Today is our 7th Wedding Anniversary! I can’t believe it’s been that long, where did the time go? Kirsty and I were talking earlier and it’s even been 2 years since we celebrated by going to see U2 live in Dublin.
We’re not doing much to celebrate today, just going out for a meal tonight. Here’s to another 7 years…
Monthly Archive for June, 2007
This Yahoo! service has been around for a little while now, but I’ve only just started to get to grips with it. It’s basically a powerful tool for getting the information you want brought to you from around the web. If you get bored with technical stuff, read no further…
For the rest of you, Pipes is a great way to mashup RSS feeds (you know, the bit that broadcasts your content across the web everytime you update your site). From Yahoo!:
Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources. Simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:
- combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate to create your ultimate custom feed.
- geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
- remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
- build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
- power badges on your web site.
- extend your web site by accessing the JSON or RSS output from Pipes.
So far I’ve only managed the simplest use of Pipes which is combining, sorting and filtering feeds to create my own custom RSS. I generally read most blogs or news items in Google Reader. Every time I find a blog that I want to read regularly, I subscribe to it and tag it with a category (E.g. ‘Tech’). All the blogs that I read to do with Christian youth work ministry, I tag ‘YM-blogs’ and then can always find updates under that heading. Google Reader has a great feature that allows you to create an RSS feed of any tags you’ve created. Here is the feed for ‘YM-blogs’.
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/15039631766755983999/label/ym-blogs. It’s basically all the youth work blogs that I read pulled together into one feed. You could subscribe to this if you wanted.
With Pipes, rather than copying all the feeds of those blogs one by one, I created a pipe that takes my ‘YM-blogs’ RSS feed from Google Reader and then searches it for the word ’school’ or ’schools’. It then arranges posts by date and throws them out the other end in a new RSS feed. Here is the result: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=KqQhe2gh3BG6htu8nkartA&_render=rss
All this is quite clever, but it really comes into it’s own when you can search for houses available to rent in a certain area and have the results overlayed on a map! However, what I really love about Pipes is the visual interface. You drag and drop different modules and then connect them together with ‘cables’. It’s kind of like creating a marble run. You can see my simple example of how I put this together with different modules here (you’ll need to sign in to Yahoo!).
The whole thing is a bit geeky (I love it!), but there is potential to find and sort hundreds of pages of information relevant to youth work and ministry. Once I’ve created a useful pipe, I’ll let you know!
Fancy a scribble? All it takes is one standard Ikea kitchen and some blackboard paint! How creative.
This is an interesting chart about what type of interaction Americans have online such as content creators, joiners (of social networks), spectators etc. Because it’s categorised by age, you can see how different generations use the web. I would imagine that it’s similar for the UK.
I’m interested that I’m (just) categorised as Gen X and my main activities are creator, collector and spectator. That puts me in 19%, 16%, and 41% of my age group respectively.
Ht: ysmarko
I’ve been thinking a lot about schools work recently. Part of my role for Arun Community Church is to develop a programme of schools work in the local area (the rest of my job is a combination of the pastoral care of young people within the church and delivering a variety of community based activities as part of the Extended Schools agenda). Although I’ve gone into many schools and delivered a variety of lessons, assemblies and support over the years, starting a new programme is an exciting and daunting task.
Some of the key questions I’ve been asking are: “What is the purpose? Are we wanting to provide spiritual (and Christian) input, or simply serve the schools in supporting young people?”, “What can we actually provide? With so many needs and issues, what should we target and where would we be effective?”
I have a few ideas about what the church could deliver for the schools. XLP, Tim Abbott and Chris Curtis (who I’m visiting at LCET next week) have been very helpful in working through some of these ideas. I’ll post more info once I’ve decided on a clear strategy, but in the meantime does anyone have any thoughts or experiences on delivering effective schools work?
An interesting article in USA Today about ‘Phantom Vibration Syndrome’ - when you think your mobile is buzzing in your pocket only to find out it wasn’t! If you’re like me and always keep your mobile in the same pocket, you may have experienced this “habit of the brain”.
“When we learn to respond to a cellphone, we’re setting perceptual filters so that we can pick out that (ring or vibration), even under noisy conditions,” Lleras says. “As the filter is created, it is imperfect, and false alarms will occur. Random noise is interpreted as a real signal, when in fact, it isn’t.”
ht: threebillion
Oh, the irony! 
For those of you who don’t subscribe to Youthblog (all 2 of you), I loved Ian’s commentry on the Church Times article…
I never got round to posting about our visit to the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery over the Bank Holiday. In all, it’s a fascinating collection of works that major on the theme of space. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Blind Light; the glass box of dense white cloud that visitors are invited to explore.
Walking into the box is an amazing experience. Although your eyes are wide open, all you can see is bright white! It’s so disorientating as you can hear the sounds of other people around you but can’t see them until they are less than a foot away! Many times someone materialized out of the mist mere inches away from me!
The other thing you don’t expect is the water. Obviously the mist is water vapour so you know it’ll be damp, but you can actually feel the water going into your lungs as you breathe and when you finally emerge from the box, your clothes are saturated with an ultra-fine water coating.
I strongly recommend you go along and experience it for yourself. In the meantime, check out my Flickr set here.
I found this blog referenced on Think Christian and amused myself for a while enjoying the some of the awful signs found outside (mainly American) churches. Sadly though I found a link to this sign on flickr which outlines some of the narrow-mindedness of some Christian churches.
From the photographer:
Jesus made it his mission to serve and help the poor, yet this church takes a stance to attack the poor and blame them for their own plight…..If laziness is poverty’s cousins, then social injustice and opression are poverty’s parents……..
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