Month: December 2007

  • Youth Ministry Pro

    youth ministry proObservers of YMX and this blog will remember that we recently started “domain farming” a few domain names that aren’t currently registered… but we think would make great websites.

    In other words, we bought a bunch of domains hoping that if we marketed them a little, people would pay for them. Well, along the same lines we’ve learned that you can’t just buy the domain and do nothing… sometimes you have to do a little property development.

    So, I’ve had that buried in my “dream list” for a couple months. Today I decided to go for it and develop a domain we’ve owned for a long time, Youthministrypro.com.
    I could not believe that this domain wasn’t owned by someone! It’s a great domain name.

    Today I finally took a little time and developed this little property of ours. I installed Joomla, pimped it out with a nice template, did some simple graphic work, wrote a little copy, partnered with a great content delivery system, and voila: Youth Ministry Pro was born.

    What is it? Basically, it’s a job board for youth ministry. Sure… there are lots of these… but not very many of them are independently run. Most are tied to a school, denomination, or a publisher. What makes this one different is that we can offer some job finding content, a safe place to post your resume, access to Raising Lazarus, and of course a place for employers to post jobs. (Actually, it’s part of a mega-network of job listings so there is lots of stuff already there!)

    The best part is that this new site pretty much runs itself. Other than posting new content (e.g. reprinting from YMX) there isn’t a lot to do with it. That is… unless someone was willing to invest a lot of time and a little bit of money into the project. (Neither are commodities I have.)

    And, of course, the domain is still for sale. Now instead of just selling a domain, we’re selling a complete and profitable little business. Interested? Contact me.

  • K Mart saved Christmas

    kmart logoWithout sounding overly dramatic, K Mart saved our Christmas day. After the service last night I took a gander at our food situation. Let’s just say the cupboards were bare and the day had been so insane that we hadn’t had the chance to get groceries.

    A quick search on Google maps determined that every grocery store in our area closed at 7:00 PM. Unphased by that reality and in search of anything that could be assembled into a Christmas dinner I started driving around.

    If you’ve never had to shop on Christmas eve, plan on doing it in 2008. It’s a trip. A lot of gas stations are closed. Any type of grocery store is closed. Most pharmacies are closed. Specialty stores are closed. Pretty much everything closes on Christmas eve at 7:00 PM. (I know, I checked!) Wal*Mart. Miejer. Kroger. Vince & Joes. Sheenah’s. Everything.

    So this left me with two choices. Liquor stores or KMart. Every liquor store in Michigan was open late last night… but I figured that my hopes of getting mashed potatoes, ham, and other items for a Christmas dinner were slightly better at KMart. (Serving the kids Slim Jim’s and Molson Ice for Christmas seemed a little like child abuse. I wasn’t quite that desperate… yet.) So I pulled into the KMart parking lot at 23 & Van Dyke at 8:45 PM.

    The place was packed!

    And it was filled with tons of people just like me. Did you know that KMart has a grocery section? They don’t have much of one… but they have one. It was getting tribal in the grocery aisle as we were all looking for the same thing, meat! As I contemplated spam and ham cold cuts for Christmas dinner… the aisle filled with people looking for “one thing” they forgot to purchase. A conversation quickly erupted of the places we saw that were open that might have sour cream, yams, or freshScrooge fruit. I settled on pot roast and mashed potatoes then walked around looking for other things. After double checking the store for a spare ham in a can and walking around to snag some last minute stocking stuffers, I headed the check out where a scantly clad checkout girl scanned everything and I headed home. (She must have thought it was Halloween. Brrr.)

    I just want to add. Had a grocery store stayed open until 10 last night they would have done quite well. While I had fun trying to put together “something” for a Christmas feast… it would have been so much better at a grocery store.

    I kept thinking about Charles Dickens’s Scrooge. Where did he get that goose and all those presents on Christmas morning? It must have all come from KMart– open until 10 on Christmas eve.

  • Stoney Finally Got His Squirrel

    Shopping yesterday Paul and I ran across the perfect gift for our yellow Lab, Stoney.

    You may remember this Spring I lamented about how Stoney longed to kill and eat on of the squirrels that haunts his backyard. So Stoney went into training and even went jogging with Kristen for a while to try to get fast enough to catch a squirrel. Even once, in early summer Stony actually had a squirrel in his mouth… but it got away. The rest of summer Stoney was depressed and refused to chase the black squirrel in the backyard.

    Well, we bought Stoney a squirrel for Christmas. Sure it’s fake. But I’d like to think that he’ll enjoy killing it just the same. Perhaps it will even help him come out of his depression and begin training again.

    In other news, the Christmas eve service was fun tonight. The MainStreet portion was a trip. It was the first (and last) time we did something without a rehearsal… and we pulled off most of the elements of it just fine. I kind of made up a character on the spot to match a video… which was pretty fun. It wasn’t a MainStreet with any content, but it was definitely a lot of fun to do. And I think the audience enjoyed it. The second half of the night was our regular Christmas eve. Jimmy and Jason did a very nice job.

  • From the MainStreet vault

    Some of these clips are for MainStreet tomorrow while others are for “web only.” But over all I thought this was some funny stuff.

  • Romeo Elves: Band Intro

  • The boys rule the Wii

    wii bowling

    As Kristen mentioned, yesterday we had a Wii bowling competition in our family. 4 competitors, 4 controllers, boys vs. girls.

    The entire game Paul (4) is talking mega-smack to mommy and Megan (6). We are all pretty good at bowling, but Megan and I are the best. I routinely get above 200 and Megan averages about 185.

    Megan would get a spare. Paul would get a strike. Mommy would get a strike. Daddy would get a spare. On and on this went, neck and neck. It was supremely close.

