Changes for Gen-X Rising
Saturday, July 05, 2008
I had some major problems with Blogger over the past few days, keeping me from posting since last Friday. That's a real bummer, 'cause a post I tried to put up early in the week detailed a major new development in my life: a new appointment as the pastor of Mt. Carmel UMC in Henderson, NC. The post is up now though, and you can view it here.
At least fixing my Blogger issues gave me a chance to start making some changes to the blog. (Well, my web guru Scott Kent is actually making the changes, since I have the technology IQ of a housecat. And a not very bright housecat, at that.) You'll notice them by looking around on the blog, but I'll list them anyway:
-- Subscription Service: The little RSS widget below my picture in the top right-hand corner of the frontpage. I know some of you subscribe to the blog through various different readers, but I wanted to make reading Gen-X Rising super-easy for those who don't. So clicking on the "Subscribe" hotlink will take you to Feedburner, which allows you to customize how you keep up with genxrising.com using the reader of your choice.
-- Inclusion in the Christian Century's CC blogs network: Right under the RSS widget you'll see a CC blogs widget. My blog has been highlighted in the "Related Blogs" section of Theolog, the blog of the Christian Century, for sometime now. Gordon Atkinson, author of the Real Live Preacher blog and the administrator of the Century's CC blogs network, has offered to include me as a part of the network. So clicking on the CC blogs widget will take you to the Century's blog network, and soon my blog will be a part of it.
-- Expanding the archive on the left-hand sidebar: You may have noticed the two tabs on the left-hand sidebar titled, "UM Reporter Columns" and "CDQ Columns". I added those pages into the blog a few months ago, with the intention of creating an annotated listing of all the column work I've done for both the United Methodist Reporter and the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. I've started that work, and you can access online versions of some of those columns by clicking on one of the two tabs. But what I want to do to expand that part of the blog is to sub-divide the column tabs by year, so that you can go directly to the columns I wrote for a given publication in a given year. To do that, I'm going to have a drop-down tab that will give you options of what year to choose. That development is in the works and should be finished by early next week.
-- Maintaining an ad-free blog: This isn't actually a new development in the blog. It's just the maintenance of a personal policy I have employed since launching genxrising.com almost two years ago. I understand why people add advertising to their blogs, and I have heard that (depending on traffic) it can earn enough money to pay for a lot of the costs of regularly maintaining a blog. But I've always thought there were problems with allowing advertising from outside companies. The two primary ones I see are clutter issues in your sidebars and the danger of ad content that is out of step with the message you are trying to convey in your blog. So I made a decision a long time ago to keep my site wholly devoted to content relevant to what I'm trying to do through genxrising.com. So that means that all you'll ever get is my writing and links to other sites in the general area of the Christian blogosphere.
At least fixing my Blogger issues gave me a chance to start making some changes to the blog. (Well, my web guru Scott Kent is actually making the changes, since I have the technology IQ of a housecat. And a not very bright housecat, at that.) You'll notice them by looking around on the blog, but I'll list them anyway:
-- Subscription Service: The little RSS widget below my picture in the top right-hand corner of the frontpage. I know some of you subscribe to the blog through various different readers, but I wanted to make reading Gen-X Rising super-easy for those who don't. So clicking on the "Subscribe" hotlink will take you to Feedburner, which allows you to customize how you keep up with genxrising.com using the reader of your choice.
-- Inclusion in the Christian Century's CC blogs network: Right under the RSS widget you'll see a CC blogs widget. My blog has been highlighted in the "Related Blogs" section of Theolog, the blog of the Christian Century, for sometime now. Gordon Atkinson, author of the Real Live Preacher blog and the administrator of the Century's CC blogs network, has offered to include me as a part of the network. So clicking on the CC blogs widget will take you to the Century's blog network, and soon my blog will be a part of it.
-- Expanding the archive on the left-hand sidebar: You may have noticed the two tabs on the left-hand sidebar titled, "UM Reporter Columns" and "CDQ Columns". I added those pages into the blog a few months ago, with the intention of creating an annotated listing of all the column work I've done for both the United Methodist Reporter and the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. I've started that work, and you can access online versions of some of those columns by clicking on one of the two tabs. But what I want to do to expand that part of the blog is to sub-divide the column tabs by year, so that you can go directly to the columns I wrote for a given publication in a given year. To do that, I'm going to have a drop-down tab that will give you options of what year to choose. That development is in the works and should be finished by early next week.
-- Maintaining an ad-free blog: This isn't actually a new development in the blog. It's just the maintenance of a personal policy I have employed since launching genxrising.com almost two years ago. I understand why people add advertising to their blogs, and I have heard that (depending on traffic) it can earn enough money to pay for a lot of the costs of regularly maintaining a blog. But I've always thought there were problems with allowing advertising from outside companies. The two primary ones I see are clutter issues in your sidebars and the danger of ad content that is out of step with the message you are trying to convey in your blog. So I made a decision a long time ago to keep my site wholly devoted to content relevant to what I'm trying to do through genxrising.com. So that means that all you'll ever get is my writing and links to other sites in the general area of the Christian blogosphere.
posted by Andrew C. Thompson at 2:47 PM
2 Comments:
The two primary ones I see are clutter issues in your sidebars and the danger of ad content that is out of step with the message you are trying to convey in your blog.
That's always been a problem in journalism. How much need (or can) and advertiser offer a publication for it to advertise products or services that it finds disagreeable?
John,
I think that's exactly right. It's certainly a key issue for people with blogs that seek to speak out of a specific point of view (like the Christian faith).
For people whose blogs cost more than mine, I definitely see the reason for including advertising to help defray expenses. And they have to grapple with just the question you raise. I don't put ad content on my site just so I can avoid it altogether and just focus on my own content.
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