Friends Journal seeking articles on Quakers and Christianity

August 7, 2018

The Decem­ber theme of Friends Jour­nal will look at the juicy top­ic of Friends’ rela­tion­ship with Chris­tian­i­ty. I wrote up an “Edi­tor’s Desk” post about the kinds of arti­cles we might expect. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s a series of ques­tions that has dogged Friends since we did away with cler­gy and start­ed call­ing bap­tism a “sprin­kling,” and it has been an issue of con­tention in every Quak­er schism: Are we Chris­t­ian? Are we real­ly Chris­t­ian? Does it mat­ter if we’re Chris­t­ian? What does it even mean to be Chris­t­ian in the world?

One rea­son we began pub­lish­ing more themed issues begin­ning in 2012 was so we use the top­ics to invite fresh voic­es to write for us. While we’ve long had reg­u­lars who will send us a few arti­cles a year on mis­cel­la­neous top­ics, themes allow us to tempt peo­ple with spe­cif­ic inter­ests and min­istries: rec­on­cil­i­a­tion from war, cli­mate activism, work­place reform, men­tor­ship, ecu­meni­cal rela­tion­ships, the wider fam­i­ly of Friends, etc.

More recent­ly I’ve start­ed these “Edi­tor’s Desk” posts as a way of shar­ing some of the ideas we have around par­tic­u­lar upcom­ing issues. The post also gives us a URL that we can share on social media to drum up sub­mis­sions. I also hope that oth­ers will share the URL via email.

The absolute best way of reach­ing new peo­ple is when some­one we know shares an upcom­ing theme with some­one we don’t know. There are many peo­ple who by chance or incli­na­tion seem to strad­dle Quak­er worlds. They are invalu­able in ampli­fy­ing our calls for sub­mis­sions. Ques­tion: would it help if we start­ed an email list just for writ­ers or for peo­ple who want to be remind­ed of upcom­ing themes so they can share them with Friends?

Quakers in Politics today!

March 22, 2018

I know I’ve shared it a few times before but today is the day of the Quak­ers in Pol­i­tics live steam! There’s an updat­ed URL to join list­ed on the Face­book Event page.

https://​www​.face​book​.com/​e​v​e​n​t​s​/​3​6​4​5​4​9​3​8​7​3​5​9​637

A comeback of personal blogging?

September 3, 2014

There’s some pieces mak­ing the round to the effect that some of the old school NYC blog­gers are com­ing back to blog­ging. From Fred Wil­son, The Per­son­al Blog:

There is some­thing about the per­son­al blog, your​name​.com, where you con­trol every­thing and get to do what­ev­er the hell pleas­es you. There is some­thing about link­ing to one of those blogs and then say­ing some­thing. It’s like hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion in pub­lic with each oth­er. This is how blog­ging was in the ear­ly days. And this is how blog­ging is today, if you want it to be.

Wil­son cites Lockard Steele in Back to the Blog:

Back then, we’d had a ton of stu­pid fun link­ing to each other’s blog posts for no oth­er rea­son than that they exist­ed and that it amused us great­ly. Who wouldn’t want back in on that?

Anoth­er one of his cita­tions was Eliz­a­beth Spiers, who fol­lowed up with a post Any­thing I Care About:

I don’t have to write as nar­row­ly as I do when I pub­lish in a reg­u­lar media out­let. The upside of that for me is that I don’t feel com­pelled to stick to a par­tic­u­lar top­ic. I can write about, as Fred put it, “any­thing I care about.”

One of my first thoughts is how annoy­ing­ly insid­er these posts feel. One of the qual­i­ties about the cur­rent inter­net is that our fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms are so sophis­ti­cat­ed and trans­par­ent that we don’t always see how self-selected a sliv­er of social media we’re see­ing. Face­book and its mys­te­ri­ous algo­rithms are the exam­ple we all like to com­plain about. But Twit­ter is a dif­fer­ent beast depend­ing on who you fol­low and Google search­es use hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent sig­nals to tai­lor results. Just because your cohort all stopped per­son­al blog­ging in exchange for pro­fes­sion­al­ized blogs ten years ago doesn’t mean it’s a uni­ver­sal phenomenon.

When­ev­er some­one says they’re start­ing (or restart­ing) a blog I like to wait a few months before cel­e­brat­ing, as there’s a big dif­fer­ence between intent and actu­al writ­ing. But I like the idea that per­son­al blogs might be mak­ing a come­back among some of what we used to call the digerati.