    In the last frame dad, mom, and Megan finished. We did a little quick math and discovered that they boys and girls were both tied. This meant that if Paul got a single pin, the boys would win.

    Paul stood up proudly, soaked in the situation, and proclaimed “it’s showtime.” He then proceeded to dial in a strike and win the game for the boys in style. Then he walked over to mom and Megan and told them, “That’s right. The boys rule the Wii!”

    Megan (first born, dominant) was quick to want to play again. I’m guessing this won’t be the last battle in our house with boys vs. girls.

  • Saturday Tunes

    saturday tunesAnother quiet Saturday for the McLane’s. OK, that’s a lie. I’ve got a bunch of videos left to edit for church tomorrow and MainStreet on Monday night. But that’s besides the point! Here are the next 10 tunes streaming into my ears this Saturday before Christmas. As always, no cheating (I just press shuffle and start writing) and my ratings are included.

    1.  Chanukah Song by Adam Sandler *****
    2. Wish You Well by TFK *****
    3. From the Inside Out by Hillsong United *****
    4. The Glory of it All by David Crowder Band ****
    5. You’re Worthy of My Praise by Passion Band ****
    6. Homeby Great Northern ****
    7. Awesome God by Chaz Shepherd ****
    8. Stand Up by Everyday Sunday *****
    9. The Rising Shout by Charlie Hall ***
    10. The Adventure by Angels and Airwaves ****

  • Nominations for Best of Youth Ministry 2007

    Best of 2007Over at YMX, we’re accepting nominations for “Best of 2007” from the world of youth ministry.

    Here’s the link.

    If you post your list on your blog and post the link in the comments section by 12/30/07, we’ll put your name in a drawing for a $25 gift card from Amazon. (Drawing on 12/31/2007) Don’t post your link here… post it here!

    Do I have to be “in youth ministry” to nominate? Nope. It’s open to anyone with an opinion. The only requirement to be in the drawing is that you have to post a link to your nominations in your blog/website.

  • R.E.M. and the President: End of the World

    HT to Boing Boing

    From the same people who did “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” comes this old REM classic.

  • 3 Things Big Name Bloggers Need to Learn from the Little Guy

     I have  a  mixture of blogs that I  read. Some of them, I am their only subscriber and others have thousands of  people whoBlog snob read their  stuff every day. Seth Godin‘s blog apparently has more readership than 95% of all magazines in the United States. In doing this every day I’ve made a couple of observations. You see, while these “blog celebrities” may be online moguls, they are generally not that famous. (Just making a couple hundreds bucks a day from Google to blog… or in Seth’s case, no money to blog as he refuses to have ads.)

    But there are a couple of things I don’t like about the big name bloggers. Even in the Christian world, big named bloggers take on an aura of superiority. They tend to communication that blog rules don’t apply to them when you get to be super big. Here’s three things that big named bloggers need to learn from small named bloggers if they want to remain on top. Because folks like me are getting annoyed and are going to drop you like a bad habit if you don’t straighten up and fly right.

    1. Leave comments on. I’ve noticed that once a blog hits about 1,000 subscribers they like to turn off comments and leave on trackbacks. (Some truly elite turn off both!) In other words, the blog owner wants you to send traffic to them and doesn’t want traffic to go to you. Once you turn off my ability to respond to your blog post it isn’t a blog anymore. Now you are running a consultancy or a business, but not a blog. Some say they don’t have time to respond to comments. They joy of commenting is that you don’t have to respond as your blog will take on a life of its own. I recently noticed a speaker from a conference on blogging who told his audience “If you don’t allow comments you aren’t blogging.” He is now only accepting trackbacks.
    2. Don’t forget you’re a human. One of the things I like about reading blogs is that you get a snapshot of a person’s life. Big name bloggers tend to stop writing personal thoughts, schedule snippets, and other stuff because they think it doesn’t pay well. (Yes, big named bloggers write with the purpose of drawing traffic and getting paid. The big trend now is to write the perfect eye catching subject line.)  One of the reason I am reading your blog, Mr. I Make $200/day on Adwords alone, is because I am curious about you. If you think I just want to read essays that aren’t good enough for your book, think again. Just be human.
    3. Ads are OK, just be upfront about what you are getting paid for. When I read a bloggers recommendation for a book, website, or any other product… I am automatically trying to figure out how that blogger is getting paid. (ebooks are the #1 culprit of this) Amazon affiliates, ad networks, and Google Adwords are all easy to spot. But I’m finding that a lot of these big named guys are getting paid to plug in about half their posts. (Or so it seems) That’s pathetic. Another thing I am noticing with big named bloggers is that they aren’t giving credit for their sources. Not only will they not link to a commenter, now they won’t link to their sources? Why is that? Oh yeah, because big name bloggers only want to link to things that increase their page rank and/or pay them.

    I’m a capitalist and I’m all in favor of new media and I’m perfectly fine with blogs becoming the most powerful medium on the internet. But I want to caution blog readers that while blogs may seem like citizen journalism, you have to be certain to ascertain a bloggers credibility.

    Do you know the ethical standards of journalism? Bookmark this page!

    Here’s the thing… most “big name blogs” are not journalist. They are marketers and they are profiteers. You have to use the same wisdom in reading a blog that you do in watching the news. At least in the news there is some editorial control. Blogs are like the old west of journalism… there are no sheriff’s in Blog County.

    No, I won’t name names. And no, I’m definitely not talking about any youth ministry blogger. In fact, the “big name” youth ministry bloggers that I read tend to be true gentlemen about all of this. Sure, some of them make money off their blogs… but they aren’t crossing the line. (yet!)