Backwards and forwards……

Happy new year to everyone. It’s always good to review a past year and look forward to a new one. 2011 was generally a “good year” for me and mine. The economy may have been tanking, the world was in turmoil but there have been some really positive things last year.

A year’s blogging

Well I’ve now been blogging for a year now. What you don’t realise when you start is how many different types and styles of blogs there are out there!

Social Media Revolution

Don’t know whether to laugh or be scared. Hat-tip to Becca for this  look at the Social media revolution. It is certainly already making a huge impact in the world and how people find things and interact. What do you think?

Collect for the Week

A weekly collection of mainly religious stories that I thought were really interesting (click on links to read):

1. Would Jesus support Palestinian statehood bid. By Carl Medearis, very interesting religio-political take on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the role of Christian Zionists.
2. Archbishop Rowan Williams in conversation with comedian Frank Skinner - from news release can get to an audio of their conversation in Canterbury Cathedral
3. Pastor in the Present Tense - Interview with Eugene Peterson (responsible for the Message translation) about being a Pastor
4. The ten happiest jobs - complied by Steve Denning in Forbes magazine (there is also the ten most hated as well)
5. Why breaking up is so hard to do - wondered what and why the euro crisis is so important and what its about then this article by Martin Wolf of the FT is for you. You will need to sign up for the FT to get it (there is a free sign-up with limited number of articles you can read per month)
6. Ten Years On Really interesting article on the decline of the West by the Chief Rabbi and what to do about it.
7. Christ, the Church and Pat Robertson - Very moving and powerful rebuttal of Pat Robertson’s view that it is ok to divorce someone with Alzheimer and marry someone else by Russell Moore

Finally, my most popular post of the week (by numbers reading it that is) is

• Archbishop Rowan Williams to visit Springfield

 

Statistics, wikio and blogs.. and why you shouldn’t take much notice

Well you won’t know this (just because I bet you don’t) but according to Wikio I am the 46th top blog in the UK to do with Religion and Belief (as a reference point – Nick Baines is number 16). And here is my Wikio badge to prove it:

Who do you write like?

Well seemingly I write like George Orwell. Who says so? Well this blog site: I write Like I even have the badge to prove it (so it must be true!):

Our Church SALT Magazine is now online

Having only produced paper versions of our Church magazine we have decided to publish parts of it online.

You can find it at http://salt.springfieldchurch.org.uk/

The magazine is published 5 times a year and in its paper version is normally about 36 pages. As we get used to it the online version will obviously have more links etc that we can embed within it. Hope to add a few more stories as we have time this week.

Have a look and let us know what you think.

How long has it been? Really?

Well today is the sixth month “anniversary” of the blog. Just thought you would like to know! And being a statistician I thought you might want to know some of the statistics!! No, really – you do.

Site Update

I’m sure that you won’t care at all, but I have changed the website design. I’ve done it to allow ease of finding things on the blog (and that the load time of the blog was going up). There are many more styles of post available (video, gallery, image, aside, link etc) and many of them have a symbol next to them to allow you to select all the posts of that type.

I have also updated the drop down menus – not quite finished – but again aimed at being able to get to areas of potential interest. Under the Sitemap menu I have put a variety of different ways of viewing posts from Timelines, Archives and Sitemap as well as a number of the Post types.

One other thing that this gives is a tabbed system for Recent Posts, Popular Posts and Comments.

I admit it I’m a geek.

So a Happy Christmas to everyone….

Well, here it is Christmas Eve. The Carol Service from Kings College Cambridge is about to begin. It’s our Christingle Service at St Paul’s, Roundshaw at 4pm; Midnight Communion at St Paul’s at 11.15 and then Christmas Day at 10.30am tomorrow morning at Wallington Girls. It’s that magical time leading up to Christmas day that [...]