But let’s not get too snob­by about domains: how are Face­book posts not a per­son­al blog? Is it just a mat­ter of URLs? I have Face­book friends who put care into their online per­sona. Peo­ple use Face­book and Tum­blr and Insta­gram part­ly because they come with built-in audi­ences — but also because their crack­er­jack engi­neers have tak­en away the fric­tion of blog­ging. When Wil­son decid­ed to exper­i­ment with this nouveau-blogging, he pho­to­blogged a trip to his Word­Press site. What hap­pened? The pho­tos were all over­sized. One of the com­menters asked Wil­son “isn’t this a bit sim­i­lar to what you’re already post­ing on Tum­blr and Foursquare?” Well, yeah.

Any­way, all this is to say that I’ve blogged a lot more since I decid­ed to make my Tum­blr my per­son­al blog. I’ve got the near-frictionless post­ing that keeps my pho­to­blog­ging look­ing good but I’ve main­tain the con­trolled URL of mar​tinkel​ley​.com to future proof against new tech­no­log­i­cal plat­forms. But is it just the URL that makes it a per­son­al blog?

Elisabeth Olver, Artist & Painter

September 4, 2009

Elisabeth Olver ArtistElis­a­beth is a painter and artist who spe­cial­izes in orig­i­nal acrylic paint­ings and giclee prints of nature and South Jer­sey beach scenes. Her exist­ing site was attrac­tive, but it did­n’t have online order­ing and she was­n’t able to update it herself.

We put togeth­er a fea­tures list and then went through a round of con­cept screen­shots which I built in Adobe Fire­works and Pho­to­shop (you can see our work here!). Design in hand, I built a cus­tomized Mov­able Type site. A spe­cial­ized tem­plate allows her to enter infor­ma­tion about the each piece: medi­um, theme, price and the URL to it’s image (most of which are host­ed on Flickr). Mov­able Type pulls these togeth­er into var­i­ous cat­e­go­ry and indi­vid­ual art pages, with automatically-generated Pay­pal “Buy” but­tons for avail­able pieces. We stressed search-engine vis­i­bil­i­ty so there are many cat­e­gories and they all cross-link with each painting.

Vis­it: Elis­a­beth Olver

Floating on Clouds

April 26, 2008

Last week­end I found myself with the sce­nario no solo web design­er wants to be faced with: a dead lap­top. It was eigh­teen months old and while it was from Hewlett Packard, a rep­utable com­pa­ny, it’s always had prob­lems over over­heat­ing. Like a lot of mod­ern lap­top mak­ers, HP tried to pack as much proces­sor pow­er as they could into a sleek design that would turn eyes on the store shelf. They actu­al­ly do offer some free repairs for a list of half a dozen mal­adies caused by over­heat­ing but not for my par­tic­u­lar symp­toms. When I have a free after­noon, a big pot of cof­fee and lots of music queued up I’ll give them a call and see if I can talk them into fix­ing it.

Once upon a time hav­ing a sud­den­ly dead com­put­er in the mid­dle of a bunch of big projects would have been dis­as­ter. But over the last few years I’ve been putting more and more of my data “in the cloud,” that is: with soft­ware ser­vices that store it for me.

Email in the Cloud

I used to be a die-hard Thun­der­bird fan. This is Fire­fox’s cousin, a great email client. I would take such great care trans­fer­ring years of emails every time I switched machines and I spent hours build­ing huge nest­ed list of fold­ers to orga­nize archived mes­sages. About a year ago Thun­der­bird ate about three months of recent mes­sages, some quite cru­cial. At that time I start­ed using Google’s Gmail as back­up. I set Gmail to pick up mail on my POP serv­er and leave it there with­out delet­ing it. I set Thun­der­bird to leave it there for week. The result was that both mes­sages would be picked up by both services.

After becom­ing famil­iar with Gmail I start­ed using it more and more. I love that it does­n’t have fold­ers: you sim­ple put all emails into a sin­gle “Archive” and let Google’s search func­tion find them when you need them​.You can set up fil­ters, which act as saved search­es, and I have these set up for active clients.

Why I’m hap­py now: I can log into Gmail from any machine any­where. No recent emails are lost on my old machine.

Project Man­age­ment in the Cloud

I use the fab­u­lous Remem­ber the Milk (RTM) to keep track of projects and crit­i­cal to-do items. Like Gmail I can access it from any com­put­er. While mess­ing around set­ting up back­up com­put­ers has set me back about ten days, I still know what I need to do and when I need to do it. I can review it and give clients renewed timelines.

An addi­tion­al advan­tage to using Remem­ber the Milk and Gmail togeth­er is the abil­i­ty to link to emails. Every email in Gmail gets its own URL and every saved “fil­ter” search gets its own URL. If there’s an email I want to act on in two weeks, I set up a Remem­ber the Mail task. Each task has a option­al field for URLs so I put the the email’s Gmail URL in there and archive the email so I don’t have to think about it (part of the Get­ting Things Done strat­e­gy). Two weeks lat­er RTM tells me it’s time to act on that email and I fol­low the link direct­ly there, do what­ev­er action I need to do and mark it com­plete in RTM.

