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?

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Friends Journal

https://www.facebook.com/events/364549387359637

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.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 martinkelley.com to future proof against new technological platforms. But is it just the URL that makes it a personal blog?

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

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.