media? Can’t find it on Qranter or via Google. Thx!” Jay subsequently found a great piece from Robin Mohr circa 2008 but I kept remembering an description of blogging I had written in the earliest days of the blogosphere. It didn’t show up on my blog or via a Google search and then I hit up the wonderful Internet Archive.org Wayback Machine. The original two paragraph description of QuakerQuaker is not easily accessible outside of Archive.org but it’s nice to uncover it again and give it a little sunlight:
Quakerism is an experiential religion: we believe we should “let our lives speak” and we stay away from creeds and doctrinal statements. The best way to learn what Quakers believe is through listening in on our conversations.
In the last few years, dozens of Quakers have begun sharing stories, frustrations, hopes and dreams for our religious society through blogs. The conversations have been amazing. There’s a palpable sense of renewal and excitement. QuakerQuaker is a daily index to that conversation.
I still like it as a distinctly Quaker philosophy of outreach.
Something afoot circa 2004
January 9, 2013
Came across an 2004-era page of mine (the Baby Theo homepage) via an Archive.org search today. Here was a description on the sidebar:
This website is part of a informal emerging network of Friends that are reaching across our institutional boundaries to engage with our faith and with each other. The “ministry of the written word” has often sparked generational renewal among Friends and there’s something afoot in all these comments and linkbacks. There are lots of potential projects that can be launched over the new few years (books, workshops, conferences, etc) so if you like the direction of this site and the questions it’s asking, please consider a donation to the nonviolence.org site.
New Monastics & Convergent Friends update
April 28, 2010
My workshop partner Wess Daniels just posted an update about the upcoming workshop at Pendle Hill. Here’s the start. Click through to the full post to get a taste of what we’re preparing.
Martin Kelley and I will be
leading a
weekend retreat at Pendle Hill in just a couple weeks (May 14 – 16)
and I’m starting to get really excited about it! Martin and I have been
collaborating a lot together over the past few months in preparation for
this weekend and I wanted to share a little more of what we have
planned for those of you who are interested in coming (or still on the
fence). During the weekend we will be encouraging conversations around
building communities, convergent Friends and how this looks in our local
meetings. I wanted to give the description of the weekend, some of the
queries we’ll be touching on, and the outline for the weekend. And of
course, I want to invite all of you interested parties to join us!
Read the full post on Wess’s blog
Creating an RSS feed from scratch
February 26, 2007
RSS feeds
are the lingua franca of the modern internet, the glue that binds
together the hundreds of services that make up “Web 2.0.” The term
stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and can be thought of as a
machine-code table of contents to a website. An RSS feed
for a blog will typically list the last dozen-or-so articles, with the
title, date, summary and content all laid out in special fields. Once
you have a website’s RSS feed you can syndicate, or re-publish, its contents by email, RSS reader
or as a sidebar on another website. This post will show you a
ridiculously easy way to “roll your own” RSS feed without having to
worry about your website’s content platform.
Just about every native Web 2.0 applications comes built-in with multiple RSS feeds.
But in the real world, websites are built using an almost-infinite
number of content management systems and web development software
programs. Sometimes a single website will use different programs for
putting its contents online and sometimes a single organization spreads
its functions over multiple domains.
Step 1: Make it Del.icio.us
To begin, sign up with Del.icio.us,
the popular “social bookmarking” web service (similar services can be
easily adapted to work). Then add a “post to Del.icio.us” button to
your browser’s toolbar following the instructions here.
Now whenever you put new content up on your site, go that new page,
click on your “post to Del.icio.us” button and fill out a good title
and description. Choose a tag to use. A tag is simply a category and
you can make it whatever you want but “mysites” or your business name
will be the easiest to remember. Hit save and you’ve started an RSS feed.
How? Well, Del.icio.us turns each tag into a RSS feed.
You can see it in all its machine code glory at
del.icio.us/rss/username/mysites (replacing “username” with your
username and “mysites” with whatever tag you chose).
Now you could just advertise that Del.icio.us RSS feed
to your audience but there are a few problems doing this. One is that
Del.icio.us accounts are usually personal. If your webmaster leaves,
then your published RSS feed will need to
change. Not a good scenario, especially since you won’t even be able to
tell who’s still using that old feed. Before you advertise your feed
you should “future proof” it by running it through Feedburner.
Cloak that Feed
Go to Feedburner.com. Right there on the homepage they invite you to type in a URL.
Enter your Del.icio.us feed’s address and sign up for a Feedburner
account. In the field next to feed address give it some sensible name
relating to your company or site, let’s say “mycompany” for our
example. You’ll now have a new RSS feed at
feeds.feedburner.com/mycompany. Now you’re in business: this is the
feed you advertise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from within Feedburner and no one need know.
The default title of your Feedburner feed will still show it’s
Del.icio.us roots (and the webmaster’s username). To clear that out, go
into Feedburner’s “Optimize” tab and turn on the “Title/Description
Burner,” filling it out with a title and description that better
matches your feed’s purpose. For an example of all this in action, the
Del.icio.us feed that powers my tech link blog and its Feedburner “cloak” can be found here:
- http://del.icio.us/rss/martin_kelley/tech
- http://feeds.feedburner.com/techlinksblog
Get that Feed out there
Under Feedburner’s “Publicize” tag there are lots of neat features
to republish your feed yourself. First off is the “Chicklet chooser”
which will give you that ubiquitous RSS feed
icon to let visitors know you’ve entered the 21st Century. Their “Buzz
Boost” feature lets you create a snippet of code for your homepage that
will list the latest additions. “Email subscriptions” lets your
audience sign up for automatic emails whenever you add something to
your site.
Final Thoughts
RSS feeds are great ways of communicating
exciting news to your audiences. If you’re lucky, important bloggers in
your audience will subscribe to your feed and spread your news to their
networks. Creating a feed through a bookmarking service allows you to
add any page on any site regardless of its underlying structure.
Opening up the QuakerQuaker listings
January 9, 2007
Everyone can now add posts to the QuakerQuaker category listings. Simply bookmark the post in Del.icio.us, list the QQ categories and it will be added to the page.
For example, say you’ve seen just the coolest post on Convergent Friends. Go to the “Convergent Friends”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/convergent_quakers page to find the right “tag” – in this case “quaker.convergent”. Bookmark the post you like, write a title and description and list “quaker.convergent” as its tag. An hour or so later the post will show up on the Convergent Friends page. How cool is that? Here are “instruction on how to use Del.icio.us and title pages”:http://www.quakerquaker.org/contributors_zone_how_to/.
Michael Kinsley: Did it matter if Iraq didn’t have WMD?
June 20, 2003
By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn’t play much of a part. The phrase itself – ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – is more like an incantation than a description of anything in particular.”
Here’s a nostalgic listing of Bush Administration quotes assuring us WMDs existed. (Thanks toStuffedDog for the link)