Project Notes in the Cloud

I long ago start­ed keep­ing notes for indi­vid­ual projects in the most excel­lent Back­pack ser­vice. You can store notes, emails, pic­tures and just about any­thing in Back­pack and have it avail­able from any com­put­er. You can eas­i­ly share notes with oth­ers, a fea­ture I fre­quent­ly use to cre­ate client cheat­sheets for using the sites I’ve built. Now that I use Gmail and it’s URL fea­ture, I put a link to the clien­t’s Gmail his­to­ry right on top of each page. Very cool!

Anoth­er life saver is that I splurge for the upgrad­ed account that gives me secure serv­er access and I keep my pass­word lists in Back­pack. There’s a slight secu­ri­ty risk but it’s prob­a­bly small­er than keep­ing it on a lap­top that could be swiped out of my bag. And right now I can log into all of my ser­vices from a new machine. 

Keep­ing the Mon­ey Flow­ing from Clouds

The lat­est Web 2.0 love of my life is Fresh­books, a ser­vice that keeps track of your clients, your hours and puts togeth­er great invoic­es you can mail to them. I’m so much more pro­fes­sion­al because of them (no more hand writ­ten invoic­es in Word!) and when it’s billing time I can quick­ly see how many unbilled hours I’ve worked on each project and bang!-bang!-band! send the invoic­es right out. Because the data is online, I was able to bill a client despite the dead com­put­er, pro­vid­ing my exact hours, a detailed list of what I had done, etc.

Oth­ers

Cal­en­dar: I always go back and forth between lov­ing Google Cal­en­dar and the cal­en­dar built into Back­pack. Because I can nev­er make up my mind I’ve used ICal feeds to cross-link them so they’re both synced to one anoth­er. I can now use whichev­er is most con­ve­nient (or whichev­er I’m more in the mood to use!) to add and review entries.

Pho­tos: Most of the pho­tos I’ve tak­en over the past four years are still sit­ting on my dead lap­top wait­ing for me to find a way to get them off of the hard dri­ve. As trag­ic as it would be to loose them, 903 of my favorite pho­tos are stored on my Flickr account. And because I emailed most of them to Flickr via Gmail most of those are also stored on Gmail. I will do every­thing I can to get those lost pho­tos but the worst case sce­nario is that I will be stuck with “only” those 900.

Your Exam­ples?

I’d love to hear how oth­ers are using “the cloud” as real-time backup.

Working with Pipes #2: A DIY personalized community with Del​.icio​.us, Flickr and Google Blog Search

March 17, 2007

blankIt’s
not nec­es­sary to devel­op your own Web 2.0 soft­ware infra­struc­ture to
cre­ate an inde­pen­dent Web 2.0‑powered com­mu­ni­ty online. It’s far
sim­pler to set a stan­dard for your com­mu­ni­ty to use on exisiting
net­works and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.

I decid­ed on about a dozen cat­e­gories to use with my DIY blog aggre­ga­tor (Quak­erQuak­er).
I only want to pull in posts that are being gen­er­at­ed for my site by
com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers so we use a com­mu­ni­ty iden­ti­fi­er, a unique prefix
that isn’t like­ly to be used by others. 

This post will show you how to pull in tagged feeds from three sources: the Del​.icio​.us social book­mark­ing sys­tem, the Flickr pho­to shar­ing site and Google Blog Search.

Step 1: Pick a community designator

I’ve been using the com­mu­ni­ty name fol­lowed by a dot. The prefix
goes in front of cat­e­go­ry descrip­tion to make a set of unique tags for
the aggre­ga­tor. When some­one wants to add some­thing for the site they
tag it with this “community.category” tag. In my exam­ple, when someone
wants to list a new Quak­er blog they use “quak​er​.blog”, “quak­er” being
the com­mu­ni­ty name, “blog” being the cat­e­go­ry name for the “New Blogs”
page.

Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes

blank
You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for
the com­mu­ni­ty pre­fix, the oth­er for the spe­cif­ic category.

Step 3: Construct these into tags

blank
Now use the “String Con­cate­na­tion” mod­ule to turn this into the
“community.category” mod­el. The com­mu­ni­ty input goes into the top slot,
a dot is the sec­ond slot and the cat­e­go­ry input goes into the last slot.

blank Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr auto­mat­i­cal­ly removes it in the resul­tant RSS feed.
So with Flickr you want your tag to be “com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry” with­out a
dot. Sim­ple enough: just pull anoth­er “String Con­cate­na­tion” module
onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it
won’t have the mid­dle slot with the dot.

Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs

blank
Pull three “URL­Builder” mod­ules into Pipes, one for each of the
ser­vices we’re going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific
part of the URL that each ser­vice uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:

Del​.icio​.us http://​del​.icio​.us/​r​s​s​/​tag
Flickr http://​api​.flickr​.com/​s​e​r​v​i​c​e​s​/​f​e​eds
Google Blog Search http://​blogsearch​.google​.com

Under path ele­ments, put the cor­rect tag: for Del​.icio​.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less com­mu­ni­ty­cat­e­go­ry tag.

Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe

blank Fetch is the Pipes mod­ule that pulls in URLs and out­puts RSS feeds. It can also com­bine them. Send each URLBuilder out­put into the same Fetch routine.

Since it’s pos­si­ble that you’ll might have dupli­cate posts, use the “Unique” mod­ule to dedu­pli­cate entries by URL.
Through a lit­tle tri­al and error I’ve deter­mined that in cas­es of
dupli­cates, feeds low­er in the Fetch list trump those high­er. In the
actu­al Pipe pow­er­ing my aggre­ga­tor I pull a sec­ond Del​.icio​.us feed: my
own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can
per­son­al­ly over­ride every oth­er input.

Step 6: Sort by Date

blank
With exper­i­men­ta­tion it seems like Pipes orders the out­put entries by
descend­ing date, which is prob­a­bly what you want. But I want to show
how Pipes can work with “dc” data, the “Dublin Core” mod­el that allows
you to extend stan­dard RSS feeds (see yes­ter­day’s post for more on this).

Google Blog Search and Del​.icio​.us feeds use the “dc:date” field to
record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses “dc:date.Taken” to
pass on the pho­tograph’s meta­da­ta about when it was tak­en. Pipes’
“Rename” mod­ule lets you copy both fields into one you cre­ate (I’ve
sim­ply used “date”), which you can then run through its “Sort” module.
Again, it’s a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically.
But it’s good to know how to manip­u­late and rename “dc” data if only
because many PHP parsers have trou­ble lay­ing it out on a webpage.

Update: it’s all moot: accord­ing to ZDNet blog, “Pipes now auto­mat­i­cal­ly appends a pub­Date tag to any RSS feed that has any of the oth­er allow­able date tags.” This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!

Step 7: Output

blank The final step for any Pipe is the “Pipe Out­put” module.

In action

You can see this pub­lished Pipe here, and copy and play with it your­self. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs. 

Going all the way with MovableType

August 5, 2005

An
ear­ly descrip­tion of my using the Mov­able Type blog­ging plat­form as a
con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS) for an entire web­site. I’ve used these
tech­niques to build web­sites which clients can eas­i­ly manip­u­late and
update.

Inspired by Doing Your Whole Site with MT
on Brad Choate’s site, I start­ed exper­i­ment­ing today with putting the
whole Non​vi​o​lence​.org site into Mov­able Type. At first I thought it was
just a tri­al exper­i­ment but I’m hooked. I espe­cial­ly love how much
clean­er the entry for the links page now looks and I might actu­al­ly be inspired to keep it up to date more now. (I’ve also inte­grat­ed Choate’s MT-Textile which makes a big dif­fer­ence in keep­ing entries clean of HMTL garbage, and the semi-related Smar­ty­Pants which makes the site more typo­graph­i­cal­ly ele­gant with easy M‑dashes and curly quotes).

So here’s what I’m doing: there are three Mov­able Type blogs inter­act­ing with one anoth­er (not includ­ing this per­son­al blog):

  • One is the more-or-less stan­dard one that is pow­er­ing the main home­page blog of Non​vi​o​lence​.org.
  • The sec­ond I call “NV:Static” which holds my sta­t­ic pages, much as Brad out­lines. I put my desired URL path
    into the Title field (i.e., “info/index”) and then put the page’s real
    title into the Key­words field (i.e., “About Non​vi​o​lence​.org”) and have
    that give the data for the title field and the first head­line of the
    page. It might seem back­wards to use Title for URL and then use Key­words for Title, but this means that when I’m in MT look­ing to edit a par­tic­u­lar file, it will be the URL paths that are listed.
  • The third blog is my “NV:Design Ele­ments.” This con­tains the block
    of graph­ics on the top and left of every page. I know I’ll have to
    redesign this all soon and I can do it from wher­ev­er. This blog outputs
    to HTML. All the oth­er pages on the site are PHP and its a sim­ple include to pull the top and left bars into each PHP page.

Oh yes, I’m also think­ing of incor­po­rat­ing guest blogs in the near
future and all of these ele­ments should make that much easier.

Here’s anoth­er site to check out, about how some­one inte­grat­ed Mov­able Type into their church web­site using some inter­est­ing techniques.