If you have a bit of weekend time to idle away why not have a play on Typedrawing.

Posted by Dave at 9:57 am on June 18, 2005 and filed under Art, Slacking.

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So asks Church Marketing Sucks in a piece about church ‘bulletins’ – the quote in the headline above also says ‘bulletin’ rather than ‘notice sheet’ on their site but I’ve changed it to be terribly British.

“The church bulletin is no easy design task. They have to serve a practical purpose (guiding people through the service), notify and inform, and invite and welcome. But they can also do more. What does your church bulletin do?”

Of course (plug coming up) people like me can help. Cartoons are a great item to include in a church notice sheet to add interest and hopefully encourage people to take the notice sheet home with them and actually read it. You can (plug imminent) use as many of my cartoons as you likein your bulletins and notice sheets for as little as £25 a year, thats less than 50p a week.

I’m also about to launch a range of other clipart and artwork ideal for church publications, all of which will be fully included in the full CartoonChurch licence – £35 for unlimited cartoon, worksheet, overhead transparency and clipart use for a year. Any feedback about the kind of artwork you’d find useful would be much appreciated.

Posted by Dave at 5:40 pm on June 17, 2005 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Church.

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So the new Archbishop of York is John Sentamu. I remember Ship of Fools saying he looked a bit like Graham Norton, but I can’t see it myself.

Posted by Dave at 1:05 pm on June 17, 2005 and filed under Church.

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An evangelist has been cleared of causing harassment, alarm or distress by shouting abuse at passers-by in London. A good thing too I think, though the likes of evangelists like these do tend to be an embarrassment to us all. My advice to Philip Howard (51) would be to tone it down a bit. For instance:

“Your hair’s going a little bit grey, your skin is showing mild signs of aging and that’s because you’re ever so slightly naughty.”

… isn’t going to offend anybody.

The story is on the BBC, found on Paul Roberts‘ blog.

Posted by Dave at 10:14 am on June 17, 2005 and filed under Sundry posts.

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A caravan turned into an art gallery which tours the country. It shows wryly observed drawings, photographs and collages and is “particularly drawn to absurd anomalies and curious juxtapositions“. The caravan, in case you were wondering, is a diminutive mustard model (circa 1969), with white walls and beech floor on the inside. Sounds a bit like the sort of thing I’ve always wanted to do, except I bought a campervan which sits in the drive except for odd trips to Tescos. The Caravan Gallery website is here. I found it via Reach out and touch the screen, though after some thought and reflection realised I’d seen it on John Davies‘ site too.

Posted by Dave at 10:01 am on June 17, 2005 and filed under Art, Campervans.

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No, not an agricultural question, but rather one raised by Adrian in the comments below when he said:

“Ultimately if your RSS feed is published on your website you are asking for it to be included in all kinds of services both christian and not so I am surprised by this level of concern.”

Hmmm. But is there a limit to what you are allowing? When you publish a feed* for your blog, what are you happy to happen to it?

1. Be used via an aggregator on someones computer which allows someone to privately browse your content on their computer.
2. Be used for an online aggregator like Bloglines which allows someone to browse your content via their own private account on a website.
3. Be used as content on someone elses website with your permission and attributed to you.
4. Be used as content on someone elses website without your permission but still attributed to you.
5 Be used as content on someone elses website without your permission and not attributed to you.

I think anyone who publishes a feed is happy for 1 and 2 to happen. By definition if asked they will be happy for 3 to happen. 5 is clearly theft and is unacceptable. Buit what about 4? And is there a difference between 2 and 4?

*In case you don’t know what a feed is this is a sort of an explanation from Bloglines, the aggregator I use: “Many online information sources, including web sites, weblogs and news services, now broadcast their content to the web in so-called “syndicated feeds” or “news feeds” with new technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and ATOM. News aggregator software and services collect those syndicated feeds and present them to end users in a variety of ways.”

I’ll do a post about subscribing via Bloglines for the confused and / or baffled as it really is as easy as clicking the button to the right there, but in the meantime my one about subscribing via My Yahoo or MSN is here.

Posted by Dave at 10:04 pm on June 16, 2005 and filed under Blogging, Technical.

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My post and the entire conversation that’s been going on about Christian blogs obviously went entirely unheeded. The new Truth Laid Bear site is there with the ‘Blogdom of God’ on it (Click ‘Blogdom of God’ under ‘Jump to community’).

But, oh dear oh dear. The list of blogs not only includes ALL of our Wiblogs, whether they would identify themselves as Christian or not, it also inludes links to galleries of our Wibsite images (????), repeated blogs, lots of individual blog posts and links to things that really aren’t blogs at all.

