Jon Jolly

I was reading Dave Johnson’s post about what rss feeds he subscribes to and it got me thinking it would be good to recommend a few of the blogs that I read too.

I subscribe to hundreds of different feeds from around the web ranging from youth ministry and human interest through to technology and research. By grouping them into categories in Google Reader, I skim through a lot of the content by browsing titles or headings.

I could list a whole host of great blogs, but here are the ones I find myself reading most frequently:

• ASBO Jesus: some great cartoon insights into the Christian world.
• Chris Curtis: film obsessive and schoolswork blogger.
• Curious In Ibiza: life in Ibiza with 24-7 Prayer
• Life in Student Ministry: support and resources for youth ministers
• Pink Lady: thoughtful youth worker in Hereford
• Postsecret: creative confession of secrets through a mail-in art project.
• Tim Abbott: youth work, topical debates and theology
• youthblog: news and info on relevant UK youth work and ministry
• ysmarko: links, research and thoughts on youth ministry

It’s funny to think how important feeds have become to me. It’s now part of my daily habit to get news and information from around the world brought straight to my reader. Also the real-life connections I’ve made with people through blogging has been great!

So what are your favourite blogs?

You may have noticed a number of posts recently about games that can be used with youth groups. This is going to be a regular feature that I’ll add to as much as I can. Coming up with creative games to use with a group can often be quite frustrating, so I hope to document some tried and tested formulas for you to use.

All of these games will be under the Youth Group Games category and easily searchable. I’ve even set up a separate rss feed if you want to be updated on all the games posted.

There are already some great games resources out there so you could also check out The Source For Youth Ministry with their great custom game search, try EGAD Ideas, or just do a Google Search! Also, if you have a game you’ve used and would like to put up here for others to benefit from, please get in contact or add it to the comments below.

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!

I’ve been using Google’s Gmail service for some time now because it offers some excellent features that competitors don’t. POP access for collecting your mail through another email client (Outlook etc), 2.5GB of free storage, powerful search, filtering, and sending mail from multiple addresses.
Then I recently started using ‘Google Personalised Home‘ as my homepage because you can customise it to display your Gmail inbox, your bookmarks, and as many rss feeds as you like. I’ve got feeds from BBC News, Slashdot and Empire as well as the latest weather, Movie listings, music reviews and friends Blogs on my homepage everytime I start my browser. Plus I can log-in anywhere in the world!

Well now the Google rumours appear to be true, with the leaked internal report of Gdrive. Currently in development, Gdrive promises to be an unlimited amount of online storage to keep all your files, music, media within easy reach anywhere you go. A definite advantage for certain things, yet be sure to keep personal/sensitive documents away from such online storage ideas as many have been quick to point out that if Google can’t even keep their own files secure, why should we trust them with ours?

Oh, for all you hotmail users, Microsoft have launched various aspects of Windows Live where you get massively increased storage, a personalised homepage, an improved search facility, plus local maps and directions, among others. Sound familiar?