These links have clearly been gathered by some automated process, not unlike e-mail address harvesters used by spammers it seems to me. It really is nonsensical, and as I said yesterday just a power thing.

Adrian, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you really have gone about it the wrong way. Aside from actually making sure the links are blogs, you’ve got to ask permission before adding people to these lists. Simple as that. I don’t actually mind this blog and some of the Wiblogs being on there. But we need to be asked.

Update: Adrian might be away, in which case he gets a mild amount of the benefit of the doubt.

Posted by Dave at 2:30 pm on June 16, 2005 and filed under Blogging, Slightly grumpy.

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Well, something like that. Thinking Anglicans has links to some of the reports about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s media lecture last night. The Guardian has the full text of the speech here. Andrew Brown was there, furthering his career.

I would love to say more, but I am going to be very very good. We don’t want to descend into ‘paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry’ after all.

Posted by Dave at 1:38 pm on June 16, 2005 and filed under Blogging, Church.

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In the Green liquid quiz I asked: “What is this green liquid, and what is it doing in this bottle?” I know everyone is longing to see a repost of the particularly tasteful photograph:

Answers and details of the winner under ‘More’.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Dave at 6:52 pm on June 15, 2005 and filed under Quizzes and competitions.

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Sarah posted a link to these rather marvellous costumes for the Biblical man or women. They are rather splendid, though whether Jesus wore ‘Harem Style Silk Essence Dance Pants‘ I’m not sure. I’d also have to ask questions of anyone who went out of their way to get the ‘adulterous’ costume in the women’s section, but there you go.

Posted by Dave at 12:04 pm on June 15, 2005 and filed under In-depth analysis.

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Christian Blogs. Todays subject for my pontification.

I read a lot of blogs by Christians and I know a lot of Christians who blog. As you may or not know some friends and I run the Wibsite, essentially a community of over a hundred bloggers, most from the UK and most would describe themselves as Christian, but not all. We’ll be celebrating our third anniversary of Wiblog blogging this summer, though we’ve been blogging on the Wibsite for a bit longer than that via our ‘this just in’ column. The Wibsite has also made an attempt to encourage Christian bloggers to intermingle via our Greenbelt Bloggers gathering which I hope we can repeat this year.

Often I /we have thought to ourselves “wouldn’t it be great to have a website to bring all the great and marvellous Christian bloggers together”. Well, yes, it would. And so, ages and ages ago we made an ‘aggregator’ site, which brings lots of ‘latest posts’ by bloggers together, not just our Wibloggers but other Christian bloggers as well. For one reason or another this has never been launched publicly, not least because there is a considerable grey area in terms of whether it is right to post other people’s blog headlines / excerpts without their permission.

A small kerfuffle along these lines is breaking out in the Christian blog community as we speak. A list called the Blogdom of God is about to relaunch or somesuch. A blogger called Bene Diction who I’ve read for a few years now isn’t too happy about it, and to be honest I agree. Here’s why:

1. The Blogdom of God is all about getting improved rankings at a list site called ‘The Truth Laid Bear’. The Truth Laid Bear’ is a list which ranks blogs in terms of how many other blogs link to them. It is dominated by male right wing American political bloggers (or those who fall into 3 out of those 4 categories) who all link to each other, and as such is a complete irrelevance to most bloggers I know, especially Christian blogs here in the UK.
1a. It’s about power. Getting higher up the list. Gaining more influence. Unfortunately, it’s when the the church / Christians try to get power and influence that things tend to go horribly wrong. I’m sure we can all think of many examples over the course of history and indeed today. [Aside: this is a totally different thing altogether.]
2. Putting other people’s content on a list without their permission is morally dubious. Adding someone to a list is ok I think as long as that is all it is, a list of links.
3. While I’m on a roll, I really really dislike the term ‘God blog’. It makes us sound wierd, which a lot of Christian bloggers are, but that’s not the point.
4. The whole thing is run by one person, a chap named Adrian who I’m sure is a very nice fellow. But at the end of the day I don’t think that a one man show is the way to go on a ‘Christian bloggers together’ project.

A list or website to link up Christian blogs out there, especially (from my point of view) the ones from the UK is a good idea. But I just don’t think this is the way to do it. It should be collaborative, opt in and unrelated to climbing lists or gaining rankings.

Posted by Dave at 11:12 am on June 15, 2005 and filed under Links: bloggers, Slightly grumpy.

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A little quiz. This one has no prize I’m afraid, but I’ve got two prize-laden quizzes in the pipeline for later this week and next week, so this will be a good warm up.

Question: What is this green liquid, and what is it doing in this bottle? Answers in the comments – I’ll post the correct answer tomorrow.

Posted by Dave at 1:44 pm on June 14, 2005 and filed under Quizzes and competitions.

7 Comments